Lara After Bedtime: A Grown-Up's Tomb Raider Page

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Lara After Bedtime
A Grown-Up's Tomb Raider Page

Who plays at 10 p.m. | Why Lara | The three games | The next one | My ten favorite levels

Who plays at 10 p.m.

My name is Joan Stevens. I'm 34, I'm a cost accountant for a manufacturer in Hartford, Connecticut, and I spend my working days on standard costs, variance reports and overhead allocations. I have two children, Madeline, who is 9, and Timothy, who is 6, and a husband, Leon, who goes to bed at ten because he gets up at five.

Which means that from about a quarter to ten until whenever I make myself stop, the living room and the PlayStation are mine.

We bought the PlayStation for the kids two Christmases ago. A woman I work with, Debby, lent me her copy of the first Tomb Raider that winter and said, "Trust me." I didn't expect anything. I hadn't played a video game since Pac-Man in college. The first night I played until one in the morning and fell asleep at my desk the next afternoon in the middle of a budget meeting. I have now finished all three games, every level, most of the secrets, and I am not a bit sorry.

This page is for the other grown-ups out there who play after the house is quiet, and anyone else who wants to know why a sensible woman with a mortgage spends her evenings in a sunken ocean liner. On a page of its own are my ten favorite levels, with one piece of advice for the hardest jump in each.

Why Lara is a heroine

I know what people think when they hear "Lara Croft." I've seen the magazine covers. My brother-in-law makes a remark every Thanksgiving. So let me say it plainly: that is not why I play, and that is not why Lara is worth anybody's time.

Lara is an English aristocrat who walked away from a plane crash in the Himalayas and decided she would rather explore the world than go to garden parties. Here is why she's a heroine:

Her brains	Most of these games are puzzles. Levers, keys, gears, blocks to push, a room that floods and drains, the order you have to do things in. She's an archaeologist, and she thinks her way through tombs that would stump most of the engineers I work with.
Her nerve	She goes alone. Into caves, into the dark with a flare, past wolves and a dinosaur, down a shaft with no idea what's at the bottom. No sidekick, no one coming to help. I am a grown woman who gets nervous in the parking garage at work, and I admire that more than I can tell you.
Her backflips	She runs, swims, climbs, swan dives, and backflips out of trouble. She's an athlete. When I took my daughter to gymnastics last week, I caught myself thinking Lara would have been good at the vault.

Madeline is 9. She isn't allowed to play yet (too many wolves), but she watches me sometimes on a Saturday afternoon, and she has decided that Lara is a girl who isn't afraid of anything and is smarter than everybody. I can live with that being her impression.

The three games, in order

Tomb Raider (1996)

The first and still my favorite. Lara is hired to find a piece of an ancient artifact called the Scion, and the hunt takes her through Peru, Greece and Rome, Egypt, and finally Atlantis itself. It is lonely and quiet and huge, mostly just you and the echo of your own footsteps, and then something roars. On the PlayStation you can only save at the blue crystals, so every crystal is a little celebration. And yes, there is a Tyrannosaurus.

Tomb Raider II (1997)

Lara goes after the Dagger of Xian, starting at the Great Wall of China and going on to Venice, an oil rig, a shipwreck at the bottom of the sea and the mountains of Tibet. She gets a braid, a speedboat and a snowmobile, and a lot more people with guns to deal with. Less tomb, more raider. You can save anywhere you like, which saved my marriage.

Tomb Raider III (1998)

Pieces of an old meteorite, scattered around the world. It starts in India, and then you pick the order: the South Pacific, London or the Nevada desert, and it all ends in Antarctica. A quad bike, a kayak, and the hardest levels of the three by a mile. On the PlayStation you collect your save crystals and have to decide when to use them, which is just like budgeting, and I'd know. Took me from Christmas to Easter.

The next one

Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation
Set in Egypt. Due in November.

That's all I know, and that's all I want to know. My nephew keeps trying to tell me what he's read on the Internet about it, and I keep putting my hands over my ears. I loved the Egyptian levels in the first game, so I'm glad. I have already told Leon what I want for Christmas. He says he figured.

A neighbor

My nephew plays scarier things than I do. He sent me to Dominic's R.P.D. Case File: Resident Evil 2 Survival Guide, a survival guide in three case files: the basics, the monsters and weapons, and the secrets, with spoiler warnings, which I appreciate as a person who hates being told the ending. I'm not brave enough for zombies. But I admire a well-organized guide.

Fellow explorers since November 1998:

My ten favorite levels >>

Write to me: [email protected]
(I answer on my lunch hour, not after ten. After ten I'm busy.)

Last updated Thursday, September 23, 1999