There’s been a very disturbing trend throughout virtually all forms of entertainment media in the past few years known as the “reboot”. I can’t lock down exactly when this rather unimaginative and jargon-y term became mainstream, though I suspect it had a lot to do with Chris Nolan’s fantastically successful Batman Begins. And to it’s credit, Batman Begins was a genuine reboot. It took a concept and basic outline that just about all people are familiar with and completely re-wrote it in a creative and modern way. It sought, as much as one can do with a “superhero” movie, to leave behind the more childish aspects of the material and present movie goers with something truly interesting. Of course, by that definition, Tim Burton’s Batman would also have been a reboot, but no one called it that at the time outside of Hollywood because the term “reboot” hadn’t become shorthand for “making lots of money” yet. Ah, good times.

Any-old-how, rebooting a franchise now means something slightly different. Essentially, it means dredging up some old crap people are tired of and trying to get them to pay to be disappointed again. They called Superman Returns a reboot when it was, in fact, a sequel to Superman II (correctly leaving the third and fourth movies in some alternate Universe of Suck, Richard Pryor excluded). And now the gaming industry has gotten a hold of the “reboot” concept and, as with anything they borrow from the film industry, somehow made it ten times worse.

I mention all of this because I’ve just played through Tomb Raider: Underworld (which is on sale for $40 at Target right now), a game that got partially panned by critics for being, well, Tomb Raider. And to be clear, I was completely done with Lara Croft for a very long time, until Crystal Dynamics was handed the franchise. And what they did with Tomb Raider: Legend wasn’t a proper reboot per say, but rather just a new framework for an otherwise tired series. A framework, it should be noted, which actually contained a good game. And now the rumor is that Eidos wants a full on, proper reboot for Tomb Raider. Which is, of course, a very stupid idea.

Underworld itself was actually a fairly good game (minor character animation twitching aside). It wasn’t a 10, but it wasn’t a 6 or a 7 either, as I saw it so frequently scored. It wrapped up the story of Legend nicely, and it actually loaned some perspective to Crystal Dynamics’ decision to remake the original title as Tomb Raider: Anniversary (as Underworld ties those two plots together). While I admittedly feel like Underworld was a touch on the short side (they can go to hell selling me DLC that should have been on the disc) I will say that I enjoyed it quite a bit. The levels, while still linear, are a bit more experiment friendly in terms of finding alternate or even unintended paths. And they really nailed the feel and the fun of the series. I did feel that the game was a bit short on actual boss fights (read: there are none), but otherwise they crafted a fine addition to the franchise.

That all brings me back to the sudden desire to “reboot” Tomb Raider, and the aforementioned stupidity of that idea. Apparently Eidos is concerned that Underworld only sold 1.5 million copies. That’s by no means a meager sales record, but Tomb Raider as a franchise was expected to do better. That is, assuming you live in a bubble where you aren’t releasing your game right before the holidays up against every other new title on the market during one of the worst global financial clusterfucks in the past century.

Of course, other factors contributed to Underworld’s mediocre sales – such as the mediocre reviews. What I will say for Underworld is that it gets better the more you play it – with each level presenting a more interesting series of puzzles and scenarios. It probably didn’t help reviews too much to start the entire game with a prolonged, underwater swimming stage that, unless you’re a fucking psychic, will have you doddering around the ocean floor for a good half an hour until you psychicly find the hidden McGuffin required to open the first door in the game. But the thing is, aggrivating scenarios like that (and there are a few more. . . I’m looking at you, Belt Room) must be contrasted against the sprinting dash through a gravitationally irregular sinking barge or the sheer thrill of razing enemies later on in the game.

So I don’t think the problem is that Lara Croft herself has grown “stale”. As a matter of public record, I will officially state that hot, armed chicks with British accents are in no danger of ever going out of style. And the platforming itself is very solid. Plus, Underworld did something that game designers have been trying to figure out for about ten years now. They got rid of the quicktime events and replaced them with a situation where in you still have a hasty “reaction” based event, but you retain proper control of your character. It did surprise me a bit that that our stalwart crusader against “Press X To Not Die” game sequences, Yahtzee, reviewed Underworld without at least giving it that subtle nod.

But the core issue here is that, really, there isn’t enough of Tomb Raider to reboot it. The game is already pared down to its most basic concepts (a hot, armed British chick jumping from ledge to ledge) and the gameplay steps forward in almost all cases. If what you want to make is a game that isn’t Tomb Raider, and you feel that the franchise is an anchor, then make a new game. Uncharted for the PS3 borrows heavily from Tomb Raider (which originally borrowed from Indiana Jones, and which in turn has now borrowed from Uncharted), was a completely new IP on a poorly-selling exclusive platform, and it was a major success.

Now, maybe some executive was just talking out his ass and didn’t understand what “reboot” actually means when he was talking about the next Tomb Raider. If they are simply talking about a new plot arc, then it almost goes without saying (as Lara’s current plot arc ties up fairly well in Underworld). If they are saying we need to re-imagine the character and the setting, I just can’t see that going anywhere good. The truth is that for every one Dark Knight, there are about a hundred Extreme Ghostbuters. The failure rate on these sorts of reboots is both high and needlessly risky, especially considering the amazing job Crystal Dynamics did taking the Tomb Raider franchise from the abysmal crapfest that was Angel of Darkness and revitalizing it via Legend – all without having to reinvent the wheel.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 12th, 2009 at 3:52 pm and is filed under Games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.