Lara Croft
Herione, icon, reluctant role model. New stuff including Rhona scans from FHM, a couple of interviews and... Well, that's about it, really. 

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 So, without being all cryptic and hiding behind faintly-amusing banter, you'll find that the entire conversation and (obviously) photo-shoot with Rhona Mitra has been shamelessy ripped from the sturdy spine of 'top' men's magazine FHM and placed carefully on to the more comforting surroundings of the scanner. Not only that, but... well, other than a few extra scans and mini-articles from other corners of the world's media, it *is* just that but, hey, there's still enough to keep you interested for, ooh, maybe the best part of five (yes, five) whole minutes - In total, no less than 774Kb of new graphics and a slightly less impressive 38.8Kb of new text. That's still quite a lot of text to get through, though. 

But enough about me. So, how've you been? 
 

 And so, in the November issue Rhona Mitra joined the likes of Gillian Anderson and... others in appearing on FHM's front cover. Along with seven pictures dragged from the photo studio (including one with "the world's luckiest snake" - like, as if the snake even cares), a short interview dug a shallow trench into Rhona's personal and public life including long-awaited news of the forthcoming Lara Croft single. Quoth Rhona:

The Lara Croft single is called Getting Naked. When was the last time you were naked in a public place?
I don't think going starkers in a public place is especially commendable. You can go to Stringfellow's for that. Although they don't get it all off there, do they? The song is really about one night stands and a woman saying that she'll go so far but not the whole hog. Why does all frolicking have to end in penetration?

 

Be careful. After filming GI Jane, she's quite buff these days.
So am I. And I'm younger than her. The idea of her playing Lara is sacrilege. She has to be a posh English girl with a stiff upper lip.

 

 Usually this would be cause for a long rant about Eidos’ twisted priorities and, once again, an example of the company turning a blind eye to the people that actually buy the games in the first place. After all, who needs morals when you have money? But, at least as far as the UK is concerned, Nintendo care more about head-lice than they do about the general public, the games are very few and far between and are still being released on outdated, under-equipped, over-expensive cartridges. And if the people who bought the N64 on it’s UK launch date (which was, with customary Nintendo apathy, about a year after the rest of the world got to see it) didn’t feel even slightly ripped off by the huge price-drop a few months later then they’ve got more money than sense - Who cares about them? They’re just the sort of people Nintendo want.

 Eidos proved with the early plans for the Unfinished Business expansion pack that they were more than prepared to rip people off but, against all that is wrong with the Nintendo empire, the deal is the lesser of two evils. Sorry, Nintendo people - if you didn’t want a PC you should have bought a PlayStation. Surely someone told you that? 
 

 For the PlayStation people, you can find the demo neatly mounted to the front cover of PlayStation magazine, a publication which, unlike every other magazine in the world, has been very well behaved by not slapping giant pictures of Lara on the front cover each and every month just to boost sales. Unfortunately, if you want the PC version and don’t feel like downloading it then you’re going to have to buy PC Zone and suffer reading a magazine that is not only badly written and badly designed but also seems to take great pleasure from scattering every conceivable swear-word wherever they can be crow-barred in and then thinking it makes incredibly amusing reading. Banal, pre-pubescent trash with the intellect of a nine-year-old, basically.

 So, a word of advice, rather than spend £4.99 on PC Zone and adding another one to their circulation figures, try stealing just the CD first. Then write to the editor and thank him for the free CD. Alternatively, you can try this plan. The demo included on the magazine CD is faulty and requires a fair bit of messing about with your system registry and adjusting the time before you can get it to work. Thoughtfully, they included a phone number for people who don’t wish to do this and just want a working copy of the demo. Simply phone 0990 100444 (calls charged at 6p a minute, it says here) and they’ll probably send you a shiny CD to treasure forever through the post. Neat.

 The demo itself impressively shows off, amongst other things, the new, more ‘rounded’ Lara - thankfully, in the process of smoothing Lara out a bit, they seem to have decreased the size of Lara’s boobs so at least she looks proportional now, the ponytail, the dynamic lighting and one or two of the new enemies. You can even do a bit of shallow-water wading and notice that, when slowed down by the water, she moves a bit like Donald Duck did when he got angry. Try it, it’s uncanny.

 On the other hand, it's not all roses on the demo front. There's no options to save or load games, you can't define your own keys (leaving you to cope with the blatantly unusable CTRL and ALT for action and jump respectively) and if you leave Lara doing nothing for a minute or two then you get dumped back in Windows. Surely things that are going to be non-existant in the full game, but still... 
 

 It can’t be just mere coincidence that since Tomb Raider was released, Core Design went from massive losses to massive profits. It also can’t be a case of unbelievably good timing on the part of the rest of the games industry that since Core Design started counting out money in multiples of a million that loads more games have appeared with female characters in them. Pandemonium 2: Female character Nikki gets a sexy new haircut and several inches added to her chest. Hexen 2, Daikatana, Quake 2, Fighting Force etcetera, etcetera start appearing with females among the cast list and suddenly it’s a sure sign of girl power. Certainly not when you consider that these female characters are designed by men to appeal to the 95% of games players that also happen to be men who hold the shallow belief that "as long as it's got a good pair of tits it'll do me". The male equivalent of 'girl power', the 'new lad' rears its pig-ugly head once more.

 Females have made appearances in computer games since the beginning of time (roughly) and have never made it higher than the brutally honest description of token girlie (Oh. Except Ms. Pac-Man and I never heard the cries of 'girl power' to accompany that one). Granted, the position of the female in computer games is getting more respected as more girls find themselves playing them but it’s the smiling face equal opportunities and nothing more - it'll be a few years yet before the games industry grows up enough to have a female in a computer game and not just for the publicity. As for girl-power: How about considering the gut-wrenching irony of taking self-respect lessons from 'Ginger' Spice - kind of like taking good business ethics lessons from Eidos Interactive Limited... 
 

Regular readers of this column - I am led to believe you are legion - will now be only too aware of the exploits of one Rhona Mitra, she of ever-expanding breasts. Hired to portray the ubiquitous star of Tomb Raider, Rhona is Lara is Rhona - is no more, it would seem, having been dumped by her paymasters Eidos.

 Details of the reasons are sketchy, although in a secret meeting with one of my international team of snouts, the words 'whining' and 'bitch' were mentioned. Whither now for the young starlet, her otherwise moribund career having been given a major boost by Eidos, to the extent that she recently reached the status of FHM cover model? Without the Lara Croft endorsement, the words 'borrowed time' spring to mind, although with her undoubted assets she could have a very big future in the specialist video market. Womb Raider, anyone?