Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light

Sween and I started this one a while back - probably about six months ago - and just finished it tonight while gorging on a chicken parmesan calzone that, even through our combined efforts, we could not finish. When it takes six months to co-op a six-hour game, and when two grown men can't put down more than 70% of a large calzone, well, let's just say we're getting older every day. Still! Logress is logress, and it was great to have the kind of night tonight like we used to have every other week or so when the blog began. Even if I am already regretting the way my stomach will behave at work tomorrow and dreading the three large remaining chunks of that hideous thing in my refrigerator.

That was a tangent. Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light was an arcade-style take on the Tomb Raider franchise. More puzzle solving than shoot-em-up, it lent itself very well to the gaming tendencies of two guys sitting on a couch trying to figure shit out. It was one of the best local co-op games I've played in years, as each of us figured out a fair share of puzzles and held off a slew of enemies from time to time. We died a shit ton, but all it did was reduce our scores, and even though I ended at least one of the fourteen levels with an overall score of zero, we still ended up unlocking nine of the game's twelve achievements without really going out of our way to do anything. One measure of how good a game is, for me, is how willing you wind up being to go out of your way to do any unnecessary tasks. It's that element of "completion." When a game is fantastic, you're going out of your way to explore every last corner of it and do every last possible thing. When it's terrible, you just want to beeline right through to the ending along the path of least resistance. Here, Sween and I did a lot more, "oh, let's see what's over here," than we did, "who cares, let's just keep going."

All in all, a decent game made better by its temporarily free price.