The charm of the Tomb Raider games is fairly simple. You get to look at a lot of shapely bum and shapely breasts. You get to shoot things. You get told a story, with enough interactivity to keep you interested. And in the recent games - I'm playing Tomb Raider: Underworld - you get some fantastically realised caves and ruins to go raking around in, kicking priceless artefacts and shooting rare endangered species.

In other words, it's a "Boy's Own" story.

We're now up to game 100 in the series. Now the first one was a classic - but these days it's virtually unplayable. If you're clever, you can get it running in a DOS window, but it's so bulky and blocky as to be almost unwatchable. That gives some idea of how old it is - if it was much older it would have Ascii graphics and Lara Croft would be a mere (*)(*). In green.

Back in the 1940s, the thing I remember most was the grid system the game was played on. Everything was square and blocky and you sometimes had to position Lara in just the right spot prior to jumping. She could only really face in four directions, but she was relatively easy to control, which made all that precision jumping much easier. But there were some stunning moments - I remember looking down at a sphinx in a cave and being actually damn impressed, for instance.

These days, the grid system has pretty much gone. You can run and jump anywhere and you don't need to be quite as precise in the old jumping. That's probably just as well, because the additional graphics features, sudden random panning, and changes to the control system mean that Lara is much harder to control than ever before. Personally, I set the game to "so easy a kitten could play it", and focus on the problem solving rather than shooting at things. But that's just me.

And Tomb Raider: Underpants is a sumptuous game, beautiful to look at. I'm at early stages yet, clambering around ruined cities in Thailand, and I can almost feel the heat and humidity around me. Total immersion. Fantastic.

On the way to work today, I had something of a revelation.

New stuff happens all the time. New work is created - art, music, graffiti, political speeches, journalism, theatre, cinema, TV shows, web sites, photographs, dirty limericks, malformed half-cocked pub theories, bigotry, food, drink and doodles.

How cool is that?

And what's more, this has been happening for years now. So there must be something out there that I've missed. And so, I thought I'd try to expose myself to something new. Well, new to me.

And so, this week, I have watched the first seven or eight episodes of Smallville.

It's not bad. I wouldn't call it great, but then I wouldn't call the first series of Buffy great either, and that went on to great things before disappearing up itself. It's got a fair amount going for it - the leads are sympathetic and easy on the eye, the effects are great and the scripts don't jar too much.

However it suffers in a number of areas - the plot is the same every week, the message of the week is sometimes layed on with a trowel ("I sometimes feel like I have a secret identity - do you ever feel that way, Clark?") although it's nowhere near as bad as Heroes in that respect. However there's a bit too much of a reset button about the relationships - episodes seem to try to develop the relationship between Clark and Lana only to have everything going back to normal the week after. And when Clark's performing his hugely alien feats to rescue people they're almost invariably unconscious.

I suspect I will stick with it, though - it passes time, it's not something I feel the urge to share with Mr Twinky, my evil sidekick cat, and I'm prepared to give it first-season-benefit-of-the-doubt.