Holiday season

With tomorrow being December the 1^st and this also being the first weekend in December it’s that time of year where we now place up are Christmas decorations and start getting ready to celebrate this festive season.

Now I will be honest with you that for me Christmas is one of those times of years where while I was growing up I always enjoyed myself but within the last ten years I have started to dislike the hype that comes with this time of year which bring me nicely to what has ticked me off so far this year.

Most of my problems come from the retails who have decide that it is best to place up their Christmas decorations up in the middle or end of October which to me is far too earlier for them to be doing so. I just get the feeling that they want to drag out the season as long as possible but as soon as Christmas day or New Years Day has been completed they pull it all down. If I was given the choice I wouldn’t allow retails to place them up till at least the middle of November at earliest which also bring me to Christmas music.

If you are going to play any Christmas music then at least start doing so on or after the 1^st of December and not how I discovered in the middle of November were almost every five stores I walked into was playing some form of Christmas music.

I don’t want to give the believe that I don’t like Christmas full stop but when it comes to the build up or the hype I just believe that there is a time and a place of all of it and that the closer it is to December the more Christmassy it is.

The one thing that worries me the most is a lot of people seem to be doing the same thing and the best way that I could explain this to you is when I was driving home from work at the beginning of the week the amount of house that had already placed up their decorations was unbelievable to me. It is as if they believed last weekend was the beginning of December.

All I will say is good luck to all those that will attempt to place up there Christmas decorations this weekend and I do hope that you also enjoy yourself.

Until next time

Are we going backwards?

Once you start reading this week’s blog you might get the idea that I am on another rant but I do hope that it’s true and that you can understand why nowadays I stay away from the comment section of most websites and why I don’t touch forums anymore.

Today I will be looking at the news media and the way in which headlines are used to gain read ship and how the younger generation and current generation can't seem to understand how it all works.

First off I will admit that I never took a media course while I was at school but I did spend two years helping my friends out with their coursework and learning some very basic, if not obvious knowledge behind media. 

Now if we take a moment to looking back in time you will see that if you wanted any form of news you only had two ways in which to get it, one was from newspapers and magazines and the second was from the scheduled television times for the news. Now the easiest way of getting the news was from papers and magazine but it also bought with it a choice. Every paper and magazine had its own view point and that they needed to come up with away to get new readers and keep the ones they have already collected. The way in which they did this was to have exclusives and bold headlines that where eye catching and sometimes unbelievable.

When it comes to newspaper you can now understand why their headlines are always so bold and why the front page will always have the most catchy headlines and a stories that they believe their view ship what’s to read. Now when you are next out and about pop into your newsagent or supermarket and take moment to look at newspaper stand, what is the first think that your eyes are draw too? I will be honest with you that ninety percent of you will be draw to bold text that covers the front page and that if the headline appeals to you then you are more than likely to pick up that paper and read the rest of the story.

 
If we jump back to present day you will notice that everything I have said so far still happens to this day but with only a few changes when it comes to the internet format. (Yes the internet is readily available and a lot of people read it.) If you go to a news website you will still see the bold headline and a very small amount of text that starts off the article and like I said earlier if the headline says what you want it to say you are more than likely going to click on the link to read the rest of the article.

Now this is where it get very interesting and the reason that I say this is because if you happen to be like me you will read an article that appeals to you but you want take it at face value. Why is this you may ask? Simple I know that the story is from a view point of that person and that if I was to read the source that they link at the bottom of the page I will end up reading that as well. If it doesn’t take me to the source I will spent a bit of time reading up on the news event before drawing my own conclusion, this is what I would like to call not taking it at face value and find out what the true is.

As you could guess, articles are used to draw their views and new readers to their site, which in turns boost the traffic to their site and the way in which they do this is to twist articles to their own view point and this is where I get a little bit lost. Why do people that know that the story has been twist go on to throwing hate comments to the site and their readers? If you already know that the story has been twisted and is telling their views what they want to hear, why leave comment saying that they are misinforming you and that they are a bad company. As I said earlier, the story and the headline are there to draw you in to read what that person’s or companies view point is on the topic. If you do not agree with it then leave the site and go somewhere else for your information.

I hope that kids and adults that should know better by now understand two things now, one being that news outlet, company and website are out to get you to read and stay at their site which in turn get them more money and second that if you want the true you sometimes have to go looking for it yourself.

Until next time

If you want it, earn it.

Now I should point out that this topic at times could be classed as a rant and that everything here is of my own opinion, you might not like it so take this as your warning.

As you might have noticed by the title of today’s topic I am going to be talking about something that has annoyed the hell out of me and my friend for quite some time and what I believe we should do to solve this problem. When me or my friend happen to go out some evening we end up talking about the way the world is run and why people believe that they can do what they want when they want without thinking about the bigger picture or consequences of their actions.  

I believe that the reason this gets on our nerves so much is the fact that we work our ass off to make a life for ourselves without taking anything from the government, yet others tend to think that they have the right to do nothing and get everything from the government and one way they believe that they can do this is by getting pregnant.

Men and woman a like believe that if the woman gets pregnant they can get everything given to them on a sliver platter. For me and my friend we both know quite few people that have done this and to a point it really annoys us, why should someone that has no interest in going to work and making a life for themselves have the right to fall pregnant and then get everything they want from the government.

Both of us have agreed that this has to stop because if allow this to continue we can think of at least two outcomes that we both don’t like the sound off. One outcome would be that we will end up creating another generation of children that believe by doing nothing get them everything they want and second the population of the planet will still increase to a point where it will be almost impossible for us to sustain it. A good example that I could us is that if you look at our country for a moment you can see that we struggle to build enough homes in are local areas.

I have decided to things one step fever and have come to the decision that the best way to solve these problems is to change the way in which the benefits are hand out of those with children. My first solution would be to introduce an agreement in which it states that if you both wish to start a family you will need to sign this said document and have prove that the two of you own or private rent a property with both your names on the agreement or ownership papers and that you have been living together for more than two years. The document should also state that if one of you does decided to end the relationship the one that asked for the relationship to end should pay the amount that you were original given in benefits with an addition 50% on top for child support.

This document may sound a lot but in the short fall it makes sure that you are both ready as a couple to start a family and second can prove that you have the ability to look after yourself and the new additions to the family.

Now the only exception that the agreement will allow is if you do fall pregnant and haven’t sign the agreement but have been living together for more than a year you will have up to six weeks from the date you find out which must be less than eight weeks into the pregnancy to sign the agreement agreeing that you both want to have this baby. I should stress the fact that if you do not sign the paper or only one of you agrees to the birth of the child you will not receive any benefits and will be ask to have an abortion. If this is your first then the NHS will do it for free but any other ones you will have to pay a percent of the cost.

You are probably wondering why am I being so hash on the whole subject, It’s very simple we have the ability and services available within the NHS already to prevent pregnancy which are free or come at a small cost for both men and women, so us them.

Now if you are unable to prove any of the above points and you do happen to still fall pregnant then you will not be entailed to anything so those of you that still live at home and are pregnant because you didn’t use family planning services then you will be ask if your parents want to look after the baby and if they don’t agree then you will have to have the baby terminated.

Yes a lot of what I have said is hash but something needs to be done with the current state of benefits and the increasing of the population because to me it’s getting out of hand. Those that are angry at what I have said and believe that I come from a rich family, I would like to make something very clear, I have had to work for everything that I own and there were times while I was growing up that my family struggled to get by each month and I have had to help in any way that I could and I didn’t mind it.

Hand outs from the government are there for when you are in trouble and have no where else to go and this is how things should be not how it is at the moment where every Tom, Dick and Larry get everything for free. If you want a family show that you can support and are ready for the reasonably that comes with it, don’t just pass it on to the government or NHS for a mistake that you could have prevented.  

Until next time.

What was all the fuss about?

This blog week blog will be the last blog under the heading of game related blogs due to the fact that I have some other topic that I would like to talk about within the coming weeks that I have been putting off for sometime, so let’s get started with this week’s blog.

Now before I start I shall go out of my way to give you guy’s and girls a little bit of a back story behind today’s topic and to some reason why it has taken me so long to get round to play this game.

Now if we go back three years ago I had a lot of friends and family members telling me that I should pick up and play this game along with all the downloadable content that had been released for this game so far. Now back then and to this day I still don’t always have the money I would like spend on new games so when I heard that there was going to be a game of the year edition with all the downloadable content in the box I decided to pick up on the cheap. Now it took a few months before I got round to play this game for the first time, it was also the time in which I discovered that it was the worse time to try and play a game as big this with everything that was going on in my life at the time.

After playing the game for about five hours on the first day I discovered that I didn’t really know what I was doing and decided that it would be best for me to place this game back on the shelf until the time came around for me to sit down and play this game. That time came around in the shape of me being ill at the beginning of September and then having time off work only last week which in turn gave me the opportunity to actually play this game. If you have been unable to guess from what I have said so far I will now tell you that the game in question is Fallout 3.

Now the way in which I will go about talking about Fallout 3 is to first talk about now I went about playing this game and then what I like and dislike about the game with my overall thoughts at the end.

Now when I did started to playing I didn’t know what I was supposed to be doing and that it took a few hours for me to realise how all the game mechanics worked. Once I understood how they all worked and what I had to do next I ended up running through the whole story very quickly and actually finding out that the story wasn’t as big the world lead me to believe. Upon getting to the last mission I realised that I hadn’t come across many of the side quest or collectables that. Upon realising this I decided that it would be best for me to go and do those parts of the game before completing the main story and moving on to the downloadable content. By the time I completed the whole game, I had spend just over ninety hours playing this game and almost from the forty hour make on found it hard to care on which was around the time that I had gotten to the last mission.

Now I will try and explain why I had found it so hard to go the rest of the distance and some of the dislikes that I encountered. The game was build to be a first person shooter, with a Role-playing game elements set in a post apocalyptic world. To me this sounds good and would fit the type of game that I would like to play but straight away I discovered my first two problems. One of them being that for you to be able to play the game you need to understand how the VATS system that was created to help you conserve ammunition when there isn’t much around. The system is a very good idea but after a few hours of using this system you begin to get bored of the slow motion animation that comes with the system, by the time I reached the forty hours mark the main story had mostly been completed and the system just felt like a chore which in turn leads me into my second problem.

Role-playing games (RPG’s) as a whole have always been big in every way from story to land and to a some point always running into lots of the side quest. I know that a lot of people don’t like do side quests when trying to complete the main story but I just found that the main story was located to a small part of the map and that I didn’t really needed to spend much time exploring the whole map. I do get that some area’s within an RPG should be found when you do your own exploring and that RPG’s can’t be linear because of the type of game that they are but for you to find some of the side quests you have to go to one location that takes you to another.

The other problems that I have with this game come near the end of the main story it’s self and with the downloadable content pack Broken Steel. First up I will start with the parts of the story that I didn’t like, what I mean by this is that throughout the whole story you are made to believe that the Enclave are the bad guys and the Brotherhood of Steel are the good guys but when you arrive at one point in the game when you are given to the choice to do the Enclaves bidding you already told by the story that you shouldn’t follow them. If you do decided to follow them then everything plays out the same as before but the cut scene at the end of the game changed slightly. The thing that I don’t understand is why give you a choice when the story ultimately tells you what to do and doesn’t change much (There will be a blog somewhere down the line where I look at story telling across all genres).

Now that we are talking about the end and choice this next two parts go hand in hand with each other because when you start the last mission the game becomes nothing more than a cake walk and easy which really annoys me. What I am trying to say is that in last mission you can simply stand back and let Flaks (If you have saved him) and Liberty Prime (The Brotherhood of Steels Robot) do all the hard work for you so you can just sit back and watch it all play out. I just feel get the feeling that the last mission should have been a massive cut screen that panned over the city as the Brotherhood and Liberty Prime made its way to Project Purity because even when I tried to stay close and get into the action Liberty Prime or Flaks had all ready killed them and cleared the path of me so I felt like hadn’t really accomplished anything.

The other part for me was you last choice when you do get to Project Purity, you can chose yourself, Flaks or Lyons to active the device. Giving you these choices I don’t have a problem with but how they affect the final cut scene and the start of Broken Steel. If you go in and active the device yourself, you end up survive and you are class as hero and did what your father did but if you send in Lyons or Flaks you are class as a coward. Now that would be true if you sent Lyons in but how does she not survive the radiation blast when you can. Second if you do decided to send in Flaks the super powered non playable character that can survive high levels of radiation into the chamber you are still classed as a coward when the game has given him to you. I just can’t understand how these two things work which leads me nicely into the problems that I encountered with the Broken Steel downloadable content.

Out of all the DLC that this game created the Broken Steel pack was the one and only that was able to give me a headache due to the fact even though I knew nothing about the pack, I already knew how it was going to play as soon as I was told what to happen. As soon as I was being briefed I knew we were going to be finishing of the Enclave and that something was going to happen to Liberty Prime but for I could happen this. The worse part of the pack was only going to show itself once I arrived at the Air Force Base, the DLC started to crash my console every five to ten minutes which by the time that I got around to finishing the mission I was already fed up the whole thing but the problems didn’t stop there. Once finished I decided to sell me stuff that I had collected from this pack but as soon as a fast travelled it crashed my console again, which at that point I decide to leave the game with the two outstanding achievements.

Don’t get me wrong I don’t hate this game or dislike it but those small things do put me off from carrying on and going back to the game later on. But let’s take a moment to talk about what I like about the game because there were large parts of Fallout that I enjoyed.

One of the best parts that I enjoyed was the way in which the main story was constructed, what I mean by this is that you start off looking for your father not knowing why he has ran away and by the end you feel a connected to him. The way in which I would explain this is that I wasn’t too happy with my characters farther to begin with but when I found out his motives I then could understand why he had done what he had done. Another thing that I did like was that the game did at least give you a few choices when it came to doing some of the side quest but on the flip side there weren’t that many.

The part of the game that I did have a lot of fun with once I got the hang of it was the repair system, every time you used your weapon or got hit your weapons and armour would decrease so you need to make sure that you had space in your backpack to make repairs. This then lead to me making sure that I had enough room in my backpack for double the items that I was using. For example I ended up using the Chinese Rifle and the Combat Shotgun a lot throughout the game.

The last part of the game that impressed me the most was the RPG elements of customising your character to how ever you wanted them. Each time you levelled up you would be give points to place into abilities that you wanted to us and after that you where then given the chance to add a special ability which they call perks. By the time I understood how this perk system worked I was always looking ahead trying to figure out what perks I wanted to get next so that I knew what I could spend my current perk point on now.

While playing Fallout there where large parts of the game that I did really enjoy but at the same time I saw a lot of unused potential within the game and to me this was the reason why in the long run I found it hard to carry on. The downloadable content to this game was good but it did suffer the same problems that the main game itself had and I would still recommend this game to others and worn them that the story isn’t that big.

Until next time.