Gaming Thoughts - Full circle with Lara Croft and Nathan Drake

First off - wow, the E3 coverage has been entertaining and busy. I will continue to get articles out this week, even if it is just small bits on trailers, games or nuggets of news that caught my interest. I already have a few things queued up to auto-post throughout the day. Also? The traffic through here has been awesome - some of my all-time highs, so thank you for dropping by. This morning's article more or less puts the finishing touches on my Uncharted reviews and thoughts, leaving me with a handful of other reviews coming up including some new releases - two for the PC and one for the PSP (not everything has to be about cutting edge consoles this week, does it?).

Having just spent a lot of time recently with the Uncharted series, I began to think back on not only those games, but what I would guess was the primary inspiration of that series - Tomb Raider. I played a handful of the Tomb Raider games in the past, back Lara was much more stiff and her world far less exciting to explore. All the same, her ability to explore and interact with her environment was exciting and largely new at the time.

However, the Tomb Raider games did not age very well, and the series suffered a series of missteps along the way. Tomb Raider did eventually start to regain its footing, but not long after the Uncharted series blasted onto the PlayStation 3 scene, and the parallels were glaring.

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Tomb Raider - Xbox 360 Review

Tomb Raider has been around for a decade and a half now, and the series has seen a bunch of high and low points over that time. Still, excitement has been building for this latest title, a reboot of the series, for quite some time now. Last year at E3, I came away more excited for this game than anything else I saw there, and I am happy to say I did not come away disappointed.

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June's PlayStation Plus

I haven't had a chance to finish watching Nintendo's E3 yet, but once I do I'll get a post out there (probably tomorrow) with my thoughts on it as well as on what has been (at least to me so far) a disappointing E3 overall.

But in the meantime, if you are a PlayStation 3 owner, and you don't have PlayStation Plus, now might be a very solid time to sign up for a month or three. Just hope you have plenty of hard drive space.  For those who haven't used PlayStation Plus yet, the premise is this: While you are a subscriber, you get access to demos (complete with the ability to earn trophies) and 'free' games.  The catch on the free games is that they only will play while you are an active subscriber.  For those who like to purchase content on the PlayStation Network however, being a PlayStation Plus subscriber sometimes gives you some nice discounts too, and unlike the freebies, games you actually purchase while a subscriber are yours to play indefinitely, even when your subscription runs out.

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