#2 - Melons.

With more than a little pessimism, I throw back the heavy wooden doors to what I think is the first official tomb of the game. Last time I killed a bunch of tigers and a crow, but besides giving PETA cause for concern, I don't feel I'm properly prepared for what's ahead. I'm the tomb raiding equivalent of the kid who only started revising for the exam while on the bus to school. While wearing hotpants and gun holsters. A spider takes a liking to my face and jumps up to have a nibble. In what may be the most overkill way ever of dealing with a spider, I pull out my 9mm pistols and unload a two entire clips at it. Beats hitting it with a shoe or a book. My aim could use a little work, though.

After killing the spider, I'm also attacked by a silver key which I deal with by pressing the wrong button, jumping towards it, head-butting the wall behind it, picking myself up, picking the key up, and then finally then putting it in my inventory. I then take it out of my inventory and put it in the door it unlocks. Heading deeper into the tomb within which I plan to raid (it's my thing), I feel a chill run up and down my spine. If the tomb starts with giant spiders, where is this going to end? Mummies? Giant rats? Hell hounds? Oh, no. Much worse than that. Much, much worse.

S-S-S-Skeletons!

It's clear that the spider mob killed this hapless adventurer, but I guess we'll never know how he managed to die in a game when he was right next to a med kit. Either way, it benefits me that he never got to use it. I bag it along with the shotgun shells also lying on the ground, and this prompts me to realise that Lara has a shotgun tied to her shoulder, which had escaped me despite playing for an hour. I arm it. Oh guys! This is going from bad to worse - spiders, skeletons, shotguns, and now I've got a puzzle to solve. Presented with a large block, I have two options - pull it out of the way, or push it more in my way - and I cleverly choose the latter option. What else is the game going to throw at me? Some kind of jumping challenge?

Jeepers. Apparently we're due for a water puzzle. I'll just...

... oh.

What the devil are these things?

Cannon balls? Circular saws?

Agressive bubbles?

... that could have gone better. In fact, I'm staring at that picture of Lara Croft's lifeless corpse and I'm struggling to think how to put a positive spin on things. Well, it's a shame we didn't get more than a few posts into the series before losing our one and only life in Iron Man Mode. Usually on the site games last for a single post or go on for some time - it's odd to see proceedings being halted at an awkward post #2, and for that I apologise if you were enjoying the series and wanted to see it continue. But, as we know, them's the house rules and I feel I brought it upon myself in a way - I'm still looking at the floating corpse bobbing around and feel like the game is laughing at me for ridiculing its difficulty curve and elementary puzzles earlier. As a result of my complacency, I'll concede that I did kinda deserve being killed by angry bubbles or whatever the hell those things were. But now I'm a bit stuck. What on earth should I fill the rest of today's post with? I know. Let's play Scuba Dive on the ZX Spectrum. Betcha didn't see that coming. [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C\_GNbdgrxRU&list=UU9847q7Fv\_4E6qK5dnTkVrw&index=1&feature=plcp[/youtube]