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News!
(November 1998 - December 1998)

Tomb Raiders Traveler's Guide News

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Dec 24, 1998 11:05
Season's Greetings

Dear readers, this will be the last news update for the year, so I wanted to wish you and yours a happy holiday season. I hope that your holidays will be filled with joy. Thanks for your support. God bless.

 Status Report

Allow me to give you a quick status report on what's going on around here. I've changed the color scheme for many of 		the front pages, because I've begun setting up my TR3 guide. I spotted TR3 at my local Sam's Club, so it's certain that I'll be picking up my copy "any day now".

The motherboard of the computer that I upgraded months ago up and died, so I decided to build a PC from scratch, using parts from the dead PC to learn how it's done. I'm now waiting for the 166MHz Pentium to arrive because I gave my 200MHz Evergreen MxPro		 upgrade chip away. The new machine is sporting a SoundBlaster PCI128, 3D Blaster Voodoo2 12MB (possibly with SLI next year), and Cambridge SoundWorks PCWorks Four Point Surround speaker system. That's one reason why things have been quiet around here. This ought to be one hot game rig when I'm through. Also, I'd like to take this opportunity to publicly thank my wife for being so patient with me and my little hobby. (Old articles...)

Nov 25, 1998 10:30
The Name's Winston

Jeeves fans, we have some news for you. We asked Vicky Arnold, scriptwriter for the Tomb Raider games, to verify if Lara's butler's name was "Winston" since it was mentioned in an "Interview with Lara" in Gamers' Republic magazine Dec '98 issue. Vicky replied, "Lara's butler has been referred to as Winston here since he was 1st designed as this is what Gav called him in his code..." 		Vicky continues, "and it seems to have stuck. I'm not sure how often this has actually been put into writing before the Gamer's Republic interview - but he's been called that long enough for it to be warranted as an 'official' name anyhow."

We at the Guide let out a sigh of relief now that we don't have to say "Lara's butler" all over our plot transcripts. Our thanks to Vicky for her permission to publish her comments. 		On Holiday

There's been quite a stir here at the Guide. In case you've been living in a cave, you should know that Tomb Raider III has been released in many parts of the world. We have reported to you on conspiracies and plot twists. Now, just to let you know that I'll be out of town for two weeks. I won't be back until Dec. 14th, so I can't answer your emails until then. Happy Thanksgiving to all! (Old articles...)

Nov 25, 1998 10:00
CORE Plot Points

We, at the Guide, felt TR2 had a strong plot, intelligent dialogue, and were pleased with how TR2's story unfolded. While working on our TR2 plot transcripts, we were unclear on some of the dialogue. We emailed our questions to Gavin Rummery, lead programmer for TR2 at Core Design, who in turn sent them to Vicky Arnold, scriptwriter for TR1 and TR2.		 Her response was prompt and she cleared up the dialogue at the end of the Opera House and the Diving Area. In addition, she also shared some plot details that we missed. "As for the battle sequence at the start," Vicky writes, "[...] the Emperor is the dragon; the idea being that the dagger will give this power to whoever has enough belief to drive it into their heart - and that his warriors who fight alongside him will have added powers too." "(Hence the cult's interest.)" Vicky explains, "The monks therefore have been at a bit of a disadvantage in battle. But when the monk sees and removes the dagger from the dragon, these powers are thwarted; the dragon is destroyed and his warriors weakened."

"The guy with the disturbing green eyes is one of the Emperor's generals and when the dragon is killed," Vicky continues, (more...)
"he and the other soldiers return to their normal human strength."

 Retrofit Plots

We went on to ask her whether the plot or the locales was decided first. Vicky replied, "The level locations are indeed decided on first and a plot fitted around them - but the basic premise ideas usually comes hand in hand with one of the designer's levels. eg. in TR2, Heather's China level was an obvious 		focal point for a story and Gav was interested in having a cult as the main enemy, so the plot develops like that. The main difficulty for me is then structuring it around the levels, ensuring that plot revelations all come at the right time and that there are no inconsistencies in it."

Vicky tells us, "Also, the FMVs can only be really short cos of the work load involved for the FMV artists and so the information has to be" 		shown as concisely as possible. [...] Unfortunately, info like; 'How [...] does Lara get a lead to China in the first place?', does get compromised. Erm... like it's never even mentioned... I liked your plot summaries with the additional stuff covering things like that cos it makes the read through more complete and the story less dry." -- Thanks Vicky!

by Brian Chew, Executive Editor   (Old articles...)

Nov 24, 1998 15:00
The Large Medi Pack
Conspiracy

We asked Gavin Rummery, the lead programmer for TR2, a few of our burning questions. First, you may have noticed both TR and TR2 have a large Medi Pack that is unreachable by conventional means. In the Palace Midas level of TR1, there is a large Medi Pack perched up high on some blocks that is only accessible by using the corner bug. In the Temple of Xian level in TR2, there 		is a large Medi Pack high up in an alcove across from the gold dragon. This is unreachable except by patching a saved game. We asked Gavin Rummery, who was involved in both games, the origin of these two large Medi Packs.

Gavin commented on the placement of the Palace Midas Medi Pack, "You just plonk them down in the editor - the artist in question obviously thought Lara could reach it, but you can't."		 Gavin wrote, "It was found by the playtesters, and it was then we decided to leave it in as a joke."

We asked if the ladder leading up to the large Medi Pack in Temple of Xian was originally meant to be scalable. He answered, "Yes, but there was some detection deal with the climb and the slope at the bottom (I can't remember the details now), and for some reason this ladder wouldn't let Lara hang on to it properly." (more...)
"It was only found at the last minute, and by then it was a bit late to do anything about it," Gavin tells us.

All perfectly innocent? We, at the Guide think this is too much of a coincidence and we believe that it is actually a conspiracy to slowly erode our sanity. It would be interesting to see if there'll be a signature unreachable large Medi Pack in TR3. 		The Corner Bug

We asked Gavin whether the infamous "corner bug" was intentional, since is quite handy sometimes. Gavin replied, "The corner bug wasn't discovered until Tomb2 was in playtesting, but an attempt to fix it introduced another bug, so (as we were highly stressed at this point) we decided to leave well alone and take the chance that no-one would find it. Some hope." 		Our thanks to Gavin for taking the time to answer our questions and giving us permission to post his replies.

by Brian Chew, Executive Editor
(Old articles...)
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