VideogameVagabond.com

Can a 45-year-old man maintain a marriage and a videogame habit? Let's find out!

Tomb Raider no more?

All that has been released is a game logo, but it speaks volumes; the next videogame featuring Tomb Raider star Lara Croft won’t feature a lot of Tomb Raiding… or at least, it won’t feature that aspect in the title. While loose diamonds may be a girl’s best friend, Lara has always been a more underground sort of gal … in the archeological sense, at any rate.

But the name of the new game only focuses on Lara herself; it’s called Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light. Beyond that, no one outside of developer Crystal Dynamics and publisher Eidos knows much of anything, except that the game is expected in 2010 and will be sold via digital download, rather than via retail Blu-Ray disc.

So is it a typical Lara Croft shooter/platformer action and adventure title or something else? We’ll have to wait until the Game Developers Conference next week to find out for sure, at the very least, but here’s what Crystal Dynamics’ Darrell Gallagher had to say about the new title, Lara’s first appearance since Tomb Raider: Underworld in 2008:

“This is a really exciting project for Crystal Dynamics, we have created something completely new and very different to what people might be expecting. Lara Croft is such an iconic character in videogames, with Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light we have created what we believe is a truly original digital experience.”

Dragon Age: Origins fever is spreading

I have a fever; it’s source is not a flu bug, but Dragon Age: Origins, the hot new RPG from BioWare, makers of most things good, RPG-wise, on this side of the ocean.

Did anyone catch the commercial campaign on prime time TV? Looks like EA is really getting behind the BioWare team with a strong promotional push.

It’s about time. Most of BioWare’s titles have always been valuable like loose diamonds; this time, maybe they’ve stumbled across a setting!

Finally have my new HDTV!

After two years of denying ourselves, my wife and I finally got ourselves what we’ve been wanting for a while as part of our videogame habit: a top-of-the-line Sony Bravia 32-inch 1080p HDTV with a 120MHz refresh rate. It has the Bravia 2 engine and, wow, the PS3 and Blu-Ray movies have never ever looked better.

Sure, some will say that 32-inches isn’t that big a set; but it’s the perfect size and at $772, it was definitely the right price! Everything looks better, the set works like a dream and it weighs about a third of the weight of my old Sony Wega 26-inch.

If someone offered me a handful of loose diamonds, I’m not sure which I’d rather have, I’m so happy with this set! While I’ll always have a soft spot for my decade-old Wega, we’ll be donating that to charity now; the age of HDTV has finally reached the Hansen household, and I think we bought exactly the right set for us, at exactly the right price and time.