tomb-raider-anniversary posts

One of the co-creators of Eidos' Tomb Raider franchise, Toby Gard, has left the company's development team at Crystal Dynamics. According to Develop, Gard would not comment on why he has left the company, saying only that " I've started up my own consultancy business."

Gard was one of the main designers behind the original Tomb Raider at developer Core Design in 1995. He left Core after Tomb Raider's release to form Cofounding Factor, a development team that spent seven years creating a game, Galleon, that was finally released for the original Xbox in 2004 to poor reviews and sales. Eidos later brought Gard in as a consultant on Tomb Raider Legend and Gard ended up as the co-writer of the game's storyline along with other duties on the game. He also co-wrote and performed other duties on the next game in the series Tomb Raider Underworld. He was supposedly leading a group at Crystal Dynamics on a new project which most people believed would be the next Tomb Raider game.

Thursday has come around again which means new updates to the GameTap subscription game download service. This week folks who pay the big bucks for the premimum service will have Hotel Giant 2 added to their library of titles. This is a new title from developer Enlight Software that will put the player in full charge of a high rise and high class hotel establishment. Yes, you can get your inner Trump on with this game.

For you freeloaders out there (most of you) GameTap is offering Tomb Raider Anniversary, the graphical remake of Lara Croft's first game adventure, in their free game selection for the next week.

Valve's weekend sales deal for Steam users is always something interesting (and cheap) and this weekend's special sales event is no exception. For the weekend only Steam has put the 2007 released action game Tomb Raider Anniversary on sale for just $5. That's a 75 percent difference from its normal $19.99 sales price.

The game itself is a graphical remake of the first Tomb Raider game but using the graphics engine that was created for Tomb Raider Legend. While the game franchise isn't quite as popular for publisher Eidos has it was during its heyday during the 1990s the series and its main character Lara Croft still remain well known. It should be interesting to see how the series evolves when Square Enix completes its purchase of Eidos later this year.

If you love your games to be fee (and who doesn't really) then Gametap continues to be a place for PC gamers to check out. Today the downloadable game service has added Eidos' action-adventure game Tomb Raider Anniversary to its free game line-up.

This remake (sort of) of the first ever Tomb Raider game has new content and of course a complete graphical revamp of the original title and you can play it on Gametap for free from now until Dec. 18. In addition, the new American McGee's Grimm episode, The Pied Piper, is available to play for free today only and the first person shooter S.T.A.L.K.E.R Shadow of Chernobyl has been added to Gametap's paid premium service.

Do you like free stuff? Of course you do. Then you will love Gametap's new weekly game line-up this week. Today the game download/subscription service is making Eidos' most recent Tomb Raider game, Tomb Raider Anniversary, free for one week only.

Yep, this is your chance to check out the PC version of the graphical remake (with new content) of the first Tomb Raider game as handled by Eidos' Crystal Dynamics. Oh, and they have added Ubisoft's Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory to their paid premimum service if you role that way. So there's new stuff for the cheapskates and new stuff for people who still have money in this economy. Life is good.