Girls who came back...

Two of my favourite women had new outings this week.  The very real Dido finally released her latest album, and the I wish she was real Lara Croft has rebooted herself as a young, briefly innocent young woman ready for us to make a survivor out of.

Amazon deliveries don't get better than this...

For an impartial review of these two offerings I would suggest looking elsewhere, I was doomed to like whatever was put out by either of these ladies. Both were a very large and fond part of my late teens and early twenties, and I have been eagerly anticipating the return of both.

Dido's No Angel and Life For Rent were a soundtrack to my A-level and university education.  Seeing her perform live at Brixton was absolutely unforgettable, and I still use the DVD recording of that event to chill out / fall asleep to during life's more stressful moments.  Don't Believe in Love from Safe Trip Home has also been played on repeat for periods of time that some would consider close to torturous, but there's something about it that I can't get enough of.  It has also been a long five years since Safe Trip Home, with only the odd Faithless cameo and Sex in the City soundtrack single (Everything To Lose) to keep my Dido cravings at bay.

So with that backdrop, I was looking forward very much to the new album - and Girl Who Got Away is wonderful.  After a week's worth of being my looped background sound, it has established itself as something I will be coming back to again and again.  With Dido the lyrics and the story get just as much attention as the composition of the music.  There are is something very familiar and comforting about this album, while at the same time some lovely experiments and new directions.  The more dancy Blackbird (featuring a beautifully executed counterpoint intro story) and End Of Night in particular stand out.  However it's the little touches, such as the birdsong that can be heard at the end of Day Before We Went To War that really make this complete.

Familiar, but new, can also be used to describe the young Miss Croft's first/new/latest outing.  I have vivid memories playing an original Tomb Raider demo (which would have come on a *CD attached to a physical games magazine) during my teenage years.  One level of the village, with a few wolves, a bear and lots of ruins to jump around.  Fast forward and since then I've spent hours with Lara in her different incarnations - Tomb Raider II, then I, then III followed (yes, I did play them out of order), before Angel of Darkness,  Revelations, Anniversary, Underworld, and Guardian of Light and probably some others I've merged into a seamless memory of run, jump, spin, shoot, scream, reload, retry...

The new reboot still offers some of the puzzles and platforming (which has been executed brilliantly) but has traded some of the exploration and isolation for a very slick (but possibly incongruous) combat scheme.  On the flip side experience and skills are no longer learned by the player as the game progresses, but awarded by the game as points, unlocked moves and levels - a change that moves towards explicit rather than intrinsic rewarding of the player.  I do miss the days when nailing a tricky jump or surviving a trap in a world before quick time events brought a sense of achievement that hit green triangle now to not die just fails to deliver.  However the story (for at least the first hour or two) is pretty gripping, the graphics stunning.  However the world has changed, and my having a job means less free time, and at the moment Lara's still milling around a tomb despite being in my PS3 for several days.  Something I hope to go remedy right now...