Trigger Happy
DISPATCHES
PERSPECTIVE
Trigger Happy
Shoot first, ask questions later
STEVEN POOLE
C rafting sucks. I don’t mean that I despise a Pritt Stick or a pipe cleaner, you understand. But I was never enamoured of having to make Snake forage for his lunch of raw squirrel and acorns or whatever it was in MGS3. And now we hear that the Tomb Raider remakeboot, Legacy Of Atlantis, will oblige Lara Croft to make her own tastily nutritious meals rather than using medpacks to restore her health.
In E429, the developers said that this is because it’s not realistic to imagine that medpacks would just happen to be scattered around ancient tombs into which no human has stepped foot for millennia. But why stop there? It’s also not realistic to imagine that a person can shoot bats in the middle of performing a backwards somersault. It’s definitely not realistic – spoiler alert – that they would in due course find a live Tyrannosaurus Rex mooching around in there either. And it’s not realistic that Lara would have a Batman-style environmental scanner that immediately revealed the solutions to puzzles, but just such a device has she been granted in the new game, to risk short-circuiting the joy of puzzlement.