It’s a curious experience to be playing Tomb Raider: Underworld a full dozen years after the first game’s appearance.
 
Sure, Lara now slaps petulantly away at innocent fronds of vegetation, and the arms-at-her-sides pose when she is balancing sideways on a beam is pretty cute (although arguably thematically inconsistent – it looks like a posture someone who wasn’t used to balancing on things would adopt).

And yet the game’s core pleasure is the same as it was 12 years ago: the best bits of Underworld, like the best bits of all the previous games, are when you wandering at leisure around a beautiful puzzle environment, trying to figure out how the massive machine you are inhabiting works, free of time pressure or pointless attacks by badly animated lizards and idiotic spiders. (Talking of appalling bugs, Lara’s propensity to get stuck in geometry is a sad sign of a rush job, but I observe it with a certain nostalgic warmth: yes, it’s still like the Tomb Raider of yore.)

Indeed, the new player-tailoring system is an implicit recognition of what is really important and what peripheral: so now, thankfully, you can make the annoying combat bits go away faster by reducing enemies’ health, but there is no need to allow the player to tune the core platforming system, providing the levels are designed well.

Now that Crystal Dynamics has thus explicitly acknowledged that most Tomb Raider players just want to get the irritating gunplay over as quickly as possible, they ought to have the courage of that conviction and make a Tomb Raider game with no combat at all, one that gives the player all the time in the world for thoughtful exploration and appreciation of the aesthetic majesty around him.

Or perhaps you could keep the combat, but only for very rare super-enemies. Imagine what impact things like the brilliant T-Rex fight in Anniversary would have if you hadn’t already left such a long trail of smaller wildlife dead and decomposing in your wake.

But there I am, already thinking about a sequel, yet another entry in one of contemporary videogaming’s most long-lived series. So I begin to worry whether the seemingly unending industry of Lara’s adventures represents a kind of general calcification of videogaming’s spirit.

Sure, the fans want what they are used to, but shouldn’t videogaming be offering us new, previously unimagined experiences, rather than the same old yearly updates of proven successes? Is ‘sequelitis’, as some people argue, a sign of creative timidity?

Then, on a trip to London, I was looking around the Mark Rothko exhibition currently at Tate Modern, and realised that Rothko’s oeuvre is sequelitis in spades. He was basically iterating one idea over and over again, searching out its hidden variety, its polymorphous potential. Within his self-imposed limitations, he was wildly experimenting with alchemical combinations of painting material, brushwork layering techniques, geometric rhythm and colour. If he had been a videogame designer, you know what the reviews would have said.

‘This new series of Fuzzy Rectangles is just a retread of his Blurred Rhomboids of five years ago: a few tweaks, but nothing really new. Five out of ten.’

Some of the greatest artists are obsessives, constantly recombining material within the same restricted conceptual space. On the cover of a JM Coetzee novel I recently read   was an enthusiastic blurb describing it as ‘another exemplary tale of suffering by   Coetzee’ – a recommendation so off-putting that it’s hilarious. What, another exemplary tale of suffering? Spare us!

And yet it is true: Coetzee’s darkly addictive, thrillingly austere fiction is an obdurate repetition of exemplary tales of suffering. So, given that we don’t complain when painters or novelists return again and again to the same themes, trying to get it right, it seems a bit unfair to be prejudiced against the same thing in videogames.

Halo 3, Wipeout HD, and even FIFA 09 are all strong arguments that iteration and refinement can result in work just as valuable as gratuitous novelty. Isaiah Berlin once divided thinkers into hedgehogs and foxes. The hedgehog knows one big thing; the fox knows lots of little things.

You can have fun applying the same distinction to artists. Dylan and Bowie are foxes; Springsteen and Morrissey are hedgehogs. In videogames, Miyamoto is a fox, and Jeff Minter is a hedgehog. More generally, the unending stream of Tomb Raider games represents an apex of hedgehogism, and that’s no bad thing in the wider videogame ecology.

Berlin didn’t think foxes were better than hedgehogs, or vice versa: he celebrated the fact that both existed in the world. Of course, Lara Croft would whip out her pistols and shoot the faces off both types of animal without a second’s thought, but we can’t all be perfect.