Tomb Raider (Credit: Crystal Dynamics)The new Tomb Raider game is a reboot of one of the biggest franchises in gaming - and a big change for Lara Croft.

“She’s still very recognizably Lara Croft - but some of her, ah, attributes have been reduced,” says Rhianna Pratchett, scriptwriter for a ‘reboot’ of the hit game franchise this year.

“She’s more realistic, more in proportion - and much younger.”

The new Tomb Raider game reinvents a character who is one of gaming's biggest hit machines.

(Credit: Baile Zhang)The Elder Wand and Resurrection Stone may still be locked away in J. K. Rowling's imagination, but the third Deathly Hallow made a rare appearance on stage in Long Beach this week.

Baile Zhang, an assistant professor of physics at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, showed off his "invisibility cloak" on Monday at the TED2013 talks in Long Beach.

PowerUp 3.0 (Credit:Tailor Toys)Bored with the traditional paper airplane? Debuting later this year is a new product that’ll give your folded creations a literal boost.

It’s called the PowerUp 3.0, and it’s an elegantly engineered device that turns any paper airplane -- absolutely any paper airplane -- into a motorized, iPhone-controlled, technological wonder.

Tomb Raider (Credit: Square-Enix)It’s been a wild ride for Lara Croft.

After stunning gamers with her innovative 1996 debut, the Tomb Raider star leaped, shot, puzzled, climbed, tumbled and very much raided through a feast of follow-ups. Few reached the heights of the original game, however, and despite big-screen success via Angelina Jolie, the Tomb Raider franchise has been somewhat lost at sea.

Fittingly, that’s just where we find Lara at the start of the rebooted Tomb Raider, releasing March 5. Marooned on a not-entirely-deserted island, the heroine seeks salvation not only from the cruel twist of fate that led to her shipwreck, but from the fickle tastes of gamers grown tired with her cliff-clinging schtick.

As it turns out, salvation is exactly what she’s found. Currently averaging an 87 at Metacritic, Lara’s newest tale finds her back on top of the video game peak.

Margus Hunt (Credit: AP Photo/Eugene Tanner)Margus Hunt is a familiar name for fans of Southern Methodist University football. As a Mustang, he broke the SMU record for blocked kicks, deflecting eight in his first 14 games. He was also the MVP of the 2012 Hawaii Bowl.

At 6'8" and 277 pounds, he'll likely be just as familiar to NFL fans in the coming years. But at this year's NFL Combine, Hunt revealed a secret to his success that no one saw coming: If it hadn't been for EA's Madden series, he might never have played football at all.

When Hunt first came to the U.S. from his native Estonia, it was for his Track and Field prowess, but when SMU did away with track scholarships, he says, he turned to football. Having never played -- and having only been to a couple games in person -- he used Madden games to help him learn how to play the game.

3D street artist Leon Keer with one of his creations.When your 3D street paintings have been experienced and praised all over the world, from San Diego to Abu Dhabi, what do you do for an encore?

That's the challenge confronting Dutch illusionist Leon Keer, and he's meeting it by exploring a new dimension: motion. It's all well and good to create a life-size Pac-Man maze on the pavement, but what if you could see creatures moving in that maze?

IGN logoIt’s game over for a trio of popular video game websites.

Ziff Davis Media has announced plans to shut down 1UP.com, GameSpy.com and UGO.com to focus on its IGN and AskMen properties. The decision comes less than a month after the company purchased IGN from Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.

For over a decade, the three sites were among the most influential in the gaming space. With high traffic and up to the minute information, all three contributed to the downfall of several video game magazines, thanks to their aggressive reporting on the day-to-day minutia of the gaming world. 1UP brought video game podcasts to the mass market, while GameSpy's editorial division was just one facet of a company founded on multiplayer middleware, which was used in over 300 titles.

Lego friends (Credit: Lego)COPENHAGEN, Denmark (AP) — Lego's sales soared 25 percent last year thanks in part to its new series of building blocks designed for girls.

The privately owned company said Thursday that on revenue of 23.4 billion kroner ($4.2 billion) its net profits grew 38 percent, to 5.6 billion kroner ($1 billion).

The company, based in western Denmark, said the Lego Star Wars and Lego Ninjago series remained among the more popular, but it was a novel rollout for girls, Lego Friends, that sold better than expected — to the extent that production units were unable to keep pace with demand.