Too much of Lara Croft’s bum!

Now I don’t usually start off by focusing on Lara Croft’s buttocks (who does?), but I’ve seen an awful lot of them lately and feel the need to confess why: I changed the controls I used in Tomb Raider Anniversary. And now I’m worried, because somehow I changed everything else too.

Hear me out: I did not change controls to stare at Lara’s behind due to being some sort of pervert. That is just a coincidence. All I did was shift the Jump command on to the right-mouse button so I could streamline my tomb raiding. That’s it.

Normally of course I’d use a gamepad. I’d have my thumb primed, curled like a scorpion-tail over the x-button so I could jab – and jump – at the slightest provocation, occasionally giving the right-stick a quick nudge to shift the camera into position; like say, a film director punching his cheap Hungarian cameraman. The focus was on controlling Lara’s acrobatics, with the camera as my unruly lens on the action. A good camera is revered in gaming, as can be seen by the reams of praise reviewers give to capable game cameras, as if ‘Looking The Right Way’ was some state of the art graphical effect.

But now I was being all trendy, playing games on my laptop using a mouse, my left hand punching out a million anagrams of the WASD keys. Unwittingly, in using this set up I had changed the way the whole game felt to play. I was suddenly able to both steer the camera and jump… at the same time! Freed from the alternating rhythm of camera changes/climbing forced by pad play, I was climbing and catapulting through tombs with the smooth grace of some, curiously busty, underground Spiderman.

Effectively I was controlling Lara like Marcus Fenix or Max Payne, forever running forward, gracefully steering my way around the environments with the mouse-camera and never seeing anything other than Lara’s improbably proportioned backside.

But was it better? Sure my fluidity increased ten-fold and those tombs were probably grateful to be raided at record speed and have done with it, but something felt a bit off. I was used to feeling like I actually moved Lara around the environments, like my gamepad buttons were hooked up by strings to a digital marionette on some pixel-powered stage. Now instead my avatar was locked in some eterna-run in the centre of the screen while I practically rotated the whole world around her with the mouse. Egypt still looked like Egypt and that T-Rex still filled the screen, but the small sliver of change had slid into my psyche and had turned Tomb Raider into some kind of Tomb Runner.

Don’t get me wrong, it was still fun, perhaps even more fun than usual. But in changing the control scheme I had stumbled upon something deeper: the delicate link between control, camera and immersion, the role these play in the depiction of our avatar’s physical presence in an environment and also just how obsessive I could be when my hard-wired expectations of a game are violated.

Did I mention I originally preferred playing it at 640x480 too?