Lara Croft games are the nightmare of any real archaeologist, biologist and paleontologist.
At least her name is on point with Tomb Raider.
Congruent, at last.
Lara Croft, Tomb Coddler
cough
not the only thing that's on point
quickly eyes the angular monoboob, then looks away
Well. She's the Tomb RAIDER, not the Tomb Preserver.
I love when I'm surrounded by treasures in an ancient temple no human has laid eyes on in thousands of years, so I take a look at a scroll then immediately leave.
It's a good thing those torches are still burning after thousands of years, otherwise you would have needed a flashlight!
That's the way it should be!
Oh, what's that in the corner? A random Uzi mag and health pack. Cool.
Put mercenaries on the list. They get hired to guard some excavation. A chill job the recruiter told them.
Lara overhears them talk about going home to their families as she sneaks up and brutally murders them with her ice axe one by one until the ruins are flooded with blood. It's all self defense.
Damn you're right! Is like that recurring joke in the Austin Powers Movies.
Original Lara was a Tomb Raider.
New Lara is a fucking psychopathic Rambo with daddy issues.
Just like Huitzilopochtli would want it.
Blood for the Sun God, skulls for the Hermann Miller office chair. Sun God values ergonomics.
Well I mean she's British and rich, what do you expect?
In case ya'll don't know about Heinrich Schliemann...
Now you do.
He fucking dynamited what quite likely is the actual location of ancient Troy....in the early days, the field of archaelogy had a number of basically wealthy idiot assholes who fancied themselves as 'great men', who went around doing nonsense like this, and of course just actually stealing the artefacts and taking them back to museums in their home countries.
Schliemann obliterated the potential Troy site so thoroughly that archaeologists spent over 100 years looking at other potential sites... only to largely (not entirely, but largely) come to the conclusion that Schiemann's Troy site probably is the actual correct site....
... But he fucking blew it up.
Are there any games that accurately depict the activities of any kind of scientist?
I dont think scientist simulator would be a very popular game. Its be mostly trying cope with the mental anguish of rejection over papers and grants being published.
There's a mini game in Spider-Man where you have to match up absorption lines to identify chemicals. That's relatively realistic.
Half-Life
Theoretical physicists FTW
Surgeon Simulator! It’s a the best training program for today’s surgeon in a rush
Chants of Senaar?
I guess there was Foldit 😅
Heaven's Vault.
Beyond Blue
The game is literally called "Tomb Raider". What did you think raiding meant?
In the latest game she triggers a massive flood that destroys an entire village, possibly killing hundreds of people, IN THE TUTORIAL STAGE!
To be fair, the odds of removing a dagger from a pedestal doing that are extremely low, even in the survivor trilogy.
Oh boy, crimes against humanity must be added to the list.
Same with Indiana Jones. Maybe he's slightly less terrible about it than Lara Croft, but the fact that he cares only about that golden idol and not about the entire temple complex around it with apparently still active traps, makes him a terrible archaeologist.
They're both very effective adventurers and tomb robbers, though. And at least Lara Croft doesn't pretend to be any better than that.
Also: "It belongs to a museum"
Which museum, indie? I guess you are talking about the museum of the country where the artifact is from, right? RIGHT?!
Of course not. That big government warehouse with all the boxes. I'm sure "museum" is a nickname they use for it.
I know it is a game, but every time an ancient ruin got crushed while playing, I felt a lot of regret...
I kind of wish there was a chill game about discovering an old civilization (a.k.a. 20 years of work in 20 hours of gameplay).
Myst?
there's one where you have to slowly decode their language, but can't remember what it was called :(
There's Heaven's Vault, though it is rough at the edges, and there's Chants of Sennar.
There's also Tunic, which it looks like a Zelda game, but it has a lot of language-based puzzles that you need to discover.
I might say that also Outer Wilds would easily match this category, but I didn't find it chill at all, I was always over-stressed due to the time limit.
Maybe Subnautica would also fall in this category, and probably the reason I liked that game so much.
And as a stretch, Call of the Sea, but it plays more like any adventure game, than any actual archeology.
Oddly enough, the game that made me feel like I'm discovering something was No Man's Sky: I'll admit that the archeology game mechanic is half-cooked, barely there and probably it would benefit from more work on it. But did I enjoy going around trying to find ruins and rests of long gone animals. I would pay any good amount for a DLC that focused on expanding animal behaviors, making settlements enjoyable and having more different ruins (do not need the half-baked combat).
To be fair, even some of the other characters in the games/movies recognize this and call her out for it.
Lara Croft is basically a female Indiana Jones. Replace the whip with two pistols and the hat with triangular boobs.
And Nathan Drake is male Lara, which is kinda funny to think about.
tomb RAIDER
I wonder what it would look like to try and resolve some of these problems in a way that still provides a satisfying platformer experience.
Like, what if instead of these ruins being a bunch of traps with some key magical artifact that she heavily disturbs while passing through, what if the game was a platformer where you had to essentially erect scaffolding and lay down tarps in advance of a larger team? And the goal is to basically use climbing and athleticism to navigate the environment without disturbing an incredibly fragile environment?
That sounds like a dope game idea.
Thanks, I think so too.
I'm trying to expand on it a bit, because I think what's still missing is a sense of stakes and grandeur.
What if the backdrop is that Croft (or similar protagonist) is working with a team that is uncovering new and valuable discoveries that reveal the art and culture of ancient people that were largely absent from history. It's showing that some earlier group had settled an ancient valley prior to the arrival of a group that is culturally significant to a current regime. And as they're making these discoveries, it's becoming increasingly contentious politically among some faschy nationalist government (a la Orban, Erdogan, etc.)
Over time, they begin to face mounting pressure to secure the sites quickly before a rival team is sent in specifically with the goal of damaging them and stealing artifacts so that these finds aren't able to be studied. And the protagonist, as the first person who the team relies on to safely document and preserve the site, is soon persued by a goon squad, allowing us some urban platforming levels as you work towards a final confrontation.
I can assure you that I have enjoyed the games from end to end. That doesn't change the fact that Lara would be a criminal wanted by interpol for destruction and theft of cultural patrimony.
Yes and Geordi and Scotty are terrible engineers. Jake Peralta is a bad detective. Leslie Knope is a bad civil servant.
I'd put $100 on the table to say there is a least one more archeologist in the world because of those games. One who was trained to do it right, and preserved a ton of valuable cultural artifacts. Inspired by games and media.
Also, let people enjoy things.
But the 99 keeps telling me how great he is!
Schlieman moment
Oh yeah, scientists hate those things!
So when the first of the new remakes was coming out, they had a special outfit you could unlock if you preordered that was more like the original short-shorts and tank top outfit with the ad for it having that and a more sensible outfit side by side, being like
"What would YOU wear in the jungle?"
And I was like... Gimme the outfit that covers her up. There are bugs and toxic plants and it's sunny and shit... She needs protection, not traipsing around practically naked!
Wearing those shorts in the jungle in real life wouldn't be very sexy with legs all full of mosquito bites and wounds from climbing, fighting tigers and the stunts Lara does.
Give me the real thing where she's wearing long sleeves, sweating bullets, drenched in DEET, smelling like a melting locker room.
Is this a job posting from the British Empire days?
laughs in Samus Aran
Bounty Hunter. Definitely not there to preserve or even necessarily discover.
But on the other hand...
RECORDING TO LOGBOOK
but boobs
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Boobs come and go, cultural patrimony is eternal.