It's been a tumultuous decade for Lara Croft. Ten years ago she took the world by storm in Tomb Raider for the original PlayStation. Critics praised the game for verily inventing a new genre, the "3rd-person action/adventure," while applauding the introduction of a female protagonist, virtually unheard of in the day. Gamers, meanwhile, were all agog with Lara Croft, the jet-setting, archaeologically-inclined vixen with the moxy of Indiana Jones but the shapeliness of a centerfold. It was decided right then an there that if a player had to follow a character around for 30+ hours of gameplay, tailing a taught buttocks in hotpants was surely the best way to do it.

Moreover, Tomb Raider blew the doors off conventional puzzle solving, A to B gameplay, first by melding incessant brain teasers with grand scale adventure set in exotic lands of ancient architecture, then giving each box shoving, lever yanking puzzle some weight, some consequence, like Lara's untimely and convincingly animated demise. Throw in the odd shocker of a bear attack, rolling boulder of doom, or monolithic showdown using guns, perilous leaps to fingernail-sized ledges, and then more guns and you've got the modern action/adventure game that was ahead of its time.

Within short order, however, Lara's adventuresomeness was duplicated ad nauseam, with some of many knock offs improving on character models, skill sets, controls, camera work etc., evolving the genre with great rapidity. In no time the luscious Lara looked comparatively homely, her long, limber legs were soon seen for the mere flesh-colored, elongated primary geometrics that they were; her ample bosom looking like so much plastered on plasticine with a roughly rounded look that wouldn't even attract a suckling; and her athletic talents were soon reduced to trainee caliber, with mere climbing, jumping, shoving, yanking and shooting seeming run-of-the-mill.

So it followed that Tomb Raider became a franchise of many sequels, and Lara's skill set expanded to include a scrambling wall-crawl, a wonderfully suggestive pole shimmy, great leaping lunges, rope swinging, retractable grapple-hooking and more. The worlds she visited became more convoluted, more detailed in their thorniness, less a lesson in Cubism, more fleshed out and inventive in both visual pallet and box-shoving, lever-yanking, chasm-leaping puzzles provided therein.

But even so, Lara's next games reinvented nothing; they were all good in formulistic way of the 3rd-person action/adventure, but merely followed the natural evolution of the genre, always trailing better, newer games, like Soul Reaver, Prince of Persia, and, most recently, the almighty God of War, among others. Anyway, the Tomb Raider franchise was soon decried as irrelevant, and poof!, Lara was a has-been, a wash-up cyber celebrity that couldn't cut the ribbon at a supermarket opening, trying in vain to modernize herself with new make-up and urban apparel on occasion, a couple of movies only loosely based on her core antics, but ultimately reduced to B-list appearances on dud platforms like N-Gage and cell phones.

Fortunately, like any good down-but-not-out story, Lara is staging a comeback with Tomb Raider Anniversary. The genre itself has devolved and fractured, become saturated with sameness or vagueness... Ten years is a ripe time to return and remind everybody what all the hoopla was about in the first place.

Tomb Raider Anniversary does several things right, all of them key. First, it's a re-telling of the original Tomb Raider game -- a "re-imagining," in fact, which uses the same storyline a general locales of the first game, except thoroughly overhauled to appear more natural, organic, huge and shapely -- and ornery. Likewise, Lara has never looked better, intimating some semblance of muscle in those as long athletic legs, the same excessive bosom now actually heaves expressively under a skin-tight top, a well-formed face suggests a sentient twinkle behind big brown eyes -- Angelina Joli's plush bottom lip seems to have worked its way in there, too.

Tomb Raider Anniversary comes with a small set of inconsequential graphical and technical flaws which are totally tolerable -- endearing in that "no school like the old school" sort of way. In fact, the game steers convincingly toward perfection, falling short -- quite short -- in but one large way, and that is the camera work.

No Tomb Raider game has ever managed to shake the bizzaro camera view that will follow Lara around to give you the best view of both her and her surroundings, panning around, sometimes slowly, sometimes rapidly -- sometimes just cutting to a new angle -- as each particular landscape requires in order to offer an informative view without jamming behind a rock or the wrong side of a shelf. All the while, however, Lara (controlled now with the left analog thumbstick) moves around in relation to that camera, not the actual environment she's in, so if you make Lara leap from a tiny pillar top to a precarious ledge by pushing forward and jump, that confounded camera may (or may not) shift suddenly (or even slowly, gently), making your leap to the ledge a near or total miss, a lunge into nothingness because she veered slightly left as the camera tweaked to the right, causing her to fall to her spectacular death or, worse, to the beginning of that vertical maze of pillars and cliffs and towers she just climbed so you can try it all over again and maybe get it right. Other times you'll have a great view of Lara's left eyebrow as the lions you're suppose to be shooting gnaw away at her legs off camera. Sorry about your luck. Try again. Thanks for the unlimited do-overs.

To assuage this infuriating flaw (which otherwise makes the game a total and utter wash) is a manual override of the camera's meandering angles using the right analog thumbstick, which makes the whole game more playable, but only through trial and error where, for example, you line up a jump, swing, or grapple first with the right stick, then as a test run with the left 'stick to see if the camera is prone to shift at that particular point, then actually committing to the move. Truth be told, learning to cope with the wonky camera work has always been a sort of game-within-the-game of Tomb Raider games; a rub-belly/tap-head sort of ordeal that does bring a sense of accomplishment in the end, though it probably wasn't intended.

It should also be noted this PlayStation2 game was reviewed on a PlayStation3 (with which it's compatible) but was prone to locking up every once in a while, usually at a cutscene. Sound would go south on occasion, too. Not sure if that's a hardware or software issue, but a bummer either way.

Other than that, though, Tomb Raider Anniversary is all game, one with sex appeal and some brains, cool moves and endorphinated athletica -- think Parkour in Ancient Ruins -- interspersed with moments of contemplative lever yanking, not to mention hours and hours of appreciation for a tight buttocks in hotpants and the occasional glimpse of an excessively heaving bosom. Moreover, the title's low price befits its shortcomings -- well, to some extent, anyway.

TIP: If you're playing Tomb Raider Anniversary for PlayStation2 on your PlayStation3, you can set the resolution to progressives scan -- which also makes it widescreen -- for better visuals without any noticeable performance hit.

TIP: Each level of Tomb Raider Anniversary comes with a "time trial" where completing the level quickly will unlock certain rewards, like weapons, artwork, etc. Tough to do first go around, but you can always revisit the levels you're familiar with, which makes it easier to beat the clock.