Cornflour flakes

Sometimes, art just happens. Out of the blue, or in this case, red, beauty can spring unexpectedly. The mundane can become the exact opposite. Here's how.

I've always been fascinated with the stranger parts of physics, the bits where we find out just how amazing the universe is by discovering just how wierd it can be. Well, adding water to cornflour and producing a rheoplaxic fluid is one example. This is a fluid that becomes stiffer when you stress it, instead of the thixotropic thinning that you find in some paints. So I'd been playing with a mixture of cornflour and water, plus red food colouring just to avoid the whiteness of plain cornflour, and it had been great fun.

But then I didn't know what to do with it when I had finished. Previous experiments with leaving it in the fridge proved that it got cold and took quite a time to start to go mouldy, neither of which seemed to be particularly useful, so this time I left it out in the open. What happened is quite nice. Really nice, in fact.

I'm tempted to try it again...

Are games as good as they used to be?

I've been playing games since they were on mainframes. I've hunted Wumpuses (Wumpi?) and explored Colossal Cave, and I played Pong in the days when there was no scoring on the screen - you did it for yourself as in real games.

More recently, I've been an avid player of the Tomb Raider games, ever since TR1 on the PlayStation. The latest game, the 8th or 9th depending on if you count Tomb Raider Anniversary as the eighth game, or as a rework of TR1, is called Tomb Raider Underworld, and I've been happily working my way through it since it was released in the UK in late November.

Tonight, however, things went wrong in Tomb Raider land on my Sony PS3. I was in the Southern Mexico level, and had solved the first Mayan Calendar problem, and the second Mayan Calendar problem. A cinematic (a full-motion video, or FMV, as they used to be called when moving images were unusual in video games) played showing where I was supposed to go next, and I didn't realise that I was supposed to leap on the motorbike and go dashing there against a time limit. So whilst I watched, things reset themselves and I realised that I needed to reset and try again (not that unusual a circumstance in Tomb Raider games).

Tomb Raider logic dictates that you need to go back and reset the first puzzle, so this is what I did - but the calendar was locked solid. Nothing would budge, and I couldn't reset it. The other calendar was similarly locked. As a result, I could not advance any further in the game (this is about half-way through) and the only option was to restart the whole game again - the game does not save your progress through the levels in an accessible way, so if you don't keep saving your progress, then there's no way to restart an individual level. (How does game design like this ever get approved?)

So I've restarted. And I'm not happy.

I remember when games were tested. I also remember when bugs were fixed. If you go and look on the Tomb Raider Technical Support page (a summary of the Official Forum), you will find this bug (S7) and others, and a note that says 'N/A' and which seems to indicate that it is not going to be fixed. Now I know that customer support is not a priority in a recession, but not fixing bugs which are part of the main sequence of the gameplay seems a little like zero customer support to me. Worse, it is also noted that trying to save the game just before trying the time trial causes the same lock-up. At which point I despair, and wonder why I buy games at all!