Owies, Bear Naked and Gaming

Okay. It's been, what, two weeks since I posted?

Oops.

Sorry about that. I thought, once the reno was done, things would settle down. And they did... right on my spine. I know better than to move boxes and unpack, but I did it anyway. No matter how much better I feel, there are still things I can't do, and moving stuff is one of them.

Ow. Worse, when I do this kind of stupid stuff, the inflammation causes my immune system to overreact, which makes me as tired as if I was fighting off the flu. So I've been doing nothing but writing and sleeping, sleeping and writing.

At least Bear Naked has hit 77%, right?

By the way, did you see the name change? My editor over at Samhain noticed that I was using the title Stripped Bear. She realized Samhain already has a Stripped BARE, and requested I change it rather than have any confusion when someone wound up with Bear shifters instead of strip poker. I like the new title, so I hope you do, too.

Fuzzy wuzzie is frickin' terrifying.

Anyway, that's what's going on with the writing and the owies. Now on to the fun stuff, at least for me:

I completed Lara Croft: Survivor.

(Warning: Gamer girl fan squeeing about to commence. Continue at your own peril.)

M'kay. Mama Bell is a HUGE fan of the franchise, but as time went on, I found myself playing Lara less and less, until I can't even remember what the last installment was. The puzzles became ridiculously difficult to complete, and I wound up not playing them all the way through. But still, I'd get a tingle whenever I'd hear of a new Tomb Raider game, since I'd been in love with it since the beginning, when the gaming world was all agog at a female protagonist. ("Holy crap! She's got... booooooobs.")

So I bought the reboot of the Lara myth hoping I would be as happy with it as I was with the first Tomb Raider I ever played.

Surprisingly, I was.

Now, don't get me wrong. There were things I didn't like (the button mash... she did the BUUU-TTON MASH) but the frequency of the auto-save feature meant I wasn't mashing my way through a whole insta-death scene. Nope, once I got past that spike in my brain, it was on to the NEXT spike in my brain.

Sigh. Lots of spikes. It's a spikey game.

But the story, the most important part of any RPG to me, was excellent. Lara gets the hell beat out of her. She grunts in pain, cries at her losses and in the end, is suffering from some serious issues. In a couple of days her whole life changes. She's forced to murder a man to save herself and her friends, and promptly gets sick. She mutters to herself, "I can do this," when faced with a seemingly impossible task. And the story flowed well and made sense to me.

As for the puzzles Lara Croft is famous for, they weren't nearly as hard as some of the previous Tomb Raider iterations, and for that I'm grateful. There was one Tomb Raider where I couldn't even get past climbing down a pipe filled with whirring blades, no matter how many times I tried. I actually had to give up on the game entirely because I just couldn't do it. And this was pre-arthritis, when my hands didn't hurt at all and I thought nothing of gaming from dawn till dusk.

And the game is pretty. Seriously pretty. It looked, and sounded, like she was on a deserted island, complete with religious nut-balls and their pet wolves. And the mystical parts of Lara Croft were well represented, with Lara being skeptical at first, just like her shipmates, but slowly realizing something... other really is going on.

All in all, I enjoyed it immensely. It was a great way to spend a few days, and I'll more than likely play it again.