So, Obama went on his whirlwind world tour and made it all the way back home, as noted CNN concern troll Candy Crowley suggested, without making any major mistakes. I heard her say it in a snippet on television, and later heard it replayed on either The Daily Show or The Colbert Report (hey, it was 1 AM, I can’t remember which). And both times, I had the same reaction. Is that what eight years of George Bush as our national figurehead has done? Is the bar so low that going to another country and not making an ass out of yourself our official standard for success?

I mean, sure, he didn’t try to give an unrequested back rub to any German Chancellors. So I guess Obama deserves points for that. I just think it’s stunningly sad that our expectations for our President (or in this case, our President-To-Be) are that amazingly low. Managing to go to another country and not embarrass us as a nation is not an accomplishment. It’s not even the minimum requirement. It’s far less than what should be expected.

The concensus was that Obama, who is at least perceived as not being stong on foreign policy, would stammer and fall flat on his face. But since Obama not only failed to produce facepalmingly bad sound bites, but actually seemed to handle himself very well (and with no prompting from aides or advisors), what’s going to be the new spin? Well, obviously, Barack Obama did too well. Yeah. For reals. That’s what they’re saying.

I mean, after all - why was he so cozy with those Old Europeans anyway? Why does he like them more than he likes Americans? He isn’t running for President of European Union, damn it. Where was his flag lapel pin? And remember kiddies, when Barack Obama calls himself a citizen of the world, it’s unpatriotic! But when Ronald Reagan did it, it was Great Communication.

Now, my regular readers know that Obama wasn’t my first choice. In fact, he wasn’t even my second. And while he is counter-punching a bit better than I thought he would, he’s still not taking command of this framing aggressively enough. When an elected official of this government visits a foreign nation, and he is greeted by cheers and waving American flags of the not-on-fire variety, that’s a good thing. He wasn’t being celebrated abroad for hating America. He was being welcomed because he represented what other countries like about America. Not to invoke ol’ Saint Ronnie again, but there was a time not so long ago that American was the Shining City Upon A Hill. Why is that suddenly a bad thing?

Because in a larger sense, we are all citizens of the world. And I don’t just mean that in some Model U.N., naive, hand holding, listening to too much Bono sort of way. I mean that we as a nation have a lot of problems that we just can’t solve ourselves, no matter how much Crawford Cowboy we throw into our stride. We’re not going to get out from under O.P.E.C. on our own. We’re not going to finally catch Osama bin Fucking Laden without working with the international community. And while I do believe that America should look out for its own interests first, I believe there is an amazing gradient of potential worldly outcomes. I think it just might be possible to take care of our own without being complete douchenozzles to everyone else. Call me crazy. Call me a dreamer!

Call me too successful.

Wesley Clark: [McCain] hasn’t been there and ordered the bombs to fall. He hasn’t seen what it’s like when diplomats come in and say, “I don’t know if we’re going to be able to get this point through or not. Do you want to take the risk? What about your reputation? How do we handle it publicly?”

Bob Scheiffer: Can I just interrupt you? I have to say, Barack Obama hasn’t had any of these experiences either, nor has he ridden in a fighter plane and gotten shot down.

Wesley Clark: I don’t think getting in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to become president.

And that’s the conversation that took place. I wanted to start out with it because so far, I haven’t read the full exchange anywhere else (I had to go find video of it just to get Clark’s opening lines). The specific wording that everyone is so upset about came from Bob Scheiffer - a newsman that I genuinely respect. And the context in which Scheiffer used it was perfectly relevant. The discussion was centered around whether either candidate has been in positions of executive authority before and understands the consequences of war. Scheiffer pointed out that McCain had experienced those consequences first hand.

Clark did the right thing by rebutting this argument. Because military experience is not a pre-requisite for serving as Commander in Chief. In fact, our government was specifically set up with that concept in mind. Does that mean I disparage McCain’s military record? Certianly not. I may not agree with having gone to war in Veitnam, but McCain’s service as an officer is another matter entirely and by any account, he served honorably. And I thoroughly respect the tenacity and inner strength that sustained him through his imprisonment.

But it’s not a free pass to the White House, either. The office of the President is more important than personal feelings, more important than who thinks they’ve proven their loyalty or patriotism. It’s more important than any one man - even the man running for that office. It is more important than his sacrifices, more important than his desires, and more important than his pride. There are many things about John McCain that I still respect - but none of them automatically make him the better candidate. His war record is not a complete list of qualifications for the Presidency. Period.

The gutteral implication of Clark’s statement, though, is that he was mocking John McCain for having been shot down in combat. There are some people who probably only heard the Clark line and thought he was insulting McCain. There are plenty of people who heard the whole exchange and knew they could cherry pick this into a media non-issue of infinite coverage and point-scoring controversy. We’re a week or so out of the primary and already the doubletalk is in full swing.

One of the things I couldn’t quite get my head around during that primary was the infatuation that people had with Barack Obama in the first place. Now, don’t get me wrong. I like him as a candidate. I think he’ll be an effective President. But as the campaign dragged on, his supporters began defending him with Ron-Paulesque zeal. I mean, I like the guy’s message, but he’s still a politician. The Barack Obama that I saw campaigning never entirely meshed with the Barack Obama that I knew from several years before, a man cut from the cloth of Rahm Emanuel rather than Howard Dean.

Still, the John Edwards I supported in 2008 was a much different, much more progressive, and much more aggressive man than the one that ran in 2004, so I was open to the idea that Obama had also broadened his view of both his politics and his party. Though while I felt it, almost as a tangible vibration from John Edwards, I never got that vibe from Barack Obama. Still, I’m sure there was some primary-based bias still swirling in my brain (my guy lost, their guy won). And in the past few weeks, I’d been coming around to the possibility that maybe, just maybe, Yes We Can wasn’t as market tested as I originally felt.

That’s about when Obama told the netroots to blow it out their collective asses, specifically holding up the right’s favorite icon of left-wing interwebz godless liberalism, MoveOn.org (a group that endorsed him in Februrary) and doing his best to casually distance himself from them. He went to even greater lengths to distance himself from the Wesley Clark comment - a comment that is blatantly taken out of context and being used as a political wedge.

It’s a drummed up controversey, a bullshit right wing talking point with no substance and no real legs other than the feigned outrage of hackneyed political pundits. I mentined Rovian tricks just a little while ago, and this is a very commonplace one. You wait for someone unrelated to your opponent to say something that you can construe (usually out of context) as being unacceptable or indefensible. And then you demand that your opponent disown that person. It’s a win/win, because your opponent either gets to look like a backstabbing jerk, or you get to thrash him for a statement he didn’t even make in the first place.

Obama, the bold visionary who “doesn’t do cowering” is already lurching to the center. I said during the primary that Obama doesn’t know how to counter-punch. And it sure didn’t take long for him to prove it. I also said that as soon Hillary officially conceded, the media’s love affair with Bracak Obama would come to a swift and sudden end. Judging from the way this non-moment was whirlwinded into an outrage, I’d say I was right on the money there as well. Obama gained nothing by throwing Clark under the bus - and in fact, he tossed aside a very viable campaigning ally and potential cabinet member. McCain supporters aren’t going to be disuaded by this move, nor are they going to be impressed with his hideous co-opting of Bush’s “faith based initiatives” language. All he did was make himself less appealing to his otherwise tireless supporters.

Am I giving up on Obama? Not yet. I’ll see how he plays this out, and how he manages the next wave of Rovian bullshit they throw his way. But as a general rule, Barack, if you want your political base to grow and flourish, you should try watering it rather than pissing on it.

George Carlin - Comedian. Rebel. Hero.

May 12, 1937 - June 22, 2008

Okay. The primary is over. I can return to my regularly scheduled political vitriol without choking on it and keeling over. Am I happy with the primary results? Meh. I knew I’d be unhappy the moment Edwards lost his footing, and that hasn’t changed. Do I think Obama would make a better President? Yes. Do I think Hillary would have an easier time of winning? Yes again. So not a huge shift in that department.

The tap dancing piss water of media concern over the past few days (and likely well into the next few weeks) are going to be Vice Presidential candidates. Now, in theory, there should only be one qualifying metric for choosing your VP. “If I were to die, would I trust this person to run the country?” That should be the one and only question worth asking. Sadly, I’d say that question isn’t even on the table for most people, because that’s not the electoral function that a VP serves anymore. The Veep “balances” the ticket - it provides for the candidate the qualities that said candidate is otherwise lacking.

Kerry picked Edwards because he had a southern accent, he was easy to listen to, and he had a lot of charisma. Al Gore picked Joe Lieberman because he hadn’t yet made the worst mistake in his life, and he was about due. George Bush picked Dick Cheney because that’s what Dick Cheney told him to do, god damn it. And so it goes.

If Hillary had won, her choice would have been easy. She would have scooped up Wesley Clark, a former four-star General, a former Presidential candidate, a long-standing critic of the Iraq War, and one of the first major political figures to firmly endorse Hillary Clinton’s campaign. And Wes is a damn smart guy, too. I don’t think his 2004 campaign had what it would have taken to go the distance, but the guy is razor sharp and just a genuinely good human being.

The early rumors are that Obama is also looking for some military experience to counterweight his candidacy, though I don’t think Clark is likely to join him on the ticket. I’m not sure who that leaves in terms of public figures, but it need not be a known individual. Though on the flip side, Obama is already going to have enough trouble because of his general unfamiliarity with the public (the last 10 months aside). His other alternative is to select an already established political figure from the 2008 primary. I’ve heard both Bill Richardson and Mike Gravel, though I wouldn’t bank on either. Hillary as a choice is “obvious” but I don’t think it’s likely. And Obama is right not to pick her. As much as I’d like to see the Clinton Counterpunch make a comeback, it would make the whole primary seem like the dog-and-pony show that it truly was. And that might actually distance voters from the process.

As for McCain? Egads, who does he even go with? I mean, the archetype is clear. He needs to go get himself a religious conservative running mate and fast. He’s already going to be a damn hard sell to that strong Christian voting block, so you can expect him to form an uneasy alliance with a serious holy roller before his party has their convention. It would be a bad move for him to pick one of the primary losers as well, though the only one that really fits the bill in the first place would be Mike Huckabee. I’ve heard spatterings of both Joe Lieberman and Jeb Bush - and really, I would pay money to see either of those campaigns. No, his Veep will be someone most of the country has never heard of, but regular 700 Club viewers know on a first name basis.

As for the runup to November? Well, I hope you like race bating, because there’s going to be a steady stream of it coming from independent groups that John McCain and the GOP are really, really, really super duper not even a tiny bit related to or associated with. Honest. For reals. The swift boating of Barak Obama will be ugly and tense. It will also be unrelenting from August to late October. It wouldn’t even surprise me to hear the phrase “race riots” before the year is out.

It will be, to say the least, interesting to see how Obama runs his campaing now that he’s in an actual race as opposed to the good natured slapfight that he was in with Hillary. It’s my fear that he will lack the aggression and even the ruthlessness necessary to win, preferring instead to place his faith entirely in the same public that nearly voted George W. Bush into office two elections in a row. I don’t trust that. Honestly, I can’t trust that, not at this juncture. What Obama needs to do, and what the rest of his party needs to do, is to Learn To Rove.

Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not advocating spreading rumors about illegitimate inter-racial children or spiking terror alerts or postering neighborhoods with pamphlets that list the wrong election date. Those are all flavor tactics. Those are the methodology and not the target. The core mechanic of Rovian politics is actually blissfully simple. You attack your opponent where he is strongest. You don’t look for weak spots or faults - most people already know what they don’t like about a candidate. Instead, you figure out what your opponent really has going for him and you take that away from him.

It works for so many reasons. First off, your opponent never sees it coming. In 2004, a draft dodger attacked a medal-winning Vietnam veteran for being anti-military for fuck’s sake! In both of Bush’s elections, his opponents were mocked for being too intellectual, for being too smart. They went after Edwards because he has a history of fighting against corperate interests. And way, way back, in the 2000 primary, they spread rumors that John McCain was unfit to be President because he’d been broken by his captors when he was a P.O.W.

The second benefit is that you take way your opponent’s stable base. You rob him of the issue that he knows he can rely on. And in doing so, you rob him of his credentials. You make him look like a liar for campaigning on genuine values because you have publically called those values into question. You force him to play defense and force him to look weak. You force him to fall back onto qualities that are not as appealing, not as strong. It’s a devestating tactic that would be suicide on an actual battlefield, but when your only cost is words instead of lives, it can and does work.

They will go after Obama for being black. Yes, you and I both know they will. But they will go after him for being a relatively new to politics as well, even though that seems like a strength because it plays well into his change memes. They will attack him for being optimistic, because how is some bright-eyed beatnick going to protect America from “the al-Queda”? Most importantly, they will directly confront and attack his “change” rhetoric, on the basic assumption that they can make it sound either head-in-the-clouds absurd or scary - as a rule, most people resist change when they are actually confronted with it. They will attack him anywhere he seems strong, and honestly, so far I’ve never seen Obama properly set up and execute a counterpunch.

McCain, though. He’s an easy target for the Rovian method. In a lot of ways, he’s set himself up to be. He runs on a platform of being honest and sincere. On being opposed to lobbyist money (which, again, they will simultaneously attack Obama for). On not being beholden to religious extremists. On being able to work with both Democrats and Republicans. On being a long-standing icon in politics and having a vast network of solid connections in both the government and the media. And those are the places that Obama needs to attack him.

Attack his sincerity and his integrity - make it seem as if he reverses his positions. Find any minute lobbyist interaction and play it like a harp from hell. Make constant noise over the fact that McCain’s campaign finance reforms would have bankrupted his own campaign. Force him to two-step. Show the footage of him at Falwell’s university, and replay every last snippet of newsreal of him standing side by side with George W. Bush - another aspect that up until a few years ago was considered one of his strengths. Attack him for being just another political insider, for being up to his eyebrows in greasy handshakes and political favors.

Hit him where he is strong, and you leave him nothing to fall back on. His stance on Iraq is vastly unpopular, his economic policy is more of the Neoconservative bullshit that has wrecked our country’s finances, and ever since the end of that 2000 primary, he’s had the lifeless spark of a dead toad. Make him fortify at his weak points, and he loses. It needs doing. And I don’t think Obama has the strength or the stomach to do it. I just can’t see the man with bruises on his knuckles.

I still hope I’m wrong.

So, I’ve been saying from the day Pit was announced as a Brawler that a new Kid Icarus game was in the works. And as soon as I fully understood the relationship between Factor 5 (makers of Rogue Squadron, Rogue Squadron II: Rogue Leader, and Rogue Squadron III: Let’s Go To Hoth A-fucking-gain) and Nintendo, I called it that Factor 5’s new project would be Kid Icarus for the Wii. Apparently, the company’s foray into PS3 land with the tragically crippled controls of Lair was primarily the result of Nintendo being so tight-lipped about both the hardware limitations of the Wii and the motion-sensitive controls.

And on some level, I can’t blame them. Sony already tacked on their tilt controls at the last moment (currently due for execution) and rumors now abound of Xbox motion sensor controls on the horizon. However, it was most definitely not in their best interests to alienate a studio as talented as Factor 5. Especially considering that Factor 5 stuck with them, continued to produce for their console despite it being in third place last generation, and worked technical marvels on the Gamecube. No studio outside of Nintendo can even compare to the graphical feats that Factor 5 squeezed out of that little purple box.

At any rate, news of the new Kid Icarus is already unofficially official, and the developer is apparently so obvious it need not be named. Factor 5, for their part, confirmed they are working on at least one new already existing IP for the Wii, and that it would be neither a Rogue Squadron game nor a joint collaboration on a new Star Fox (which, just so we are clear, needs to happen). The only IP that could possibly fit those criteria, and would be significant enough for Factor 5 to work on, is Kid Icarus. And truth be told, it’s a great match. The original Kid Icarus featured very little actual flight, but the new Brawl version of the wide eyed angel suggests a much more fluid, maneuverable game experience. Now, sure, I could be wrong. Maybe Factor 5 is all pumped up because they are working on Festor’s Second Quest or A Man And His Blob. . . but I doubt it.

Kid Icky is coming back, and if Factor 5 can accomplish on the Wii the level of production value they repeatedly offered on the Gamecube, it should be a hell of a ride.

Attention Electronic Arts! When Mass Effect comes out for the PC, I am going to pirate an illegal copy of it. I don’t really want to. In fact, I was more than happy to pay you fifty of my hard earned dollars in exchange for this game. It is a fantastic RPG, designed and then improved upon by a studio that I remember fondly. It is in many ways an upgrade to the already brilliant (if slightly flawed) Xbox 360 version of the game. Everything about Mass Effect makes me want to play it.

However, the copy protection is quite simply a function of the game that I am utterly unwilling to tolerate. After ten days of inactivity, Mass Effect is going to connect to the internet and verify with your server that it is legitimate if I want to play it again? Fuck you. That is unacceptable. That locks this otherwise brilliant game into the subcategory of “people who are reliably online”. It also puts a sunset on the game tied to whenever you stop validating it, despite it being a single player RPG. The way I see it, if you’re going to treat me like a god damned thief, I might as well enjoy the benefits of thievery.

I really wonder what good this is supposed to do. Everyone reading this is aware that there will be a crack for this new version of SecuROM before the game even makes it to the shelf. Absolutely no piracy is being prevented with this awkward, byzantine game of packet ping pong. It does make me wonder if the box for Mass Effect will have a “requires internet connection” sticker on it. And to be honest, it’s not really the danger of being offline that pisses me off. It’s the presumption that this sort of behavior is even remotely acceptable.

DRM systems like these are notoriously buggy and even exploitable. The whole Sony Root Kit fiasco should have been the slug in DRM’s brain, and I thought it was until I installed Bioshock and was rendered unable to play it for two days because it couldn’t connect to its server and verify that I was not, in fact, a criminal. I neither want nor will allow software on my machine that phones home to check in with mommy on a permanent, ongoing basis.

It makes me question, on a larger scale, the type of insults that gamers are willing to put up with. No other consumer market gets shit on by its suppliers as much, or in such fine detail, as gamers do. Imagine if you had to get your car “certified” by your dealer once a month to prove that you legally own it, or else the engine will fail to start. To say nothing of the thousand other paper cuts that gamers are dealt. No other type of product is sold so woefully incomplete, with the understanding that it will be finished via “patches” months after money exchanges hands. To use the car analogy again, that would be like purchasing a car that didn’t have brakes, with the understanding that in a few months, when the brakes are ready, someone will come around and install them.

This type of DRM, which punsihes the legitimate, paying customer while preventing absolutely no illegal activity, is so pervasive now in all forms of media. Music publishers telling me where I can listen to the songs I’ve purchased. Movie studios setting time limits on how long I’m allowed to spend watching a film. But this new obscenity, where the product you buy routinely checks in with its own publisher to make sure it hasn’t been stolen, that’s just too much.

And part of the problem is that all of the trust is on the side of the buyer. There are real problems now with DRM-based video when the “parent server” goes offline - sometimes permanently - and consumers are locked out of content that they legally purchased and wanted to view. Is Electronic Arts promising to keep their Mass Effect validation server online until the end of time? What happens if people stop buying Madden every damn year and Electronic Arts goes out of business? Are they going to give a shit about me not being able to play Mass Effect? Doubtful. Will I be screwed out of my fifty bucks? You betcha.

And so, Electronic Arts, please be aware that I intend to illegally download a cracked, fully functional version of Mass Effect once it comes out for the PC. Not because I am greedy, not because I am cheap. Not because I want to do harm to the developers and the game designers - quite to the contrary, BioWare is one of my favorite game studios. And not because I’m a no good crimial. I am going to pirate Mass Effect because the official version of the game does not meet my minimum standards for quality and acceptability. You are releasing a gimped version of an otherwise exceptional game. A version that crosses some very ethereal and paranoid boundaries concerning ownership and authority. And I am unwilling to pay you for the experience of being treated like a thief.

Interestingly enough, I can get that for free.

You know who is a really weird mascot? Mario. Seriously. It’s not just that his origins are muddled and absurd. I mean, he’s been a circus hand, a carpenter, and most notoriously a plumber. Nor is it that he always seems to square off against large, oddly named anthropomorphic enemies, from Donkey Kong to Wart to Bowser. It’s that really, other than his propensity for stomping on stuff and his ridiculous voice, we don’t really know anything about him as a character. Yet we all know who Mario is. In the quirky, eight-bit era, where games could star miniaturized Japanese dancer/ninjas or baseball playing robots, that was about as much depth as people were looking for in their gaming protagonists. But the field is very different now, and whether you are looking to macabre titles like Alice, noir adventures like Max Payne, or thought provoking excursions like Metal Gear Solid (itself derived from a very bare-bones eight-bit ancestor), our gaming heroes are all expected to have personalities, back histories, and even deeply rooted flaws for their narratives to exploit.

Not that Nintendo has always been known for its deep character sketches. Amongst its most popular icons, Link’s emotions are often superficial and obvious. Even Samus Aran, the only central Nintendo heroine to have a consistently linear (if staggered) time line, reveals exceptionally little about herself over the course of her ten various titles. But none of them have as little going for them, from a character standpoint, as Mario. He’s an Italian plumber that never does any plumbing, doubles in size when he eats fungus, likes stepping on turtles, and shoots fire out of his fingertips. He is absolutely surreal and, if you get right down to it, a bit creepy.

Yet he stands for something, clearly. He’s the flagship icon of the longest running and arguably most successful gaming company in the history of the business. And despite being cartoony and almost cuddly, even those gamers that consider themselves hardcore enjoy Mario games. And yet if you ask most of them about Mario, they’d probably tell you that they wish Nintendo would change things up a bit more and invent some new IPs instead of trying to bleed their old stanbys dry. Personally, I think the idea of Nintendo presenting a series of new IPs is an awful, awful idea.

For one thing, Nintendo doesn’t have a reputation for deep character analysis, so I don’t even know if they’d get it right. But to a much larger extent, Nintendo’s cast of characters serve as shorthand for the games they star in. I mean, it’d be one thing if every Mario game played out exactly the same. The same levels, the same control schemes, the same gameplay and so forth. Quite the contrary, Nintendo’s original games take familiar architecture and present it in new and different ways. Sometimes it works brilliantly, as in Mario 64. Other times, it isn’t quite as clever a game, as in Super Mario Sunshine. And while we’re on the subject, while I didn’t especially enjoy Super Mario Sunshine, I still contend that part of its mediocre score was because it had to live up to the mythos of Mario 64. Had Sunshine been an independent IP, it probably would have sold fewer copies, but gotten friendlier press.

Nintendo’s mascots set the “given” quantities for their games. You know Mario can jump and stop. You know Link will get a boomerang and a bow. You’re aware that Samus can roll into a ball. But every time they present these characters, things are different. The characters are baselines on which to expand. They are the control group in the game’s scope of experimentation. Nintendo isn’t pulling a Madden on us - releasing the same game over and over with miniscule variations to the gameplay. Rather they are using their mascots as a context for what sort of game people can expect.

And that is taken to a whole other level with the Mario characters, since they star in so many non-platforming games. They play sports and race buggies and engage in life-sized board games. Mario sports titles tend to be goofy and eccentric - not a genuine recreation of a sport but more of a caffeine fueled head butt to the sport they are playing. They are wild and absurd, while still retaining the core sports mechanics. Those of you who have played Strikers know exactly what I mean here. Or look at Mario Kart - in theory, it should be infinitely less popular than Nintendo’s other racing offering, F-Zero. And while the F-Zero series still has its fans (as it well should), you can’t argue with the phenominal success of Mario Kart.

So why does a game like Mario Kart work, even though the racers are all out of context and the premise is incredibly arbitrary? Well, for one thing, it’s no more arbitrary than an Italian plumber who stomps on evil mushrooms to save a princess from a fire breathing turtle. In many ways, simply the inclusion of the Mario IP frees Nintendo from the consistent burden of realism that so many games insist upon. But more than that, the game provides its players with so many known quantities and so many understood mechanics.

Gamers know that if they pick Bowser, they are going to be slow but strong. If they pick Toad, they will be light and agile. If they pick Mario, they will be well rounded. Gamers know what a koopa shell does, more or less. They’re aware that getting the star is something that they really want to do. Could Nintendo have invented a completely different racing game, with all new characters that no one had ever heard of before, instead of treading out their standard mascots to race go-karts? Absolutely. And once again, it was called F-Zero. Guess which series is the greater success.

What Nintendo is suggesting by re-using its mascots is that the window dressing is only that. It doesn’t really matter what your character looks like or what your objective is, as long as the gameplay is solid and engaging. Nintendo IPs exist as a sort of quality guarantee on a game. You see Mario on the cover, and you have some idea of what sort of game you are going to be playing. If the game stars a dude named Link, you’re aware of the sorts of adventure / puzzle elements you will come across. With very few exceptions, Nintendo has taken care of its stable of mascots and icons. Think about it. Which game would you be more likely to shell out $50 for: Super Mario Touchdown or Wacky Fun Time Football?

All of this brings me to Super Smash Brothers Brawl, a game that originally wasn’t going to star Nintendo’s mascots. The original idea was to create a different kind of fighting game, where health gauges weren’t the cut-and-dry indicator of victory or defeat. And, more specifically, to rework the Street Fighter II formula so that more than two people could play at once (since the N64 came with 4 controller ports). It wasn’t until well after the game was in development that the choice was made to have it star Nintendo’s established gaming characters. Some tellings of the story even suggest that because the game didn’t have any graphics worked up for it yet, Mario was used almost as a placeholder.

But once again, the inclusion of Nintendo character game Super Smash Brothers a baseline to work off of. People could pick up a controller and have some idea of what characters they were playing and how they could expect them to interact. And Nintendo routinely plays loose enough with its characters - especially in these non-canon style games - to make sure that the inclusion of their icons doesn’t get in the way of the fun of the game. I mean, let’s be honest. In a “fair” fight, Samus Aran would be able to splatter most of the other characters in SSB into smears on the floor in a matter of seconds. Hell, if the game were forced to stay true to the very loose storylines of its respective series, there’d be no reason to ever rescue Princess Peach again - she could just kick Bowser’s ass and be done with it. Instead, Nintendo has set up an interesting and damn near unique pseudo-world with Smash Brothers, where their established avatars retain their appearances, abilities and concepts, but those concepts are fitted around the greater architecture of their new game. It’s sort of like a great big Nintendo-fueled game of Rifts.

Nintendo’s original IPs will always have a place in the mainstream of gaming so long as Nintendo takes care of them, prevents them from being exploited for awful schlock, and consistently uses them to show us something new. One bad thing you can’t say about Super Mario Sunshine is that it was the same old Mario platforming game all over again. You may hate the look of Wind Waker and get bored by the constant sailing, but it was a radical departure from Ocarina of Time. Though perhaps no departure was more severe, more risky, or more well received than the Metroid Prime games. And it looks like there is, in fact, a new Kid Icarus title in the future (my money is on Factor 5 as the developer).

Long live Mario.

Super Mario Galaxy really is an exceptional game. I know, as revelations go, that’s right up there with “Water is wet”. But I’ve been on a serious SMG kick for the past few days and I know I haven’t really addressed the game here despite it being, truly, a Wii flagship title. So here’s my review: If you own a Wii, and you don’t own Super Mario Galaxy, you are criminally retarded.

So much for the review. But not so much for the game. Because for me, what Galaxy speaks to is the confusing way in which gaming has evolved over the years. The basic premise of the game is that Mario has to fly to different galaxies collecting (what else?) stars. The more stars he collects, the more worlds he is able to fly to. Once he acquires sixty stars, he will be able to fly to the final boss battle and save the Princess. Except, there are one hundred and twenty stars in the game. So you really only need to acquire half of them in order to win.

And understand this well - the game is not linear. In fact, if you do very well on the earlier boards, it is entirely possible to skip right to the boss battles for the last several worlds, bypassing all of the interim stages. Essentially, that is Galaxy’s answer to warp zones, which is another Mario staple. And yet, in the earlier Mario games, warp zones served a very specific purpose. Because you could not save your game, and because extra lives were scarce, warp zones were often the only way that many players could hope to beat the game. Gamers didn’t see them as a cheat but rather as a trick. Hell, I must have beaten the original Super Mario Brothers a dozen times before I ever saw World 7-1.

But in a gaming era where running out of extra lives is either neigh impossible or simply isn’t an option, and where you can save your game to complete it over the course of weeks or months if you care to, what function does skipping content actually provide? Certainly completing every star in Galaxy would be beyond the call for some gamers, as many stars are acquired by performing rehashes of previous levels with the situation altered (the enemies are faster, or you die the first time you get hit and so forth). Additionally, many of the hidden stars are so bloody well hidden that it would be unreasonable to expect younger or more inexperienced gamers to find them.

But if you do find them, you can essentially skip the second half of the game. And on some level, I think I have a problem with that. Content means a very different thing in games now than it does twenty-odd years ago. Nowadays, content is a commodity that is traded and paid for rather than a challenge to be overcome. Expansion packs, map packs, and now even weapon packs all cost extra cash, and what you are buying is a longer or more enriched experience. Well, that’s the theory, anyway. In an MMO, content is often locked by progression, or doled out in patches throughout the year. Some people will grind their characters for week, months, even years so they can be rewarded with new content. In Super Mario Galaxy, apparently, the reward is being able to skip that same endgame-style content.

It also raises the question of whether or not a game is about the ending or the experience. Perhaps for a game like Galaxy, where the plot is so unabashedly paper-thin that you could probably act it out with sock puppets, the game has to be about the experience - even if you accept that part of that experience is the final boss fight. And yet if the game really is measured in the sliding scale of “percentage beaten” rather than the simple pass/fail metric of reaching the end, then would a person who only achieved 99% of the game’s content be said to have not beaten it?

And to be fair, the content in Galaxy is skippable on a scale that most games would never consider. Even other Nintendo offerings, like Metroid Prime 3 and Zelda: Twilight Princess required you to at least put in the bare minimum amount of effort in every stage to progress to the next one. Sure, you didn’t have to get every last missile expansion or wolf down every last Poe, but it wasn’t as though you could skip entire planets or dungeons, either. But as far as raw content goes, you were still skipping part of the experience. And where Galaxy takes the adventure game and distills it to its most raw concepts, it’s mostly comparable.

Consider sandbox-style games like Grand Theft Auto. I know plenty of people that haven’t beaten all of the Grand Theft Auto III series, some not at 100% and some not at all. Yet they own all three titles. Which is to stay that after actively failing to play all of Vice City, they still anted up for San Andreas. Content upon content, all locked and unbeaten. For that matter, what about a game like Mass Effect - where there can be 20 hours of content or 100 hours, depending on your investment in the game. I know plenty of people who didn’t come close to beating all Mass Effect had to offer, and yet they were excited, almost irrationally so, over the downloadable content for the game.

I suspect I’ll revisit these thoughts in a few weeks when I finally sit down at tackle Assassin’s Creed, which also features a wealth of optional content. But Galaxy is still in its own league not just in terms of how much of it is skippable, but because a lot of that skippable content is extremely good. That may be the difference. Even casual players are going to unlock some of the hidden stars in Galaxy. A number of them practically bludgeon you over the head as you pass through the stage. So it won’t be tedious collection quests or annoying escort missions that players can skip. It will be some of the most challenging and engaging levels the game has to offer. It does create a line where the concept of skipping content is quite different than the concept of warping past it.

And there are probably a few people who think this entire discussion is absurd. That they just want to beat their game so they can catch the game, or go out to a show or, in the case of us addicts, load up their next game. For those players, I wonder, where exactly is the end of the game? I know for myself, I usually start out trying to acquire all of the content before beating the game - and if beating the game with 100% of the content unlocked yields a better ending, I almost follow through. But some games seem to think they can add extra play-hours by not giving you any bloody clue as to where the remaining content is. If the game world takes me an hour just to cross, and I have 99% of the collections and content finished, my desire to spend another week looking for the one little gem (or ghost. . . I’m looking at you Zelda team) that I missed? Not really there.

I guess the answer is that completionist gaming is great - until it pisses me off. More on this topic after Altair and I waste some dudes.

Super Tuesday is almost all-up-ons. The great big mega-primary day, when both major political parties are supposed to choose their best candidate, and usually utterly fail to do so. I’d like to talk about the Democratic and Republican choices, but first, I need to do a little spleen venting.

Now, I won’t lie to any of you. My candidate of choice was John Edwards. Do I feel like he got unjustly snubbed by the media? Yes, yes I do. He polled higher than Giuliani ever did, but got infinitely less media coverage. Personally? I think he scared the shit out of our consolidated media, and that’s one reason I liked him. He was also one of the very few politicians to admit that voting to authorize the use of force in Iraq was just a great big dumbass mistake. Hearing a politician openly and frankly admit to screwing up is exceptionally rare, and I respected that. I also respected his platform, and his understanding that the central issue in this country is the divide between the haves and the have-nots. That class warfare is a fact of modern life whether it gets addressed or not. That as long as the lower and middle classes merge farther away from the uber-rich, the economy will remain stagnant, and the value of the dollar will drop because no one can afford to fucking buy anything. And if I could just be pithy for a moment, this is for all of the ditto heads and mouth breathers that couldn’t get over John Edwards’ expensive haircut. I can cure you of your obsession in just two simple steps.

Step One: Find any picture of Ronald Reagan, ever.

Step Two: Shut the fuck up.

Man, that feels better. Okay, first off, the Republicans. Specifically, McCain, Romney and Huckabee. I’m going to call this one for McCain, which is the conventional wisdom. Back in June I would have written him off, but he was smart enough to keep his trap shut while Giuliani and Romney destroyed each other. Romney still has a chance, don’t get me wrong. As for Huckabee? He got lucky, tapping into the particulars of Iowa, where the Republican caucus-goers are disproportionately Evangelical. He’s a one trick pony, and the only reason I don’t post a pissy fit about him wanting to re-write the Constitution to conform to the Bible is because I know he’s got absolutely zero chance of becoming President. McCain is almost certainly going to win, but if you are a Republican, I encourage you to vote for Romney because I think he’s the easiest to beat.

Now, on to the Democratic race. With Edwards out, most people I talk to assume that my support swings to Obama. They assume incorrectly. To be honest, I don’t especially care for either Obama or Clinton. Despite their rhetoric, they are both representative of the same wing of the Democratic party. The corporate wing that sees elections as an Excel spreadsheet and thinks winning by 0.5% should be celebrated as a victory instead of frowned upon as an embarrassment. The differences between them are, essentially, cosmetic. Interpret that however you like, I’m so far past chauvinism and race-bating that I won’t even acknowledge attempts at either.

The thing is that Obama talks a good game. But it’s a good game about nothing. I think I’ve heard that man use the word “hope” more times than I’ve heard my own name. His speeches are inspiring and uplifting and fucking empty. Half the time, I almost feel like I’m being sold the generic store brand equivalent of a candidate. Yes, I know he has policy initiatives on the table. Finally. And yes, they read like mediocre edits of Edwards’ initiatives. But then again, so do Hillary’s, so it’s not like I can take points from one and not the other in that respect. I do give him credit for voting against the authorization to invade Iraq. I give him all the credit in the world for that, and I suspect that he really does believe everything he says about turning pages and restoring hope.

But he also scares the shit out of me, because his rhetorical style and message remind me of George W. Bush. Now, stop. Before you get all upset. Before you start sending me snippets of speeches contrasting the two. Barak Obama is a thousand times the human being that George Bush ever was before the coke-monster ate what was left of his brain. I am aware of this. And I’d take him in half a heartbeat over Poor Ol’ George. It’s the vagueness I’m talking about. I first knew George Bush was full of shit when I listened to him talk for over an hour and realized that his only message was, “Aw, come on, trust me.” I feel like that’s all I get out of Obama sometimes, and that both frightens and annoys me.

Which brings me to Hillary Clinton. I’ve got to tell you, I liked her a lot more when she was the First Lady than I do now that she’s a Senator. And what pisses me off the most about her is her silence. As a Democratic Senator from a consistently Democratic state, and as a famous political figure who could command both local and national media attention at the drop of a hat, I find her performance as a Senator to be absolutely awful. Chicken shit. Cowardice above and beyond the call of non-duty. She was in a unique position to act as a genuine foil to the Neo-Conservative movement, from Iraq on down the line. And no, she didn’t have the legal authority to stop most of what passed through the Congress. But she had the opportunity and the capacity to draw national attention to it. And unlike many members of Congress, she knew she could do so without putting her own seat in danger. She was positioned to show real leadership for the duration of Bush’s Presidency, and she did exactly jack shit. Her apathy bears the weight of Bush’s guilt, as far as I am concerned.

But I’m voting for her. I fucking hate that I am voting for her, I really do. And yet, tomorrow, I am. And it has nothing to do with her being a woman, or being Bill’s wife, none of the petty reasons that our 24/7 media thinks matter. I’m voting for her because what is really important, in January of 2009, is that we don’t have another Republican administration picking up where Bush left off and hammering this country right into shit’s bottom. What’s important is that any Democrat is better than any Republican right now, because every Republican running lacks the courage or the common sense to see that we need to change direction as a country.

And I don’t think Obama can win. I don’t think he’s been tested, I think he’s entirely too naive, and I think he takes that bi-partisan bullshit to heart. Over the past seven years, bi-partisanship in Washington has meant that the Democrats cave in to the Republicans like a bunch of spineless pussies on every flittering, absurd demand - even when they control the majority. We don’t need four more years of that. Obama’s only election that received serious media attention was against Alan Keyes, and let’s be honest. I’ve picked things out of my teeth that could beat Alan Keyes in a Senate race.

And since the word came up? Yeah, let’s talk about race. I honestly don’t think that America is unbiggoted enough to handle a black President. There you go, I said it. I’m not proud of it. I’m not happy about it. It makes me feel like a rat bastard to even type it out. But I think enough people will come out to vote against Barak Obama because he’s black that right now, I just can’t nominate him. And that really sucks. And it makes me a calculating son of a bitch. You know what? If the next President didn’t have eight years of completely irresponsible insanity to clean up? I might get behind Obama and be willing to run the risk, chase the dream, make a real statement about progress in America. But not right now. Just for fucking once, Democrats, can’t we have an easy win and get some shit done in Washington?

But it’s not just a matter of race. In fact, even without the race card, I still couldn’t back Barak Obama. He’s just way too soft. Way to green. People can claim that Karl Rove is dead in terms of his effectiveness as a political strategist, now that Bush’s Presidency is whimpering to a close. But those same tactics can be easily re-incarnated, and I don’t think Obama knows how to counter-punch. I’ve never seen that in him. He will run an “I’m Above The Fray” campaign until just a few months before the actual election, and he will get beaten. Just like Kerry. Just like Gore.

Hillary Clinton isn’t going to let that happen to her. You can take that to the bank. She gets accused of being a calculating bitch, and yeah, sometimes she is. But in her I see the ruthlessness necessary to win. She’s not approaching this thing with the kiddie gloves on. She saw what her opponents are willing to do to the truth for their own political ends when Bill was President, and she’ll be damned if she lets them do it to her all over again. She will kick them when they are down. And she will keep kicking them until all they can do is bleed out.

So I don’t especially like Hillary Clinton. I don’t tend to like her supporters (those that I have met personally) and I will disagree with her about 30-40% of the time, just like I did with her husband. Just like I do with most politicians that I wind up supporting because our system is so broken, they are my only choices. But I can’t do anything about that on Tuesday. What I can do is make sure that the candidate who faces off against McCain (or just maybe Romney) in November will be going into that election with the other guy’s blood on her shoes. And that candidate, like it or not, is Hillary Clinton.

The new logo for Suda 51’s Grasshopper Manufacture is a mixmash coat of arms, which clearly reads across the bottom “Punk’s Not Dead” and it would seem that No More Heroes is Suda 51’s very real effort to prove that fact. The game is loud and garish and completely over the top, from the cutscene dialogue right down to the half motorcycle, half tank that protagonist Travis Touchdown drives. No More Heroes is about breaking the rules.

But not just in the obvious ways. The game breaks a lot of design rules as well. Unfortunately, one of those rules is, “In the year 2008, it is completely fucking unacceptable for objects and scenery to ‘pop’ into existence at a walkable distance.” Luckily, that rule only gets broken in non-combat areas. But that’s really a technical issue, and I mention it first as a personal irritant. There are many more important rules that No More Heroes breaks, such as the ubiquitous need that games have lately to try to disguise the fact that they are games. It started, I think, as 3D graphics began making serious advances. When characters’ hands had actual fingers instead of being blunted trapazoids with lines on them. When skin suddenly had texture. When clothing moved like actual cloth instead of plates of cardboard.

Studios were spending all of this money trying to make their games look more realistic. They still are, obviously, and with the advent of real physics engines in games, that’s going to continue to escalate. But somewhere along the line, it became common wisdom that the graphics were a function of the realism, and that realism was the goal. So the gaming industry began cramming all sorts of ridiculous tropes into games that they didn’t need in order to keep them realistic (where the term realistic can encompass worlds where aliens invade, zombies walk the earth, and World War II never bloody ends). The idea is that you can increase the realism if you prevent people from remembering they are playing a game.

And in certain genres, that’s a good thing. Part of what made Resident Evil 4 such a success was that despite thinking about aiming mechanics and ammo collection, there were plenty of moments where a enemy leaped out at you and it scared you pissless. A game like RE4 had to strive for realism in order to achieve its mood and feel. But now it seems that every game is doing this, many to the point of either hiding the user interface or else trying to make it part of the scenery. The new Ghostbusters game, for example, will not have a UI at all, but rather all of your relevant statistics will be indicated by the lights on the back of your proton pack. And don’t get me wrong, that’s cool as hell. But for every game that does integration brilliantly, there are another ten that do it like crap. And then you still remember you are playing a game, because you are struggling with the UI. So the realism is lost, and on top of that, you’re annoyed at the developers.

No More Heroes doesn’t give a rat’s ass if you remember it’s a game. In fact, it goes out of its way to remind you that you’re playing a game. All of the on-screen indicators, from waggle information to locations on the map, are indicated with huge, square, three dimensional pixels. The UI is this insane compilation of a digital watch minimap, a rolling slot machine, a battery life indicator, a large, beating pixel-based heart, and a lounging 8-bit tiger. Even as you progress through the ranks in the game, that progress is tracked via a “High Scores” list that looks like it was pulled from a 1980’s Galaga clone arcade machine. The mini-missions and side quests are designed to both be non-realistic and poke fun at the arbitrary side quests that are accepted as gaming convention. I mean, you’re an assassin with a laser sword, but you earn cash on the side pumping gas, cutting lawns, and even picking up litter with over-the-top animations and arbitrary time limits. It’s all Suda 51’s way of telling you, “Hey, asshole. You’re playing a game. Remember?” He leaves the fourth wall just barely in tact.

But he goes beyond simply making the game-ness of No More Heroes obvious. In a lot of ways, what Suda 51 has created is a living embodiment of the idea of a modern video game. It’s the caricature that people accusingly point their finger at when ridiculing games. It’s unrealistic, the violence is so gratuitous that you can’t even take it seriously (you can slice people clean in half, and they literally erupt in blood and coins like you just blasted open a very bloody, wealthy fire hydrant). All of the female characters are exceptionally hot, wear almost no clothing, and flirt with Travis (even the one who’s missing a leg). Though Suda 51 paints Travis as such an out of touch geek that nothing ever comes from it, and actually manages to work some character development into that otherwise obvious internet cliche.

When irate pundits on Fox And Friends decide they need something to be outraged about, and begin talking about the violence orgies that all video games clearly are, those of us who play just shake our heads and sigh. No More Heroes stops and asks the question, “Well, what would happen if you did get extra points for cutting peoples’ heads off and breaking their spines?” The first answer is that it would be hilarious. The second, less obvious answer is that it would actually make the violence itself much less realistic. It removes the hightened sense emotional charge from combat that you get in a game like Resident Evil 4, while still keeping the combat fun, satisfying, and completely over the top. That is the other way in which No More Heroes retains its punk lineage. It says to the world, “This is what video games are, eh? Well be careful what you ask for, bitches, you just might get it.”

And just a note on the combat - yes, if you walk around randomly mashing the “A” button, you can probably slog through most of the normal enemies on easy mode. But that’s true of most games. Most enemies in Twilight Princess could have been killed by rushing up to them and flailing the Wiimote like an idiot. But the combat system can be a game of finesse and style if you want it to be. Certainly, on larger packs of enemies and bosses it quite literally has to be if you want to progress. The inclusion of the “killing blow” mechanic, where you get an arrow telling you which way to perform your kill strike, and you must swipe the Wiimote accordingly, gives me just enough sword swinging action to keep me satisfied without making my arm tired after a few hours of progression.

As for the graphics, which I know I’ve already criticized? They are what they are. Sometimes, they look very cool. Other times, you’re running around a large mansion thinking, “Oh, there’s that ugly ass texture again.” Honestly, I think the first stage where the tutorial takes place was a very poor choice because it’s probably one of the least interesting looking stages in the game (until you reach the boss). The style is like a very updated version Killer 7, in that it’s both textured and cell shaded, and the characters are slightly cartoony while retaining mostly realistic animations. It is supposed to look like an underground comic book, and in that sense it finds success. And the special effects themselves, the combat lighting and the explosions, look very sharp. In other words, it’s not going to be Bioshock. But thankfully, it’s not Daikatana, either.

A lot of people have been writing that if you liked Killer 7 (and in that case, welcome to my very small minority), then this game is for you. But I’d expand that, because even I can admit there was a lot not to like about the brilliantly flawed Killer 7. Instead, I think it’s fair to say that if you wanted to like Killer 7, then you will like No More Heroes. Not because they are the same game - far from it. But because No More Heroes does a lot of the things that Killer 7 wanted to or should have done, but was simply unable to accomplish. It fulfills the promise of the early Killer 7 previews, while managing to remain light hearted and amusing. And for sheer stress relief, I don’t know if I’ll ever find a game where hacking through a pack of baddies with a great big laser sword will be quite as satisfying.

The game does take some adjustment. I first played it for an hour or so, beat the initial mission, then put it down to do some other things. I enjoyed it, but the compulsion to continue playing wasn’t quite there yet. Then I picked it back up about an hour and a half later and played it for almost half of a day straight. Maybe I needed that time to process what I’d just played. Who can say? Being only half-way through the game, it’s possible that my final verdict will be different (and I certainly will have a completion post and review). But for those of you wondering if No More Heroes is worth your $50? Well, that probably depends. If you want to play Grand Theft Lightsaber, don’t bother buying No More Heroes. If you refused to play Wind Waker because it didn’t use reflection maps on Link’s sword, skip out on Suda 51’s latest. But if you like games, and have an actual sense of humor? I’m officially making No More Heroes your next mandatory purchase.