Revealed during a Nintendo Direct, but in fact happening across all of gaming, the world has learned that the first three Tomb Raider games are returning with shiny new graphics, designed to work on modern consoles. Let me—an old person—gift you—presumably a young person—a piece of insight: You will want to play these games.

Tomb Raider has a bonkers history. It goes all the way back to 1996, almost 30 years ago, when Lara Croft first appeared on the Sony PlayStation and Sega Saturn. And, yes, the cardboard cutouts of Lara and her generous bosom and concerningly narrow waist appeared in every gaming store worldwide. Tomb Raider was an instant phenomenon, and not just because of her tits: This was a genuinely brilliant game accompanying a groundbreaking use of 3D graphics.

Tomb Raider was a key reason a generation of PC owners upgraded to their first 3dfx card. It was a game that everyone heard of, and perhaps is more responsible than anything else for seeing our hobby break out from its specialist niche and find a mainstream audience. And it’s statistically probable that this all happened before you were born.

Like Grand Theft Auto and the itch-inducing belief that that franchise for some reason started with GTA III, there’s now some sense that Tomb Raider began in either 2006 with the excellent Legend, or even 2013 with the franchise’s total reset. Sure, everyone vaguely knows there were some earlier games, but they weren’t on SNES, there isn’t a theme park dedicated to the franchise, they were apparently some weird, archaic anomaly enjoyed by an ancient race lost to time.

Let me tell you something, young lady: The original three Tomb Raider games were absolutely bloody fantastic.

And no, not in a rose-tinted, “Ah I remember when…” way, but in the proper, “woah, this level design is absolutely spectacular,” sort of way. In fact, the main flaw you’ll find in these originals is still a problem in all three generations of the games released over the last three decades: the god-awful combat. At this point, tiresomely waiting for the section in which Lara incongruously slaughters crowds of humans to be over is frankly nostalgic.

Talking of nostalgia, all three games are being released with an option to switch between the original blocky polygon graphics, and lovely patched-over modern designs. If it’s anything like the Monkey Island remakes, this means I will spend the entire time obsessively switching back and forth, unable to cope without knowing how every scene looks in each incarnation. Please, I need help.

We old folk at Kotaku absolutely cannot wait to experience these games again, and even more, to see how all the young-uns on staff react to playing them for the first time. Not having the right cables to attach my PSX to anything with a screen, and the PC versions being such a pain to get working, it’s been so long since I returned to these three games. But every time I previously have, it’s been such a pleasure. Like going home. Literally, when you play Tomb Raider II’s training level in Croft Manor, which is an absolute treasure trove of detail and clattering crockery.

All three games will feature their expansions and secret levels, with the restoration being done by Aspyr alongside Crystal Dynamics (the series’ original developer, Core Design, has long since gone to live on the lovely farm where games developers get to run around with all the space they need). They’ll be out February 14, 2024, on PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch, and PC, which means you have no excuse.

Activison Blizzard’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III multiplayer, out worldwide on November 10, apparently lets you murder people with marijuana. The detail was revealed in the Entertainment Software Rating Board’s decision summary for marking the first-person shooter as “mature,” and it seems like the natural evolution to smoke rings.

“The game includes a finishing move in which marijuana smoke from a bong can be forced into an opponent’s face,” the ESRB plainly states. “Badges/banners and character outfits also depict cannabis and/or smoking figures.”

From this limited description, I’d say MWIII isn’t attempting any commentary on the world’s anxious relationship to drugs, nor trying to suggest that smoking kills (though, as a finishing move, or one of the series’ complicated kill animations, it literally does). The finisher the ESRB details sounds like the Blowin’ Smoke kill from Warzone, in which players flex on their opponents by breathing a smoke cloud into their faces, except this one is less death by way of secondhand smoke and more “RIP to you after that bong rip.” The point is, I think, that smoking looks sick sometimes, especially if you’re a 17-year-old playing CoD.

Other reasons for the ESRB’s “M” rating (a Call of Duty game hasn’t been approved for teens since Call of Duty 3 in 2006) sound like more all-purpose CoD stuff, including “large explosions, screams of pain, and blood-splatter effects.” There are, of course, “terrorists (dressed as police officers and paramedics),” the ESRB writes, “shooting/killing fleeing civilians inside a stadium concourse; airline passengers getting shot on a plane; prisoners shot inside a cell.”

The game’s recently revealed Zombie mode—the beloved, macabre mode’s first time in a Modern Warfare game—also often results “in decapitation and/or dismemberment; large blood-splatter effects accompany these sequences.” The game will also reanimate every original Modern Warfare II multiplayer map, though those are less grounds for the ESRB’s concern.

In any case, you can watch all these mature video game qualities play out when Modern Warfare III releases on consoles and PC in November.

Pre-order Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III: Amazon | Best Buy | GameStop

Update 09/21/2023 at 1:30 p.m. EST: Replaced references to Treyarch with multiplayer developer Sledgehammer Games; removed “open-world” as a descriptor for MWIII.

Call of Duty filesizes are completely out of control. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III (see on Amazon), the latest in the long-running military FPS franchise recently acquired by Microsoft, consumes over 200GB of storage on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S when you add up everything it contains. The new Call of Duty HQ download manager alone is itself a roughly 50GB install.

Call of Duty games have had massive digital footprints for a while now. We complain about them every year. Things were particularly bad with 2020’s Call of Duty Black Ops: Cold War, which ate up a staggering 255GB on PS5 after all its content packs were installed. It seemed like video game filesize inflation slowed down for a bit afterward, but with Modern Warfare III the hit shooter is back to eating up anywhere from a third to half of players’ “next-gen” SSD drives, according to IGN.

Activision tried to explain why this is happening on X (formerly known as Twitter) today. “In preparation, we would like to provide an update on file sizes which are larger than last year,” the company tweeted. “This is due to the increased amount of content available Day 1, including open world Zombies, support for item carry forward from #MW2, as well as map files for current Call of Duty: Warzone. (Note: as part of our ongoing optimization efforts, your final installation size will be actually smaller than the combined previous Call of Duty experiences).”

While it makes sense that all of Modern Warfare III’s map packs, modes, and cross-over content with Modern Warfare II and Warzone 2 would add to the final filesize, Activision’s explanation still doesn’t still doesn’t make clear why players can’t simply download the single-player campaign that came out in “early access” today without messing around with the rest via a convoluted, 50GB launcher.

In theory, Call of Duty HQ is supposed to make MW3’s nearly 235GB footprint easier to manage by streamlining how players pick and choose what content to download and install. In practice, however, many fans seem to think it’s a huge pain in the ass. Warfare 2 players have already had to put up with it for months now, with PC Gamer calling the interface, “a real mess of data management.” Being required for Modern Warfare III hasn’t won the launcher any more supporters.

“Call of Duty HQ system seems way too complicated for casual players,” tweeted Charlie Intel co-founder Keshav Bhat. “The amount of posts I have seen asking how to install [the] campaign or where to find it is insane.”

Plus, if the total size of MW3 is already over 200GB, it’s likely to get even bigger in the months ahead as Activision rolls out additional content, including remastered Modern Warfare 2 maps. I’m looking forward to when Call of Duty HQ gets its own overhaul, requiring players to install a massive patch to fix the massive installer.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III’s multiplayer mode goes live November 10.

Pre-order Modern Warfare III: Amazon | Best Buy | GameStop

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