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Bring Me the Music of 2010

I thought it might be an idea to make a Spotify playlist of all of these albums. So I did. Except there is no Arcade Fire.

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2010 My Year in Games

It would be unseemly to finish the year without some sort of list, so this is my summary of games I have played this year.

This was my first attempt to record all of the games I have completed and overall I’d have to say it hasn’t gone very well. I currently have nine listed, though with Christmas coming it’s possible that will nudge up a little.

It does mean that I’ve completed games at a rate of less than one a month, which is a big decrease on other years. I know I’ve started loads of games that I’ve never got round to finishing, including Mass Effect 2, Dragon Age: Origins, God of War III, Star Craft II: Wings of Liberty and Final Fantasy XIII. All of them very good games but all of them left uncompleted to varying degrees.

There are a number of reasons for this, mainly because my PlayStation died and took all my game saves with it. For things like Final Fantasy this would have meant repeating a good twenty hours, I didn’t fancy that.

I’ve also got married this year which hasn’t had a direct impact on my ability to play games but did take some thinking about and a degree of preparation.

I suppose my final reason is that games this year just haven’t seemed as good as other years.

So, rather than making excuses here are my favourite games of the year in some sort of order. These are games released this year rather than ones I’ve played. I have no idea why, but it does mean that I haven’t included Assassins Creed 2, for an entirely arbitrary reason.

10) Angry Birds: It seems strange to include a game from my phone on here but I’ve played it a lot and it is great. It’s free on Android and I’m bewildered why some people don’t own it.

9) Sports Champions: The development of PlayStation Move was a blatant attempt to make in roads on the dominance of  casual gaming by the Wii. Given the relative difference in technology it is no surprise that Move managed show how this really should be done. Sports Champions is a great showcase for how motion controls should work. The minute adjustments you can make to you table tennis bat alone justifies inclusion on here.

8) Starcraft 2: You will notice this is also on my list of games I haven’t completed as well. For some reason I just haven’t got round to it. I’m not sure why. I love any game that makes me consider resource management and Starcraft love resources. I missed out on Starcraft the first time round but have loved this one. I do need to finish it.

7) Rock Band 3: Rock Band is a vital part of my life. It gets played consistently through the year and has been a drain on my income on a weekly basis. I think Rock Band 3 is close to perfect. The ability to change the band round mid set gives it much more flexibility in the post pub situation. The addition of keyboards has also led to a much better range of songs. I suppose quite a lot of this is also cumulative. We have hundred of songs now and there are very few situations where playing Rock Band is not the most appropriate use of time.

6) Fallout: New Vegas: I went into some detail about this a few weeks ago. It is a good game that could have been great. I understand that most of the problems have been sorted out now. If they have then everyone should give it a go.

5) Heavy Rain: Again, a game I wrote about a while a go. It’s something that has stuck with me in the nine months since I’ve finished it. It is a bit clunky but the innovation makes it worth it. I keep meaning to give it another go since it has been patched to work with Move, I’ve never quite got round to it.

4) World of Warcraft: Cataclysm: Is it fair to include this? Probably not. It has got me back into Warcraft after a few years off and, currently, I love it. Though, to be honest, most of what I’ve been playing was actually added in Wrath of the Lich King. I love the fact that the world has been remade and the new style of quests has removed much of the drudgery. I need to consider that this has only just been released so in a few months I might well have got bored again.

3) Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit: This was released at roughly the same time as Gran Turismo 5 and you couldn’t get two more different driving games. Whilst GT5 is just dull Need for Speed is unadulterated mayhem. I was a massive fan of Burnout Paradise and I think Criterion have brought the Need for Speed franchise back to life. They seem to understand how multiplayer should work and have seamlessly integrated your friends into  the single player experience.

2) Red Dead Redemption: Yeah, I mentioned this before. What was a good game at the time has been improved by the constant release of downloadable content. I hadn’t realised that it was hiding, what turned out to be, a very strong multiplayer game. In fact everything that Grand Theft Auto 4 should have been. The addition of Zombies, in Undead Nightmare was a random move that has been much appreciated.

1) Battle field Bad Company 2: This had to be number one. It is actually one of the best games I have ever played. Since completing it back in July I’ve stuck with the multiplayer and loved every minute of it. This is the game that Call of Duty thinks it is and it’s a crime that the developers have not got the accolade they deserve. This has also been supported with really strong downloadable content, capped off by the release, this week, of Vietnam.

If you do yourself one favour this year, try and play a game of rush. This is what the Internet was invented for.

Well, that was my year. Not an outstanding year for the number of games but certainly outstanding for my number one choice.

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Fallout New Vegas

I still can’t decide whether or not Fallout New Vegas was one of the greatest games I have ever played or a soul destroying experience from start to finish.

Posted in Finished Games, Games | Comments (1)

Tuition Fees

Watching the news last night I realised that I wasn’t completely sure what I thought about tuition fees as a concept, let alone the various proposals that seem to have got people fairly wound up. The majority of the story in relation to this proposal has been, rightly, pulling the Liberal Democrats up on their rank hypocrisy. I hadn’t really seen any of the other political parties proposing to do anything radically different, so didn’t give it much thought.

The Liberal Democrats really should learn that if you are going to renege on a promise then don’t do it on one where you have been filmed making it or where it affects lots of people with both free time and energy.

Watching the TV last night I realised that the attention brought to this issue through constant demonstrations and… yes, violence, has made me really think about what tuition fees mean for the first time. I don’t have any kids and my University days are a long way behind me, so far in fact that I went to a Polytechnic. I did have a small student loan and it took me ages to pay it off and caused me no end of credit problems. In the end it was help from my parents that stopped it resulting in debt collectors. Though as I say that was a long time ago and not really relevant to the situation now.

I suppose I should have started this by saying that I in no way support violent scenes blah blah blah don’t throw an egg at a Prince blah blah think about the children.

Actually I don’t agree with any of that. If kids want to go to London and have a ding dong with the police then fair play to them. Both sides are consenting adults (mostly) and I believe both sides get a lot out of it. I am, in many ways, grateful that young people have the motivation to protest about something which I can’t be arsed to do myself. I’m too old, too lazy and too scared of the cold to do anything like that.

Since the coalition have come to power they have defined everything under the imperative to decrease spending and the need to reduce the deficit. Deficit reduction in itself is obviously something that needs to be done but it is a moot point on whether the most expedient way of achieving this is purely reducing spending or also maximising tax revenue.

The question about tuition fees appears to be fundamental to this overarching theme. The story says that money paid to University’s is unsustainable, graduates need to pay us back for their education and don’t worry about them, they earn a fortune anyway.

One of the central pieces of evidence to support the increase of fees to a maximum of £9k pa is the claim that over their lifetime a graduate will earn, on average, £100k more than they would if they did not have a degree.

I find this interesting in that it appears to contradict the need for tuition fees at all. If someone, on average, will earn £100k more than they would without a degree then, on average, they will repay the cost of their education through income tax. We do not incur debt through people going to University, we actually profit. We actually profit substantially.

Our economy clearly needs people to earn these greater amounts in order to maintain tax revenue. It is strange that rather than look for the most appropriate way to maximise this revenue we have tried to find a solution whereby people graduate but we don’t have to pay for it.

In times of decreasing tax revenue the Government can only really fund higher education through borrowing the money itself or making someone else borrow it. It is a simple fact that Government can borrow money much more cheaply than a collection of individuals.

So we have a a situation where we have chosen the least efficient solution for the nominal position of “saying” we have reduced public sector borrowing. We have really only moved the debt burden from wider society to the individual. It should also be noted that the loan to students isn’t really from the Government. It is from the private company/QUANGO the Student Loan Company. A company required to make a profit, albeit minimal. This means that the total cost of borrowing for students as a collective is still greater than the Government just allocating funds to Universities.

All of this is really premised on ideology. There is an all encompassing view in the statutory provision of services that choice must govern all decisions. Thus through students choosing their University and taking their money with them the system will begin responding as a market and become more efficient.

This ignores one fundamental fact about higher education. We already have a long established system of choice that uses the currency of educational achievement to distribute people around the system. This is a far from perfect system but it does work.

Besides the issue of choice there is a ridiculous preoccupation with the idea that we are paying for pointless courses. This is the annual newspaper story about someone getting a surfing degree and now won’t be able to get a job and we have to foot the bill. Ignoring the fact that this is probably, in reality, a qualification in marine engineering that makes someone eminently employable this belief defines media attitude to courses.

I understand that extensive research has demonstrated that tuition fees will not reduce the number of people that go to University. Maybe that is true, it seems counter intuitive to me but if this has been proven then fair enough. I do believe that fees will shape the nature of courses that people now enroll on. Resultant earning capacity will be a much greater influence on choice.

In practical terms this is good because it drives up tax revenue but for wider society this is a very bad thing. We need people that do jobs like physiotherapy, research scientists and even planning officers. All jobs you need to be well qualified for but not very rewarding. Under the coalition plans it might be true that those graduates that earn the least pay the least but if we deter people from entering these essential professions then we lose out.

One of the good things about supporting eduction through central taxation is that we as a society have an investment in it. If someone chooses to become a teacher then we don’t just benefit through the tax they pay, we also benefit through their ability to give society more knowledge.

If we have paid for this then we have some control of the structure of their higher education and the way it is applied. If higher eduction is merely a contractual relationship between the individual and the institution then society loses the capacity to plan for the future.

I think I’ve written considerably more than I intended to on this and probably much more than I should have done. Much of this boils down to my concern that the first act of Government should not be to pass the responsibility of Government to the individual or the state. When I go to work my first act is not to find someone else to do my job for me.

Well I should say thanks to all of those young people that made me really think about something that I thought had nothing to do with me. So, violence does work.

Posted in Politics | Comments (1)

Call of Duty: Black Ops

It’s not been a good year for getting games finished. I’ve  started many more than I’ve got to the end of.

I’ve been playing Call of Duty since the first one came out in 2003 and have always had a bit of a tradition of playing through the single player campaign in one sitting. Calling that a tradition is probably overstating it a little, it’s not the equivalent of eating turkey for Christmas, it’s just playing a game.

I think I mentioned before that Call of Duty is a game I’ve invested a lot of time in, in fact most of my time from 2004 to 2005 in fact. There was a group of us that rented a server and hosted our own maps. It’s strange that I’ve never really found anything approaching the online multiplayer experience of the original Call of Duty.

Consequently I think the Call of Duty series has been going down hill for the last seven years.

The latest iteration is not a bad game, it’s fun in its own way. The story hangs together better than most I’ve played recently. Obviously it is just hamming it up, from one set piece to the next chasing some unidentified Russian. I have a feeling that is the set template for most games these days.

It just doesn’t deserve the hype that has been lumped on it and the fact that it will hoover up the Christmas cash can only be a very unhealthy thing from the point of view of a sustainable game industry.

One odd thing I noticed relates to the media nonsense attached to the recent Medal of Honor release. Liam fox calling for Medal of Honor to be banned was quite amusing because it was based on stunning ignorance. Ignorant of how multiplayer games  work but also ignorant that the UK troops he was so concerned about were not even in the game in the first place. Call of Duty on the other hand actively requires you to shoot UK troops. There is some vague context for it but no media outcry.

I am not suggesting this should be banned. That would be stupid.

The campaign leaves you with the same empty feeling inside you get when you watch a Michael Bay film. It looks very pretty but is ultimately vacuous. In itself there isn’t anything wrong with that, it just doesn’t seem to be very good value for money considering how much has been spent on developing it.

Oh, and whilst talking about value for money it is worth mentioning that the bloke who plays JFK does the worst JFK impression I’ve ever heard.

I have given it a bit of time to see whether or not I like the online element before I bothered to write this.

Unfortunately I’ve been spoilt by the genius that is Battlefield Bad Company 2 multiplayer. Whilst BFBC2 encourages team play and tactics, Call of Duty encourages running around like a nutter. It has some beautifully crafted levels but misses the essential gameplay.

So in summary, I think Call of Duty: Black Ops would probably be the greatest thing in the world if you are 10 (though legally not allowed to play it) but falls just short of being anything special.

I reckon it’s worth about £20.

Theoretically the BFBC2 Vietnam expansion pack is imminent and that will hopefully demonstrate how this should have been done. I realise I’m laying a ridiculous level of expectation on something I know virtually nothing about.

[Edit]I can’t believe I forgot to mention this. Call of Duty: Black Ops is also the first game I have completed in 3D.

3D is apparently the future though I’m not overly sure if I’m convinced yet. The first session I played was about five hours and it is fair to say it gave me a cracking head ache.

The effect itself is very good. It’s also subtle to the point that after a few minutes you begin to stop noticing it. I’m not sure if that is a good or bad thing. I think, probably good.

The one issue I had with the campaign is that 3D was clearly an after thought. With some cut scenes people had their shadows sort of attached to their limbs producing a very weird effect.

For the multiplayer it is effectively useless. You need more time to aim and compensate for distance. Other people don’t, and consequently shoot you dead.

I think it is something that is almost there but not quite yet. [/Edit]

Posted in Finished Games, Games | Comments (0)

There’s a Theme

I’ve noticed quite a few people claiming that this years TV offerings from the US have been quite poor. Particularly the Guardian have run with this as a theme. I can’t really comment on most of the series in that article but will agree that Shit My Dad Says is possibly one of the worst thing ever put on TV.

What I’ve noticed with this season is that theme tunes seem to be a lot better than usual. Obviously the entire basis for Hawaii Five-0 is the theme and the rest of the story is forced to fit with it. Though the remake does seem to make it sound a bit like the theme to Mission Impossible.

Getting a good theme should be a really important decision. You never know how long your series is going to be commissioned for. Do you think the makers of Smallville really thought we would be listening to Save Me by Remy Zero ten years later? Who the hell are Remy Zero?

So, a few themes that have stood out for me this year are listed for your passing interest.

Rubicon has been one of my TV highlights this year, besides the series itself the them was absolutely spot on. You can see it here, unfortunately embedding is disabled, but have a look and come back afterwards. I have no idea who did the theme to this though I haven’t searched much beyond Wikipedia.

Boardwalk Empire has been my second favourite series this year, and my second favourite theme.

I like the theme because it’s got a bit of Neil Young and a bit of the Velvet Underground about it. It’s only since I started writing this that I found out it’s by The Brianjones Town Massacre. That’s cheered me up as after watching DiG! I always hoped Anton Newcombe got some recognition.

The last on this little list is Terriers. It isn’t the greatest series ever but it has grown on me and I like the theme.

Unfortunately the theme seems to be a bit of a Babylon Zoo moment. Do you know what I mean by that? We all liked the bit of Spaceman we heard in the advert and then realised the rest of the song was crap. I have a feeling this might be the case with the theme to Terriers.

Anyway, it’s called Gunfight Epiphany by Robert Duncan who apparently did some of the music on Buffy. Fair play to him. It has a bit of Beck about it but I doubt I’ll listen to much more than the first thirty seconds.

I suppose whilst talking about themes it would be strange to not mention Sons of Anarchy. It is a series that I’ve had a mixed relationship with. I didn’t get the first series but stuck with it. I really like the second series and just haven’t understood the third series. Why they thought it was a good idea to set it in Northern Ireland is a mystery to me.

Now I’ve never really liked the theme but I especially hate the way they have attempted to make it a bit Gaelic.

Why would you do this?

Posted in Media | Comments (0)

Benefit Fraud

I’m not really that bothered about benefit fraud.

I can see that it is something that probably shouldn’t be encouraged but I don’t see it as something that we really need to get that hung up about. Most people that phoned a radio station this morning probably don’t agree with me.

I used to work for the Benefits Agency. The fraud team seemed fixated that they were some sort of special agents, they had radios.

They would spend months on surveillance, building a case to stop someone nicking  £30. It didn’t seem very cost effective.

This morning, or possibly last night, David Cameron announced a new “policy” to unleash bounty hunters on benefits “cheats”. This sounded quite exciting. The prospect of unleashing Dogg the Bounty Hunter on someone “doing a foreigner” (not a literal use of the term, but I rarely get to use it), seemed a bit over the top.

The reality is that it is just an excuse to bung more cash at credit reference agencies and give them access to more data to flog to companies. This is nice because credit reference agencies always have a hard time in a recession.

The way this has been represented seems to be the most interesting thing about it. The figure of £5.2 billion in fraud a year has been plastered over everything. This surprised me as I thought that fraud levels in previous years were much lower. I know we’ve had a recession but this would have been a massive increase in such a short time.

As you look at the story you notice that this figure is in fact fraud AND error. So it includes money paid to people by mistake. Though there doesn’t seem to be much interest in the press in the error part of it.

Finding Dave’s figures proved to be quite tricky. I couldn’t find anything that matched £5.2 billion but I did find the Department of Works and Pensions 2008/09 figures. They tell quite a different story. They say fraud and error account for £3.1 billion. So we have a discrepancy of over £2bn.

They also state that fraud accounts for one third of this total.

Over a billion quid in fraud is something that we should be interested in but it isn’t really the £5.2bn that started all this.

Listening to Five Live this morning you might have thought that most of the country were signing on whilst working. The DWPs own report estimates that Job Seekers Allowance fraud accounts for £240 million.

The report also highlights the £0.5bn that is underpaid to people each year. This again hasn’t been mentioned by the press.

Whilst looking for the figures I came across a press release from the Citizens Advice Bureau highlighting the £16 billion that is unclaimed each year. This is the real issue that should be of concern to us. This is a vast amount of money that should be paid to the most vulnerable in society but isn’t. These are winter fuel payments that play a vital role in keeping people alive.

Overall our current benefit bill is much lower than it should be.

That’s something to think about next time we make excuses to not chase the £40 billion that is avoided in tax each year.

Posted in Media, Politics | Comments (2)

Battlefield: Bad Company 2

Another week and another game. I know, it’s mental.

I’ve never really got on with the Battlefield series. I missed the first one, 1942, I didn’t have a PC that could play it. I loved the idea of combining all the elements of combat on foot, tanks and flying all in one large game, but I didn’t get round  to playing it.

I played a lot of Call of Duty: United Offensive. Actually a lot is an understatement. I played it pretty well constantly for well over a year. It was great but didn’t provide what I believed Battlefield promised in a fully integrated…..er… Battlefield.

I gave Battlefield 2 a go as soon as it came out. The odd thing about the Battlefield series is that it always insisted on throwing you straight into multiplayer. This was fine because it is, at heart, a multiplayer game. The problem I found is that everyone else in the world seems to be really bloody good at it.

One of my principles in playing games is that if I don’t at least achieve a basic level of skill quickly, I give up. Life’s short and there are a lot of games out there.

I gave up on Battlefield 2 even though it looked like they’d done a really good job of it.

I didn’t really pay attention to Battlefield 2142 and to be honest it’s really only looking on Wikipedia just now that even reminded me that it even came out.

Battlefield: Bad Company came out around the time of COD4 and consequently I didn’t pay much attention to that either.

This is all going somewhere.

I hadn’t really been inclined to play Bad Company 2 as I couldn’t see what it could do that Modern Warfare hadn’t. I was massively wrong about that.

The Bad Company series, apparently has added in the single player campaign in order to, I assume, make it viable on a console. I think this makes a big difference, it teaches you how to play the game before throwing you in.

Although the single player is essentially a tutorial it weighs in at about the same length of Modern Warfare 2 but is much more thought through. The levels are constructed well. There is a story that vaguely makes sense. There are characters that elicit some sort sympathy. You can even blow up most of the buildings.

What isn’t to like?

I loved everything about the single player campaign and could happily play it again.

This is the point where I would usually say “I haven’t tried the multiplayer yet”; having realised this I thought I might actually play it for a bit and see if it is any good.

It’s very good. Also, unusually, for a game that has been out for a while now, there are a good number of people playing and it isn’t impossible to survive for longer than a few seconds.

I’ve found it very easy to get into and a multiplayer experience which I’ve missed recently.

I don’t think it is much of an exaggeration to say this is the game that modern warfare thought it was going to be.

Go and buy it now.

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Red Dead Redemption

It took four months but I finally got round to finishing another game. It hasn’t taken four months, no, it’s been sunny, I’ve been outside.

Part of the reason for losing interest was the death of my PS3. A motherboard failure meant I lost every game save I’ve ever had and lost all progress with things like Final Fantasy and God of War. This is supposed to be fun so I’m not really motivated to go back and start things again. I probably will, but not at the moment. It did give me an excuse to go and get a new thin PS3. If you’re interested here’s my review. It’s the same as the old one but thinner. There really isn’t much more to say about it.

After a bit of lull in completing things it was good to throw myself into something quite as large as Red Dead Redemption. Although it was always billed as a massive 2010 release it wasn’t something I had my eye on until the last minute. I’ve loved every GTA but something about games set in the “Wild West” doesn’t really interest me.

Having said that, someone did lend me Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood last year. It was very playable and created an inevitable basis for comparison. Red Dead Redemption is much much better. A fantastic open world with some breath taking scenery.

Some elements like riding a horse for miles is tedious but at least they’ve built in a good work around with many different ways to fast travel. I did notice that many reviews mentioned that the diversity of missions is greatly improved from GTA. It isn’t. Just about every mission is based on riding into town and killing everyone. Not really a bad thing.

The story is fairly interesting. It doesn’t pretend to be literature and is compelling in its own way. The developers have tried to mess with the narrative by creating a really final part of the game where you basically do chores. It’s an unusual step and to be honest fairly boring.

I think this will stand out as being technically great but slightly missing something that GTA had.

The multiplayer element does look interesting but I’m not sure how much time I’ll put into it.

So, in summary, it’s fun. You can execute bears.

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Blues

It’s fair to say that as soon as I stated recording games I’ve finished I lost interest in playing games really quickly.

As nothing seems to have got completed in ages I decided to make a playlist.

I used to obsessively listen to Blues. It was the  music that started me playing the guitar because it was deceptively simple. Over the years I’ve lost most of the really good stuff I used to own, mainly because it was on tape and I don’t own a tape player.

I thought it would be plan to try and put together everything I could remember into one playlist. So here you go,  the blues, as remembered by a bloke from Eastbourne.

Posted in Music, Spotify | Comments (0)

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