PAD #15: E3 Lethargy

Almost forgot that E3 was coming up, and suddenly here it is.  Of course one of the first things I noticed was a Dead Island announcement.  Anyone picking through the archives on this blog would know that I have a bit of love for zombie games, and Dead Island is no exception.  It's a bit disappointing that there's going to be both a class and a level exclusive to the PS4, but hopefully that's going to be a timed thing.  Still, it's something that's becoming more common that I don't really care for.  I think a game should be the same from system to system.  If you want a game to be system-exclusive, then make it system exclusive.  I don't really like this practice developing content that's exclusive to another system, then charging me full price for the game anyway.

A new top-down Tomb Raider has been announced, and it still leaves the same funny taste in my mouth.  Similar to the first game like this, I just feel weird calling it "Tomb Raider".  Yeah okay, so these games are called "Lara Croft and the [Blank]", but it is what it is, and what it feels like is a completely different game where they just replaced the main character with Lara Croft and then called it a Tomb Raider game.  It does sorta beg the question, though, of why a character like Mario can be in just about any game and feel natural, where this Lara Croft series of games just don't feel like Tomb Raider titles despite being thematically similar.

And naturally, since the "first" one sold so well, they're putting-out a sequel to the Tomb Raider reboot from a few years back.  It has a completely laughable title, but I was willing to just ignore the game and move-on until Lara had to open her mouth.  She harps-on about some "destiny" crap, to the point where you look at the title and suddenly "Tomb Raider" isn't just the name of the franchise, but apparently it's what Lara is "meant to be"?  Like there's supposed to be a specific "Tomb Raider"?  I dunno, I'm not buying it.  Smacks of "We don't care about the series, but we gotta put together another one because the last one sold, so we'll just call it 'destiny' since that's certainly what it feels like to us."

Okay okay, that's enough complaining about E3.  I do like to try and keep positive, so tomorrow I'll dig-up some stuff that I'm actually looking forward to seeing (aside from Dead Island 2).  Until then, game well.