Benefit Fraud
August 10th, 2010I’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 (0)
Battlefield: Bad Company 2
July 14th, 2010
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.
Posted in Finished Games, Games | Comments (0)
Red Dead Redemption
July 7th, 2010
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.
Posted in Finished Games | Comments (0)
Blues
May 3rd, 2010It’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)
Heavy Rain
March 4th, 2010
Bloody hell. That was good.
Which probably sums up in five words why I would never get a job reviewing games.
The idea of Heavy Rain seemed strangely familiar when people started whispering about it. The idea that you’re basically watching a film that invites you to interact with it by pressing the right button was pretty well the concept of Dragon’s Lair. Clearly Dragon’s Lair was far from watching a film, more of a cartoon.
Just like Heavy Rain, Dragon’s Lair was talked about in hushed tones back in 1983. I remember seeing it on….. I can’t remember, the telly. It looked beyond anything I could imagine. A proper cartoon that you could actually take part in.
I grew up in Eastbourne which, being by the sea, had quite a few arcades. That meant there was a better than average chance I’d get to play Dragon’s Lair. The odd thing was that when it did turn up, it arrived upstairs in The Enterprise Centre (actually I’m not sure that link is right or it’s even the same place. It looks posher than it did 20 years ago and I thought it was named after a fish). There’d never been an arcade game in there before. They’d definitely never been one that was going to change the world.
I remember hearing a rumour at school that there was one in Eastbourne. I remember going down to have a look at the weekend and it turned out to be true. That’s about as good as it got. Dragon’s Lair was a truly dreadful game. You just smashed a random button for, seemingly, no reason and hoped you didn’t die. Invariably you did die.
So 27 years later I’d assumed that technology was unlikely to have improved much beyond Dragon’s Lair.
As it turn out it has.
Heavy Rain is really good.
Things seem to be looking up in terms of story as well. At last a story that I wanted to take part in and it made sense.
The game itself is far from perfect. Mainly because some of the stuff you take for granted as being cut from a film is a staple in video games. In a game when you walk from one room to another you bloody well make sure you walk from one room to another. In a film the transition is cut to make sure you don’t lose the pace of the film. I have no idea how you resolve that conflict and make people feel that they’re still in control but I did feel it quite often while playing.
I suppose that really comes down to what the hell this is. It clearly is a game but it’s also straying into the area of more passive entertainment.
I had thought a game that you essentially just influence every now and then would be a bit of an objective experience. That ‘s just wrong. Some of the action sequences suck you in purely because you don’t know when you’ll get to influence them, whilst simultaneously trying to take in what you’re seeing, digest it and getting ready to press triangle really fast.
It’s interesting that after mentioning moral choices in Mass Effect, they form the basis for how Heavy Rain works. There are decisions in there that I almost agonised over. They clearly influence how the story develops as having seen adverts on the Telly, everything they’ve shown me is different to my first play through.
If you have spare cash then I heartily recommend Heavy Rain. It’s a game that you won’t regret playing but as soon as you finish it you’ll think “the sequel will be amazing”.
Posted in Finished Games, Games | Comments (0)
Aliens vs Predator
February 21st, 2010
When it comes to writing anything that involves Aliens and Predators there is a very long and established custom. It is important to stress how cool Predator was and how Aliens is better than Alien because it has Space Marines in it. It’s then important to look off wistfully into the ether and contemplate how brilliant it would be if Predators, Aliens and Space Marines could all be combined into one masterpiece. I’m probably not going to mention any of that.
We all know it.
Having said that I am probably one of the few people in the world that thought AVP: Aliens vs Predator wasn’t that bad a film and it taught us how important pyramids are. I even sat through AVPR: Aliens vs Predator – Requiem which wasn’t that good. I haven’t got any real recollection of what happened in it.
I suppose that all points towards me being a bit of a fan of the AVP concept.
The one thing I’ve never done is play the Aliens vs Predator game. It was 1999, I had a Playstation, I didn’t play that sort of thing. I remember it being popular but as I didn’t have a PC that was ever going to play it I just let it pass me by.
I was quite excited by the build up to the newest version of Aliens vs Predator. If the first few attempts have worked out alright and the films had sorted out the importance of pyramids then how could this go wrong?
It’s difficult to say it went wrong. It’s just mind numbingly average.
I can see why they split the game into the Marine, Alien and Predator campaign but this, cynically seems like an excuse to just reuse levels three times. Fair enough if they are good levels but these aren’t. They are very much your standard “future complex” building blocks with a bog standard jungle and some ruins thrown in.
The Marine campaign goes on for, what seems like forever, and it plays like a standard FPS except with Aliens. Aliens which don’t seem the hardy bundles of terror I was expecting. In fact they’re really easy to kill and towards the end you’re just wading through piles of them hoping it ends soon.
The Alien and Predator campaigns are a little bit more interesting but there isn’t a vast difference between the two. The one thing they have in common is the control system being a nightmare. This is especially the case with the Alien where walking on the ceiling becomes a disorientating mess. Though both of these campaigns seem to take minutes to complete in comparison to the Marine section.
Unusually for me I decided to get this on the PC. Mostly this was through laziness as I couldn’t be bothered to go to the shops. I pre-ordered through Steam; actually that indicates I knew I wouldn’t be bothered to go to the shops which demonstrates some foresight. It was only £24 which is about ten quid cheaper than on the PS3. I notice that it’s now £18 on Amazon and it only came out on Friday. I think that points out it isn’t in danger of getting a game of the year award.
I do think there is still some justification that FPS’ work better with a mouse and keyboard. This isn’t a game where I would ever be able to prove this one way or the other. I’m left handed so I have to go through a fairly lengthy process of reconfiguring keys for games on the PC. Aliens vs Predator happily lets you change the keys for the Marine campaign but, seemingly, not for the Alien or Predator campaign. It is quite possible that I just couldn’t find the menu but that in itself is pretty bad and is very lazy programming. So I ended up playing it with a controller.
This is my first game I’ve finished in 2010 that was made in 2010. I hope this isn’t indicative of the quality to expect.
More annoyingly I’ve still got a pile of other better games that I’m still working through. I need to prioritise better.
Posted in Finished Games, Games | Comments (2)
Just like Microsoft
February 14th, 2010This week has completely bewildered me.
It’s no secret that I’m quite a big fan of Google. As far as the whole “we’ll give you free stuff if you let us go through your draws” deal goes, I’m fully signed up. I think it’s fair enough to say that Google know considerably more about me than I know about me. I’m comfortable about that as I walked into this with my eyes open.
At the beginning of the week I hadn’t heard anything of Google’s plans to take on social networking with Buzz. It surprised me that such a fully formed idea would pop up with so little notice. I’m used to the almost permanent “beta” label on Google products and usually more than a little publicity before hand. I watched the press conference it seemed a really interesting idea.
I’m a big fan of Twitter but sometimes it’s limitations really frustrate me. As a tool for quickly building a an interesting network it’s very good. As a medium for expression it’s largely rubbish. Though that’s fine, it is what it is and does what it says it is going to do. Buzz appeared to be addressing quite a few of these issues and more importantly, potentially, integrated with all my other sources of data. Great.
In the great scheme of things the development of a new form of social networking is pretty low down as a priority. Interesting, but unlikely to change the world. Or so I thought.
On the day Buzz was launched it became obvious that quite a few people were less than happy about being provided with something both new and free.
Clearly Google took a decision to launch this as a fully formed and set up product. I can understand this as being handed something that is already working is going to increase participation rates better than something that requires some degree of effort.
This article from the Guardian highlights how angry people really were about the implementation. This individual clearly has been caused a substantial degree of distress by something that she didn’t ask for (well mostly) and apparently doesn’t want. The issue really is whether or not this is something that has been done to people or whether there is a degree of culpability.
I think this is an excellent example that highlights the need for people to take personal responsibility for what they do on the Internet. It appears from the article that this persons biggest source of irritation is how Buzz had made shared items in Reader available to the wider public. This simply isn’t the case. Reader had shared item settings before Buzz was launched. Buzz simply tapped into these settings to provide them through another route. Equally, as you go through the Buzz set up process it explicitly states that Buzz is connected to Reader and provides a button to disconnect.
How many people had checked their privacy settings in Reader before Buzz was launched? Seemingly very few it would seem.
There is also the issue of how Buzz develops your contact list and whether these are the most appropriate people. I think, like most people, the contacts I email the most are not the ones I would include in a social network. When I activated Buzz it gave me a list of people and buttons next to their names saying follow/unfollow. I deselected the ones I didn’t want to follow.
It’s a simple process, it took seconds. No information was passed to people I didn’t want it to be.
My issue with all of this is that very few of the MASSIVE PRIVACY flaws with Buzz are valid. There are settings that you have full control over. The issue seems to be that people did not pay sufficient attention to what they were signing up to.
This demonstrates that people have a very different, and cavalier attitude to social interaction when online. In a real life situation you are likely to be considerably more circumspect about how you pass information to people and what you agree to. It is not the job of Google or any other company to to take on our own personal responsibility. We need to read all the words that appear in front of us and make more informed choices.
I suppose the last aspect of this that confuses me is the role of Microsoft. Essentially they have no role but are still taking a bit of the blame. The above events are being used to justify the claim that Google are “just like Microsoft”. Strangely this is intended as an insult. Just like Microsoft apparently symbolises some inexorable movement towards evil. Let’s remember that this is Microsoft that have made us an operating system and quite a good word processor. They have quite aggressive business practices but as far as I can work out they’ve not killed anyone. They’re certainly no Union Carbide.
So what does this “just like Microsoft” claim mean? They’re large, well yes. They make money (lots of it), I imagine that’s why they started all this. They know about computers. Erm that’s about it.
Nobody has ever forced anyone to give either Microsoft or Google any money. If you disagree with them then don’t interact with them. They won’t mind. They have lots of money already.
There’s a point in here somewhere. Maybe even two.
My first week of using Buzz has been quite positive. The way it functions and integrates many things is much better than all the alternatives. I think it has a great potential to dominate as a social networking tool and I’m quite happy to take part.
Posted in Media | Comments (1)
Mass Effect
February 8th, 2010
I’ve had a strange relationship with Mass Effect. It was always the game on the Xbox that would possibly sway me away from Sony. This was even before I bought a PS3. Actually this was even before I’d played Mass Effect. I think I just liked the idea of an RPG set in space. I still look back on the Knights of the Old Republic fondly. By far the best game based on Star Wars and one I never got round to finishing. Trying to play it on a PC that clearly wasn’t up to the job was a bad idea.
I was envious of Xbox owners when Mass Effect came out. I was even more envious when they kept banging on about how good it was. Then it was all over the news because it was apparently full of cosmic rape. I was dubious, but you wouldn’t go on telly making that sort of claim unless you’d played it all the way through and were pretty sure of your facts.
It took almost a year for it to come out on the PC and I bought it the day it was released. I did the first two or three missions and got bored (probably three or for hours work). That was back in 2008.
When Mass Effect 2 was announced I got my pre-order in straight away. Clearly the fact that I’d lost interest in the first one hadn’t really sunk in.
Two or three weeks ago I was reading a preview of Mass Effect 2 and I suddenly realised that this was the second part of a trilogy. Not only that but the decisions you make in the first one influence how the second one pans out. I assume the programmers would not have been able to have anticipated my decision to put the first one in the loft.
Worried that I was going to miss out on something I decided to go back and finish off Mass Effect. This involved going up a ladder and finding it. Not an insignificant commitment. I also had to find my save game off a backup hard drive and tease it back into the reinstalled game. Not actually difficult or time consuming but it sounds quite impressive.
I ended up being back in a game I had little or no recollection of. Apparently my last save was July 2008.
You’ll be relieved to hear it all worked out alright. It turned out to be a really really good game.
I had intended to fly through the story as quickly as possible and get on to the sequel. In the end I did get through pretty well every side quest and visited every planet I could. It’s also the first game I’ve played in a while where I can truthfully say I did understand what was going on.
The plot was well thought out and fairly robust. Also lots of little stories that lend themselves very well to making good characters.
It’s strange going back to a game that I would consider old. Especially one that is held up as defining elements of game play we find quite common these days. Moral choices are all over games these days but, and I might be wrong, Mass Effect was the first to integrate this into the way the story develops. inFamous did quite a good job of this but as it was largely based on jumping around firing electricity out of your hands it didn’t have a stable basis in narrative. Mass Effect does ask you to make some interesting decisions that do influence the game. Quite often the temptation with these sort of games is to play simplistically as good or evil. The decisions here aren’t that simplistic and found me quite often hovering for a while over two seemingly similar options.
There are a stupid amount of side quests to do but they involve travelling to planets that all look exactly the same and have buildings with identical layouts. Whoever got the contract as the principle property developer in this galaxy did very well for themselves.
Mass Effect also relies way too much on driving a large Big Trak about. One of the weirdest game based driving experiences I’ve had. The thing bounces around in a completely unconvincing way but it is strangely compelling.
So I got it finished and ended up putting much more time than I thought I would into it. I’m pretty sure that everyone in the world that was ever going to play this probably already has so I doubt I’ll influence anyone to give it a go.
I did notice there was no cosmic rape in it.
But i would say old games FTW.
I’m going to try something made in 2010 next.
Posted in Finished Games, Games | Comments (0)
Future Phone
February 5th, 2010It’s not often that someone comes up with an idea that will revolutionise the very core of telecommunications.
Strangely I have just done exactly that. Rather than keep my idea a secret I thought it would be useful to write it down here. Many people would think this is an odd thing to do. After all if it is so good won’t I make a fortune?
The problem is that my overwhelming apathy means that the odds of me even remembering this let alone finishing it is slim.
So what is this idea?
It came to me when someone recently called me. New phones obviously tell you who is calling. That’s all very well but sometimes you need just a little bit more information.
My idea is that before you accept a call the caller must provide additional extra information.
For example many people call me at work with questions. I’d like to be able to pick the phone up knowing how many questions I need to answer. That way we avoid conversation drift.
Equally it would be really handy to have a ball park figure for how long they estimate the call will take. How often have you embarked on what you think is a brief chat only to be still talking as much as fifteen minutes later?
In an ideal world a written outline of the all topics to be covered would be handy but that’s essentially just an email. Someone has already invented email.
The only thing I haven’t figured out is which letter needs to go in front of the word phone and what colour it would be.
That’s my plan and it could well change the world.
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The Courage of Others
February 1st, 2010It probably isn’t appropriate to blow your album of the week on a Monday.
What if a better one comes out tomorrow? What if a better one came out today and I just didn’t notice it? That’s entirely possible, I’ve only heard one album today and that’s the one I’m going for.
So I heartily recommend The Courage of Others by Midlake.
Midlake are the band I always think of that best demonstrate how copying music is really good for bands. I’d never heard of them until someone gave me a copied CD of The Trial of Van Occupanther. As a result of that I ended up buying myself a copy and have bought it numerous times as Birthday presents for people as well as buying everything else Midlake have ever done. One copied CD has actually sold them many CDs.
In contrast in the same time I’ve bought no Metallica CDs. Though that is more as a result of them being shit than anything to do with copying CDs or their fruitless fight against piracy. I just raise it as an issue. A rather abstract issue.
So if you want to explore The Courage of Others you can listen to it here.
Or you can watch this. Which isn’t on The Courage of Others but I really like it.
Posted in Music | Comments (0)