Deciding which Tomb Raider joke to do is actually very difficult. The game is such an exercise in extremity that it reads as parody very quickly, whenever it's not showing you something so incredibly gross you reach reflexively for your own throat while it says look what you just did.

One of the ideas keys off of the clear, presumably merit-based equipment hierarchy that seems to exist. I'd tell you the other ones, but maybe we'll still have a chance to do them. I haven't been able to play it at home, because it did not work. There are some games I want to play on computers, and this was one of them - I got real tantalized by their crazy hair, which would no doubt have been very impressive in a functioning game. My experience thus far was that it looked more or less like like haunted black spaghetti and then the game crashed.

Ben's been talking to Tomb Writer Rhianna Pratchett a bunch, seriously, and if you want to know more (or you've already defeated the game, and simply want to return to the days of your youth) you should head over to PAR.

It looks like the Torment: Tides of Numenera Kickstarter really shit the bed, squatting hard over a measly two and a half million dollars in just under a week. I'm sure they're staring listelessly into whatever reflective surface is handy, wondering where exactly their lives took such a gruesome turn. I want to take a second to emphasize the totality of this thing though: Torment: Tides of Numenera is a licensed product, just like the first one. It's just that the product they're licensing this time around is also a creator owned, Kickstarter-funded enterprise.

It's a late hour to be whipping up some breed of Kickstarter triumphalism, but the whole enterprise is so parallel to the existing structures that you blink a few times, involuntarily, just thinking about it.

(CW)TB out.