[Lick Meth]

[Swimmy]

[another god]

You heard it here, folks. Tomb Raider suffers from subconscious sexism. Select Button is like the precogs of games criticism.
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interdimensional

[parker]

That seems far fetched to you?
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[boojiboy7]

[Swimmy]

[another god]

I'm not really taking sides here because, holy fuck, it does look like she's gagging on a/my giant cock. What I'm criticizing is the choice in judging them for their subconscious and not on, you know, the actual product.

Her dying in this brutal way is just horrifying. The problem can be any of the following:

a) It's a person with lady parts
b) It's a person dying brutally

Obviously a lady dying in an action game isn't bad, but the real issue is whether the level of horrifying is just B or something more because of A. I don't think we need to conflate the issue with:

c) The artist is sexist/bad person/etc

To be honest, if I were in charge of this game I'd probably have gone with a stab in a random part of the body and then ragdoll physics. I think that the death with the stabbing in the face and the arms and the clinging to life is really neat to look at, but then it's, you know, graphic and horrifying.

Also, yeah, what swimmy said. You can't expect the industry to "grow up" when they're rehashing Tomb Raider. I'd like it to, but, hey, where's the money in growing up?

[Takashi]

Guys, I know we're totally into spikes, but I just can't get over this three seconds of footage of that GT review:



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low-end.net | Whimsy (soon) | Serfdom 2.0

[Talbain]

I don't necessarily think that the developers are bad people for developing the game, ignorant maybe, sexist maybe, but I tend not to assume that a person/people are bad without having some context to build on.

Still, the game is certainly sexist and gratuitously violent. And there are developers that chose to make it that way. Lara isn't an actor with volition in regards to her own death, she didn't choose to wear a tank-top and she can't choose how she dies in the various situations where it's possible for her to die. It's a difference between things as they are and things as they've been made to be. Tomb Raider fits firmly into the latter category, and that's the problem with it. Once or twice could be considered an accident, but after repeated, multiple incidents, you're doing it on purpose (with either intent or ignorance, but it doesn't make it acceptable in either case).
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[SuperWes]

Here's slightly more context about how often this happens:

[Brooks]

I imagine one could keep the covershoot in by simply arming all the animals

[Hojulas]

[armed police catrider]

[thestage]

[tacotaskforce]

[Hojulas]

[Wall of Beef]

I was in a gamestop yesterday and the clerk was bragging that they are one of two stores in the metro area doing a midnight release for Tomb Raider. One customers response was, "Whaaughhht!? NO WAY!"

His salivating will be ceased 11 or so hours earlier, thank the lord!
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Tumblr

[tacotaskforce]

But CD used her father from the movies who worked himself to death adventuring as well and

jesus don't make me get into a Tomb Raider lore fight.
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[Dark Age Iron Savior]

[The Troops]

http://www.gatheringcourage.com

[sawtooth]

[Hojulas]

[Winona Ghost Ryder]

[Moogs]

They should have just impaled her thru the bosom or the stomach.

Just be glad they didn't jam the spear between her legs since she is sliding down the river feet first.

[username]

[Talbain]

No, I don't disagree username, it's just that there does seem to be an inkling of the violent death thing there. I'm not going to claim it's an ongoing theme of the series, just that some of this stuff has happened before. There is also the acknowledgement that making violent death in 3D, at the time, wasn't terribly easy. Making 3D models at all was still something pretty new for videogames when the first Tomb Raider was released.
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[Winona Ghost Ryder]

http://kotaku.com/5988503/the-tomb-raider-reboot-was-going-to-be-a-lot-more-like-shadow-of-the-colossus

[Talbain]

[Toptube]

Somebody needs to explain to me how the basic idea of a girl wearing cargo pants, boots, and two tank tops is modern sexualization. You know what, that's almost the same exact thing that Jade wears in Beyond Good and Evil. except Jade trades armskin for belly skin. As she wears an unzipped jacket, too.

If you want to see modern sexualization, go visit your local comic book store and look at just about any cover artwork.
*here, I will effectively do that work for you and even make it extremely relevant:


That's what Lara Croft used to be.

In this new game, she's a slim framed, moderately cute faced girl, dressed like she's riding a boat in the tropical sea/expecting to traverse tropical shores. Other than an ideal, albeit realistic body, she appears very normal.


The comments about her "sexual moaning for pain" is just absurdly stupid and further reaching for any possible way to trash this game. People making these comments have clearly never seriously been hurt and remained conscious to experience those fresh moments of pain. and some of those people are otherwise so conservative they think that any sort of vocalization or anything that may draw attention, is distasteful. You should also account for the wide range of voice tambres and expression. Some crying sounds like laughing. Some people cry when they are happy. Sometimes expressions of pain can sound like general exclamations, joy, pleasure, or down right awful.

I think its completely stupid and discredits most arguments when people try to linger on highly specific details that are often arguably made up to justify something deeply personal and/or extremely specific to their own experience.

I think that, before actually playing it, the most questionable things about this new Tomb Raider, are non-gender portrayal specific issues with the industry right now. The key point being that game/plot/character arcs are basically only violence driven. and that violence is getting more and more graphic, detailed. Demon's Souls manages to impress upon the player a strong, sinister sense of evil. But it manages to do so with very little actual blood and only basic or even abstracted depictions of violence and injury. Most of that sense comes from atmosphere built around set dressing, monster/character design, lighting, overall art direction. Its more about the grotesque rather than being blatantly and near literally graphic. Even Uncharted, a game which is driven by a lot of violence, skirts most of the graphic details. Uncharted also wears on its sleeve the fact that its a pulp action/adventure. So being violence driven isn't exactly out of place.

Now that games more than ever are lingering a few moments to show me that spike through the neck, a head and partial spinal column separation, a person/creature being seemingly split at the seams, tearing out eyes/throat/stabbing head/cutting off limb all in one sweeping action. I have to stop along with the game and wonder, where did the game go? Am I playing games anymore or is it just an exposition of things that I don't really want to see? Based on reviews, I don't think this Tomb Raider has gone quite that far. Though it might seem like it in the first couple of hours. It does still follow the current design of piles of violence to drive the game. Which Joystiq points out in their review. The driving gameply in this new Tomb Raider barely resembles the older games. You could apply the title of many more recent games and nobody would notice. and even though the end of this game apparently pays off in terms of what we would more expect/want from Lara Croft the Tomb Raider. It still begs to ask, do we really need to play the kind of game that got us there?

[evnvnv]

kind of funny that their idea of making a game "inspired" by shadow of the colossus was basically just copying every aspect of it. I mean, Lara Croft probably doesn't need a horse, or to deal with huge stony giants, or to spend tons of time wandering around in wide-open, non-tomb places, yet there still are probably a thousand more subtle things they could have 'borrowed' from SotC.
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The text will not live forever. The cup are small

[Talbain]

Toptube, I think it's a question of content versus context. It's a question of, "is there a good reason for Lara to be portrayed being murdered gruesomely, or murdering others gruesomely?" Content-wise, the answer is yes, context-wise, the answer is no. Lara's not intended to be portrayed as a sexually vulnerable female, even if she's sexually vulnerable (which is never explained in either case), and if we're to find empathy with Lara, we first have to acknowledge her as a human character rather than a fantasy object (which is what she's reduced to in Tomb Raider). Gruesome murder doesn't lend itself well to either, really, since such extreme displays in general are hard to relate to in any manner.

What's more, if we're arguing realism, Lara would be dead before she even got started. You can't survive being hung upside down for very long. You can't survive being punctured through your chest with a rusted spike for very long, or falling from the heights she falls from - in fact, if she were to have any chance of surviving, the first thing she would need would be some heavier clothes and a fire, to prevent her from dying of hypothermia. Reality doesn't apply here, and arguing that Lara is somehow more real than her designed predecessors comes off as dismissive of the game's version of reality. The game's full of stereotypes, for females, for males, for "violence as growth." Sexism and ultraviolence aren't the only problems here, though they're also here in full force.

And again, things as they are versus things as they are made to be.
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[Swimmy]

[shrugtheironteacup]

[Toups]

[Toups]

[Talbain]

[thestage]

[Rud31]

And now Dark Souls has been invoked. We're done thestage. An SB argument has reached it's conclusion.
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My Hawt Blog Vita Games

THERE ARE DEFINITELY WORSE VIDEO GAME PODCASTS

[Mime Paradox]

[sponkmonkey]

[nuttyevans]

I wish they would reboot Reboot