Archive for December, 2010

2010 My Year in Games

December 24th, 2010

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

December 14th, 2010
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.

After Fallout 3 last year I had been really looking forward to playing this. Though that’s not to say I was a great fan of Fallout 3. I found it a really strange experience. The world it created was thoroughly depressing, complicated and well written but overall depressing. The feeling of the post apocalypse was realised through a stunning attention to detail but I was really pleased to get the thing finished.

I noticed over the months after I’d finished Fallout 3 that it was an experience that really stuck with me. Unfortunately the additional content for Fallout 3 was originally licensed as an XBox exclusive so it was some time before I got the chance to get back into playing it.
As an aside I’m very dubious of the value of licensing additional content as an exclusive. Do people really make their purchasing decisions for an entire platform on additional content? I would think the number of people aware of the exclusivity is marginal.

Anyway, once I did begin some of the additional content it was over a year after I’d finished the original game and I didn’t have a clue how to play the game, what decisions I’d made or why I seemed to have a collection of broken gnomes. Then my PS3 died and took all my game saves with it. This left me with having to start Fallout 3 from the beginning. I didn’t really fancy that.

With the release of Fallout New Vegas I thought this was a real opportunity to sort of start again.  Much has been written about how Fallout New Vegas isn’t really a proper sequel.  It’s essentially the same game engine with a different story.

The graphics haven’t developed, with the same building and car models that will be very familiar to anyone who ventured into the Capital wasteland.

This didn’t bother me as Fallout did the job, actually it also did the job in Oblivion so at least it should be dependable.

Apparently I had  a bit of a fortunate experience with Fallout 3. I didn’t have many problems with the game crashing or weird things happening. Fallout New Vegas on the other hand was a disaster. On average I could only get through 30 to 45 minutes before it crashed. This meant constant saving and a complete failure of any sort of immersion.

There are also horrendous bugs in some of the quests. I like the idea of games forcing you to give due consideration for your decisions. If you make a decision with one character then it has an impact on the you later in the game. What shouldn’t happen is that a decision you make has an impact because in the future characters simply just vanish from the world or characters lock up so they can’t move to correct locations. This is shoddy programming and Fallout Vegas is littered with it.

I spent an entire hour trying to push one character through a door because he refused to go into the only room where he was allowed to talk to me. I failed an entire quest chain because a seemingly important character vanished from the game.

What I have found, this week, is that the game has had a massive patch on the PS3 that seemingly fixes all of these problems. Too late for me now.

Having said all that something made me carry on with it and put over seventy hours into completing it. Even exploring until I was certain I had found every location. That has to say something about the quality of what is hiding in there.

The story itself doesn’t have the weight of  Fallout 3, I was never convinced I was saving the world. I wasn’t really convinced I was involved in anything other than a local squabble but the could be entirely down to the path I chose and the ending I got. The variety of side quests seems to be enormous. They also provide excellent detail of everyone you meet, and you meet a lot of people.

You do get the impression that there is a history that underlies everything, you can find all of this detail in the notes that are found in houses, in the dialogue and the email trails on abandoned computers. I love the sheer scale of all of this.

I know it is probably down to the limited graphical options but I still wonder why everything in this world is so dirty. Alright I accept there was an apocalypse. I accept that this probably had a bit of a knock on effect on the wider economy but it does not explain why basic hygiene appears to have gone out of the window.

As you navigate the hundreds of locations you will notice one overwhelming consistency, all of the bathrooms are filthy. There is clearly a hygiene penalty to Armageddon that has previously been ignored. I fear this more than the flames of hell themselves.

It is a great game and deserves much more recognition than the likes of Call of Duty. I just hope that it comes to a point where it is actually playable.

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Tuition Fees

December 10th, 2010

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.

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