Tomb Dater: Part One

My wife rarely plays games. While there were some brief drunken hijinks that occurred just after our Wii purchase, they're starting to feel like a thousand years ago now that the world sits on the eve of an E3 that will really show the mettle of Sony and Microsoft's new hardware (we hope). The Tomb Raider reboot, though, had my lady's interest curiously piqued. I am not a traditional TR fan. For as good as the games may have been at one point, I've always had a hard time being pandered to as a male with an anatomically impossible main character. I'm not going to launch into a tirade or prove how enlightened I am as a male gamer, but I can honestly say that Lara Croft never really did it for me. My main squeeze, though, saw things a little differently. A tomboy, my wife seems to have looked at TR's main character as a respectable tough chick, one that the video game industry just didn't have enough of. This isn't an uncommon response to the Croft character, it seems, and from what I know of my wife's taste in action, tough chicks are the only chicks that matter. I can get behind that.

So a pact was struck that we will play the game together. It took a little time to get started; having really no interest in purchasing the game we decided to rent it over a weekend and blast our way through it just after launch. Since it's the beginning of June, you can rightly assume that it didn't happen that way. Long story short, though, we finally happened on a copy the other night and began playing it, incrementally, as a two parts of a romantic whole. One of them gets bored very easily. Over the next several days (weeks?), you will be the happy recipient of its documentation.

We decided to start the game with the combat set to the Easy setting, which is something I rarely do as a seasoned player, but it made perfect sense for our overall enjoyment. She, after all, sort of sees the game as something of an interactive movie from what I can surmise (which, so far, it is), so the thought of further frustrating herself with difficult battles was off the table from jump street. I am totally behind this. As a non-gamer, I want her to have a good time and, hopefully, find the experience enjoyable enough to play something else with me in the future or to ultimately seek out games that will interest her down the road. Realistically, my hopes aren't exactly sky high for that outcome, but I at least want the two of us to go through this game front to back together, and if less challenging enemy throwdowns are part of that, then that's A-ok.

Besides, I knew for a fact that this wouldn't be the real challenge for her anyway. After about the first ten minutes following the intro cut scene, it hit her in the face like brick wall: the player controls the camera, and the game expects it of them constantly. While, to be fair, the first 30-45 minutes involve Lara haplessly wandering through a cave in a straight line, the few puzzles found inside of it make it necessary to adjust the camera to see the full extent of the environment, something that you and me may be keenly aware of after years of dual-analog controller handling, but frustrating for her to wrap her head around. "This must be irritating for you," was a phrase she would occasionally repeat when stumped about our next course of action. I'm not going to lie, it did a little, but I'm sympathetic. I'm aware that I've been at this a long time, and I just try to imagine my mother, or an uncle, or anybody else that isn't conditioned to knowing the right stick will swing their perspective around as they see fit and get it. I'm pretty sure that this will still be our biggest hurdle going forward, but I'm optimistic that if she gives it some time, eventually it will just click. She's a smart lady.

I've often thought about this scenario over the past few years. Not necessarily with my wife, but with anyone not programmed with the knowledge of how to necessarily move your hands on a controller with 15 buttons and two analog sticks in concert with what's happening in front of you. Like, say, if you transported Gunpei Yokoi from 1975 forty years in to the future and told him to play Uncharted. I doubt he'd be able to hang, and he was a certifiable genius, so I wouldn't expect people today unaccustomed to several years of this kind of gaming to be able to jump right in, either. Often, my wife would tell me that current-, and even recent-past gen controllers simply had too many buttons. It intimidated her, and rightly so. This is why Nintendo made a gold mine off of Wii Sports; they simplified the control so that everyone could play. I can't help but agree with the fact that overcoming the Fear of Many Buttons is is a large barrier of entry for modern game consoles, and I'm very happy with my lady's mustering of courage so that she may overcome this obstacle to play as, from what we can tell early, a tough chick. A hell of a start, I'd say.