Teenage masturbation-fantasy favourite Lara Croft's next videogame outing will be the most real-to-life yet, according to developers Eidos Interactive. The game's narrative - which sees the eponymous Tomb Raider hunting down an ancient Egyptian treasure after receiving a vision of the god Osiris whilst very slowly getting out of a shower - will be punctuated with 'ultrarealistic' levels that attempt to replicate the excitement of archaeological work in Egypt more closely than has ever been achieved before.

According to an Eidos press release, the game's designers travelled to Egypt in the company of real archaeologists while working on the game. As the release explains, "advances in videogame graphics mean that the characters and environments are now as close to reality as possible. For this game, a team of 12 programmers worked for a month just on modelling the physics of erect nipples and their interaction with different fabrics. But that search for realism hasn't always extended to games' plots - until now."

Whilst the announcement has delighted Egyptologists, who have long campaigned for their profession to be more accurately portrayed in films and other media, it may leave hardcore games players disappointed. Levels that are slated for inclusion in the game include one in which the heroine has to fight off hoards of lecherous men by avoiding direct eye contact while simultaneously maintaining non-suggestive small-talk via a convoluted combination of button presses. Different 'combos' are required to defeat each assailant - because of highly advanced Artificial Intelligence programmed for non-player characters, the combo that works for a lecherous Egyptian inspector will prove useless against an ageing American professor.

Another level, which takes full advantage of the new motion-sensing technology of Nintendo's Wii console, will see players filling out security forms in quadruple copy with an old biro in one hand while drinking from a glass of mint tea with the other. A third has gamers controlling Croft as she draws hundreds of pieces of pottery, each slightly more fiddly and slightly less interesting than the last.

UCL Egyptologist Margaret Berkley, who acted as a consultant to the game's makers, told us: "like Egyptologists everywhere, I was sick of seeing the subject I have worked so hard to obfuscate being portrayed as sexy and exciting by the earlier Tomb Raider games. Now we finally have a video game that dispels some of those myths - a game that will ring true to scores of Egyptologists."

In contrast, a videogamer identified only by his 'gamertag' of MasterChiefFTW, who had play-tested the game during its development, said on an online discussion board: "WTF?? I played this for 20 hours straight. Got stuck on some level where I was discussing how to section a posthole. At least the last one had the cheat that made her rack bigger every time you cleared a level."

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