Newstocks

Fat tax

A bill before the New York Assembly is proposing to add "modest surcharges on the very food products and sedentary activities that are linked to the lifestyle changes involved in the explosion of childhood obesity in the last 20-30 years".

Targets of the bill would be snack foods and sweet drinks, the sale and rental of movies, admissions to movie theatres, and the sale and rental of video games and video game hardware.

So why aren't books included? If I sit at home reading books all day, am I really less likely to get fat than if I'm playing video games or watching TV?

Tomb Raider: Anniversary

Finally finished Tomb Raider: Anniversary yesterday. I hadn't played any of the Tomb Raider games before, although I had tried the demos of both Anniversary and Underworld and found them a bit frustrating, particularly compared to the Prince of Persia games (which I enjoy). But when I saw Anniversary for a mere $5 in a Steam weekend sale a couple of weeks ago, I couldn't resist picking it up.

I ended up having a bit of a love/hate relationship with the game. Even though it's a couple of years old now, it still looks good (apart from a few clipping issues), and the scale of some of the settings is impressive. On the downside, the camera could be temperamental, sometimes not showing enough of the environment to judge your next jump properly. Worst of all, however, was the need to fight the controls to make Lara go where I wanted her to, particularly when trying to jump perpendicular to the wall during a wall run.

Overall, however, I liked it, and I'm now likely to pick up Legend and Underworld if they end up in Steam's bargain bin too.