Although my posting this is kind of like the echo of an echo of an echo, I figured I’d let everyone know that Penny Arcade has officially launched Child’s Play for this year. I figure since the non-gamer contingent of my readership is likely much larger than it used to be, I’d give everyone a heads up. And rather than some mishmashed explanation of what Child’s Play is, I’ll just give you the blurb right from their website.

Since 2003, over 100,000 gamers worldwide have banded together through Child’s Play, a community based charity grown and nurtured from the game culture and industry. Over two million dollars in donations of toys, games, books and cash for sick kids in children’s hospitals across North America and the world have been collected since our inception.

This year, we have continued expanding across the country and the globe. With over 45 partner hospitals and more arriving every month, you can be sure to find one from the map above that needs your help! You can choose to purchase requested items from their online retailer wish lists, or make a cash donation that helps out Child’s Play hospitals everywhere. Any items purchased through Amazon will be shipped directly to your hospital of choice, so please be sure to select their shipping address rather than your own.

When gamers give back, it makes a difference!

This charity event has always hit home for me because, when I was in Kindergarten, I was one of those kids. Now, I was incredibly lucky that my stay was brief, I made a complete recovery, and I had two amazing parents who were there for me as often as I could want. Not every kid is that lucky. And even with those advantages, I remember what it was like sitting in that bloody hospital bed day after day. So Child’s Play is important to me.

To that end, I’m asking everyone who reads and enjoys my site to consider giving something to the charity. It doesn’t have to be an expensive purchase, and if you have a personal preference against video games, there are plenty of other toys, movies and incidentals to choose from - I usually go in for at least one set of Leggos in addition to whatever games I buy. Or you can make a straight donation. What’s great about Child’s Play is that Gabe and Tycho don’t have any sort of real overhead. Anything you donate will go right to the kids - about the closest thing they have do to overhead is paying to ship the donations to the various hospitals.

Last year they shattered the $1 million mark, which is pretty exciting on its own. I know everyone’s budget is a bit smaller this year, so we’re not all going to be ponying up for 360 Elites. But please consider giving something. And for all of you political wonks and malcontents out there, if this Presidential election has taught us anything, it’s that the small contributions of a large number of people can make all the difference in the world. Though really, if you have a heart at all, these letters should more or less put you on notice.

Every election cycle, there’s one concern that I hear from most of the people that I talk to about their candidate choices. Specifically, that those choices suck because they seem so much alike. I heard it constantly in 2000 (if only we knew). And I heard it a lot in 2004, where I agreed with it much less myself. I haven’t heard it very much now in 2008, which I take to be a good sign. People can see the distinctions between Obama and McCain - even those people that aren’t sure which one they are voting for today.

But most of the distinctions that I hear from people are surface noise. Campaign preferences. Stylistic choices at best. Very few people get deeper into the differences than their stances on Iraq and how much of a tax break they’ll be handing out. Maybe that’s what motivates some people, and hell, those are issues that motivate me. But what I don’t hear anything about is the most core difference between the Democratic and Republican offerings for President this year. And I reference them by the party as much as by the individual candidates because this difference has become pervasive across each party’s platform.

In 1776 some no good, rabble rousing, north-eastern commie liberal named Thomas Paine published a pamphlet titled Common Sense. It outlined, in very specific and articulate detail, the grievances that many colonists held against King George III and made the case for American independence. One of the core tenents of his pamphlet was that the rule of law is the only way to truly guarantee freedom from tyranny - because human beings were entirely to fallible. “For as in absolute governments the king is law, so in free countries the law ought to be king; and there ought to be no other.”

This same philosphy was later incorperated into the Massachusets Constitution by another of those north-eastern liberal elitists, John Adams. He drew a clear distinction of powers and roles for the legislative, executive and judicial branches of the government, explicitly stating that no member of one branch had any business wielding the power of another, “to the end it may be a government of laws and not of men.” This same guiding principle can be traced back to the Magna Carta and even to the establishment of habeas corpus. It does not guarantee that the law is always right, or that the law cannot be challenged. It simply states that the law is to be followed, and that those in power have neither the right nor the authority to usurp it.

Now to be fair, many Presidents from both parties have been guilty of violating this concept - including several whom I truly admire, such as Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt. Of course, there are a few that have placed themselves above the law for much less admirable reasons, and under much less dire circumstances. Nixon comes to mind quite easily. But the sum of all these infractions combined is dwarfed by the sheer scope and thoughtlessness that the Bush administration has overextended its authority since 9/11. You can argue that everything Bush did was for the good of the country - you’d be wronger than armpit flavored macaroons, but that’s beside the point. The ground I’m staking here has to do with the philosophy behind his actions, and what they say about our democracy.

This is all a matter of how a person views the law and, by extension, the founding principles of our government. There are many people in this country - and in the Bush administration especially - who see the law as an obstruction. A hinderance. As just another rule that should be ignored or avoided at all costs. If there is a way to technically avoid the legal requirements of the law, that is good enough. By renaming prisoners of war to enemy combatants, they figure they’re off the hook for obeying the Geneva Conventions. By renaming torture “enhanced interrogation” we can claim that we don’t torture prisoners. By claiming that the Vice President isn’t part of the executive or legislative branches, he can avoid the rules of ethics and oversight that govern his office. To them, the law is a nuisance. Some archiaic bunch of nonesense that they know better than. In short, they see the law as a burden.

It makes me sick.

I’m not going to tell you that every law we have on the books is brilliant or perfect. In fact, there are a lot of them I think should be changed. And we have processes to change them. But that process isn’t to simply disregard or ignore the ones we don’t approve of. Fulfilling the minimum legal requirement of the law is an empty gesture if you are knowingly breaking the spirit and intention of that law. We don’t prohibit torture because there is a law that says so. We prohibit torture because it is both heinous and ineffective. We don’t limit domestic spying simply because there are restrictions on the books, we limit it because it is an invasion of privacy.

It is simply not enough for our leaders to skate around the intention and the meaning of the law on the pretense of fulfilling it’s technical standards. They should be proud to fulfill the letter of the law, and proud of a country that secures such freedoms for its people. Our leaders should want to obey the law. Following the laws that govern and protect this country shouldn’t be seen as a punishment but as an act of patriotism. I know it sounds crazy to all of our cynical ears. But if we don’t have leaders that believe in our laws and believe in our government, how can we ever expect this system to work?

Listen, it’s obvious I have some pretty strong views about Sarah Palin. It’s not exactly a secret I was trying to keep. But at the most basic level, what I knew about her from very early on was that she sees our government and our laws as just another thing getting in her damn way. Her attitude upon being elected mayor of a town smaller than some high schools in this country was that she could do whatever she bloody well pleased until a court specifically told her she could not. That she wouldn’t even try to obey the law until she was legally forced to by another branch of her own government. Someone like that has no business being in in office, and certainly shouldn’t be allowed to shape the direction of the country. And whether John McCain either can’t see that, or just doesn’t care is a moot point. It renders them both unfit for office.

So for those of you that haven’t voted today, I want you to consider what sort of person you want in charge of your country for the next four, possibly eight years. And remember that, first and foremost, we are a nation of laws, not men.

It may have been ten years coming, but at long last Fallout 3 is on the shelves and, more importantly, on my computer. This was one of those rare, so-unlike-me launch day titles that I simply had to have. And was it worth it? Well, I’m a scant six hours of play into the game (and I am already considering re-rolling based on what I’ve learned about how the mechanics work and vary from the previous titles). But the simple fact that I’m sitting here at work, physically itching to go home and play like a Jet junkie desperate for a fix should tell you what you need to know.

Fallout 3 trades in the isometric sort-of-3d tile based system for the standard first/third person environment that virtually every game uses currently. And yes, Fallout 3 has a lot in common with Oblivion. Though I’d say it’s far more than just Mad Max meets Elder Scrolls. I’m sure there are some Fallout die hards out there that will curse the very inclusion of a three dimensional environment and a twitch-capable combat system. To be honest, the twitch portion leaves much to be desired, but in a lot of ways that feels intentional. The real combat takes place with the VATS system, which should feel instantly familiar to old school Fallout fans and is a vastly superior way to approach combat. So if you’re worried that Fallout 3 is just Doom with dialogue trees, don’t be. Combat is much deeper than that.

Specifically, combat is much tougher than that. Admittedly, I’m playing the thing on maximum difficulty because that’s just how I roll, but even sampling the game on an easier setting simply caused me to have to apply the same clever tactics fewer times in a row. Overall, I’d say the combat is still clever and tactical, just a bit more frantic. The one improvement I can see is that it doesn’t result in nearly as many no-win situations, which were my single greatest point of frustration in the previous titles.

But don’t take that to mean that the game is easy, or that it lacks serious consequences. Save states aside, dead still means dead in Fallout. And the Karma system is there in full force, judging your every action and choice. So far I’ve already run across at least one character that didn’t want to help me out because I was such a goodie-two-shoes, even with my wildly unchecked Charisma bearing down on his ever so plyable ears. The voice acting has been very good so far, and one thing that I do prefer over the previous titles is the fact that you are never taken out of the game’s perspective. Accessing the PipBoy is a matter of raising your wrist to the screen, and all conversations and dialogues take palce through your normal view. Granted, that’s a pretty common feature ten years removed from the last real installment of Fallout, but the disjointed loading and unloading of interface to talk to NPCs always bothered me a bit.

On the flip side, there are loads in the game. Essentially, there is an overworld, and within that overworld there are locations which load as separate areas (many of which have sublocations which are additional loads). The load time is fast, don’t get me wrong. It’s just a shame that it couldn’t have been done more seamlessly, especially in the case of the small, one or two room stores and buildings inside the already modest sized towns. For a game that’s all about immersion, I find it disjointing, though your mileage may vary.

Since we’re getting annoyances out of the way, I’ll just make a few remarks about the game’s engine and move on. Movement could be smoother in general. Though the isometric view is gone, I still feel on some level like the characters are navigating down extremely rigid tracks and paths. Usually it’s not noticable, but when it does come up it’s just about all you can notice. There are also reports of crashes and hang ups, which I pretty much expect with PC game launches at this point. I heavily suspect the game leaks memory, based on the degrading performance I experienced and the fact that I’m not alone. And for a lot of players, there are unusual sound issues (ambient noises completely drowning out combat, speech and music). But I started playing the game about two hours after it was even available, and I expect that most of these things are temporary bugs that won’t even affect 1% of players and will disappear for We The Beleaguered within the week.

I’d love to write more, but honestly I’ve only spent a few hours with the game and I don’t want to pass final judgment on the experience without even making it to the second town on the map. But I will say this. Anyone giving this game a “perfect” score needs to have their heads examined. Perfect means perfect, and Fallout 3 isn’t that. But anyone giving this game a score that doesn’t say, “You should buy this right now!” is also full of shit. This is a title that already wants to be amazing, and wants it bad. I’ll be back in a week or so to let you know whether it wants it badly enough.

Update: Ask and ye shall receive. Upon coming home last night, Fallout 3 patched itself (hurray for Steam). Whatever the patch was, it resolved my sound issues completely, and also improved my outdoor graphical performance. I don’t know if the patch actually did both of those things directly or if fixing my sound simply stopped the game from wonking out so the graphics engine wasn’t hanging up waiting. Either way, that’s less than a twenty-four hour turnaround on a widely reported problem - most MMO companies, who I expect to be perma-patchers, don’t resolve bugs that quickly.

So, what should I be churning out this week? A pie chart of Sarah Palin’s campaign expenses? A venn diagram of things Joe The Plumber is and is not? Perhaps a comparison matrix of what socialism means depending on whether you are criminally stupid or not? To be honest, the temptation lingers. I do like selling t-shirts, after all.

But the truth is that I’m done with this campaign. Done with these characters. Am I surprised that Sarah Palin dropped $150,000 of donated money on some new threads? No. Not even a little bit. In fact, when I expressed the opinion that she’s just a self serving bitch hooked up to a perpetual ego machine, some people took offense. This whole wardrobe story is just more of the same from her. Is it any surprise that the former mayor who thought her power extended infinitely unless a court ordered her to obey the law would abuse her campaign contributors by dropping three times the median American family’s income on a wardrobe revamp? It wasn’t to me. And it shouldn’t have been for anyone willing to pierce the paper-thin veil of Hockey Mom Folks-ism to see the petty arrogance behind it.

On the up side, in about eleven days, Sarah Palin will be an afterthought. A cultural aberration. A punchline. Just another embarrassing footnote in the long line of minor tragedies and social disgraces that scar the political landscape. Jon Stewart and David Letterman will begrudgingly mourn her passing. Tina Fey will get to talk in her normal voice again. She won’t be coming back in four, eight, or even twelve years. She’s not a diamond in the rough. As Vice-Presidential candidates go, Sarah Palin couldn’t hold Dan Quayle’s coat.

Even the argument that she was George Bush in a dress (ewwww) doesn’t hold water. Bush had connections. He had “people”. He had his father’s money and his mother’s sneer. He knew, at the very least, that he’d better surround himself with people who knew what they were doing. And while he might not have done a bang up job - ever - he could at least hold a press conference. He had a proven track record. Admittedly, it was a record of feigning compentence long enough to drive whatever he was currently in charge of right into the ground. But hey, at least it was experience. The absurd part is that if Bush looked no different than McCain to many voters, he actually looked better than Palin. The revolting part is that the GOP ran her anyway.

As far as I can tell, there are really two bright spots to the Sarah Palin candidacy. The first, of course, was my flow chart. But the second (and I’m willing to concede, slightly more important) was the utter repudiation of the political myth that any asshole can get elected if they tow the party line and memorize their talking points. Palin did everything that a dim bulb in the spotlight could have possibly done to set up an infinite crecendo of false choices. She was a common sense, small town, America loving, Christian family mom, and her opponent was an eggheaded, city-slick, secret Muslim terrorist.

And it failed.

Do you hear that, traditional media? The politics of character assassination, the up-and-under shiv to the fear centers of your panicky audience’s frontal lobes missed, and missed badly. Even the pundits who carried water for eight years of the most unpopular President in American history are unable or unwilling to attach their names and reputations to Sarah Palin. Hell, her own campaign staff can hardly defend her. Maybe. . . just maybe, the American public is getting sick and tired of The Stupid.

Let’s get this out of the way right at the beginning. With John McCain trailing in the national polls by anywhere from five to fourteen points, and with his electoral college prospects putting him at anywhere from a 2:1 to even a 3:1 disadvantage, McCain needed to knock Obama flat on his ass in order to have a chance at winning the election. And he didn’t. In fact, he didn’t even come close. To be fair, this was McCain’s best debate performance thus far. He was more aggressive than the first debate, and he didn’t wander around the stage in a daze like in the second debate. He even got his creepy reptile tongue under control - for the most part. The problem was that Obama was also on top of his game tonight, and after being stymied by the Phony Town Hall format of the second debate, Obama seemed eager to go toe-to-toe with McCain. This was a very aggressive Barack Obama, and he cut exactly the right figure tonight. He hammered McCain on his mischaracterizations without coming off as a jerk or (if you’re a jackass Congressman from Virginia) “uppity”.

McCain vowed to bring up William Ayers and ACORN at this third debate and he made good on that promise. I’m sure the base was atwitter with excitement. To be honest, so was I. I’ve grown tired of hearing about Big Bad Bill Ayers, and Obama took the opportunity to shoot the comparison down. He even did so without resorting to a Keating Five remark. It would have been within the scope of the discussion, but it also would have validated McCain’s fearmongering to compare the two relationships. The truth is that most people either didn’t know about Bill Ayers, or else they had some vague idea of who he was. McCain didn’t make the case thoroughly enough to damage Obama before he slapped the issue down. I thought from the very beginning (when Hillary floated the concept) that it was a losing tactic. McCain probably could have pushed back and inflamed the issue, but as soon as he met with resistance, he backed down. For a moment, just for a moment, I almost felt sorry for pre-defeated John McCain. Then he did that creepy tongue thing and my pity turned back into disgust.

As for the ACORN business, that remained unresolved. I’d have liked it if Obama had asked McCain who gave ACORN’s keynote speech in 2006 (hint: That Other One), but I think he honestly just didn’t want to dwell on the subject. It was part of his technique of not going tit-for-tat with accusations that left McCain looking like the candidate focusing on non-issues. It didn’t help Johnie Boy any that he described a couple hundred phony voter registrations as “perpetrating the greatest fraud” against democracy. With the $700 billion clusterfuck on Wall Street fresh in our minds, and an illegal, unnecessary war in Iraq that went from lasting six weeks to six years, all under the auspices of the Republican party, McCain really should have better checked his language. His exaggeration was Obama’s gain.

I’ll give McCain credit though, he tried to hit a classic Rovian note - by playing the outraged victim of smear attacks himself. But like every other part of his campaign, it was a shaky premise with no follow through. And he failed to address Obama’s counter-accusation that McCain’s own running mate, Sarah Palin, says Obama “pals around with terrorists” on an almost daily basis. It was there that McCain shifted from Rovian rope-a-dope into stuttering deafness. It was his emergency fallback position throughout the night. Whenever Obama refuted his position or brought up an inconvenient fact, McCain simply restated his original position without reaction. The public has seen that batch of stupid for the past eight years in our current President. We’re bloody tired of it.

Pro-Tip: The trick to a successful rope-a-dope, John, is being tough enough and tenacious enough to withstand your opponent’s attacks until he wears himself out with over-eager aggression. Truthfully, you don’t have the stamina to pull it off, and Obama is too clever to go off on a nasty tear during a debate.

Truly, though, the highlight of the evening, and the moment that most people will remember, was McCain’s deer in headlights moment. I swear, it was Palin-esque. The short of it is that McCain either misunderstood Obama’s health care plan or he figured he could lie about it without being called out on his inaccuracy. Obama wasn’t having it, though, and considering how the night progressed up to that point, I’m surprised McCain had the balls to try for such an obviously fraudulent claim. Realisitically, I think McCain was genuinely shocked at Obama’s response. I don’t think he had any idea about the exemption for small businesses. It was sloppy debating on McCain’s part, and it made him look uninformed and just plain stupid. Ah, to hell with that. It made him look Sarah Palin Stupid.

And speaking of Sarah Palin Stupid, it must have taken every last ounce of willpower Obama had, when asked why he thought Joe Biden would make a better Vice President than Sarah Palin, not to burst out laughing in Bob Schieffer’s face. At first, I thought he was going to pussy out and take the super-high-road. For the most part, that’s what he did, by talking up Biden and more or less leaving Palin’s inadequecy as an unspoken truth. But right at the end of his response, Obama expressed confidence that Biden could lead the country if, heaven forbid, something were to happen to him. It was an innoccuous and even self defferential comment, but it was also deadly clever. Because unspoken in the pregnant pause before John McCain began his response, everyone watching the debate had the same thought. “What if something were to happen to McCain?” And I can assure you, the non-stupid majority of America isn’t buying a ticket for that logic train.

And if there is one guy I never, ever want to hear about again (though we all know I will), it’s Joe The Fucking Plumber. Both Obama and McCain were guilty of constantly, endlessly, laborously taking every economic issue they had to discuss and turning it into a refferendum on Joe The Plumber’s very own personal financial situation. There is no annoyance scale capable of scoring my hatred for the phrase “Joe The Plumber”. It’s worth at least ten “My Friends”s, and perhaps as many as fifteen “You Betcha”s. Truly, it was the hokey, hackneyed lowlight of the entire debate. I certainly didn’t expect, going in, to hear Joe The Plumber’s name referenced more often than Ayers, more often than Sarah Palin. It just didn’t make sense.

At least, not at first. I mean, the whole tedious, hokey process of relating every last scrap of economic information to the life of Joe The Plumber just struck me as out of place. It seemed to trivialize what was otherwise a very important discussion - and to be honest, Joe The Plumber wasn’t even a very good “everyman” because his income is far higher than the national average and even substantially higher than most small business owners. And yet both Obama and McCain continued, relentlessly and unerringly, to treat Joe The Plumber as if he was not just a metric to judge their economic plans but the only applicable standard by which to gauge the economy. Suspiscions ablaze, I did a bit of digging into this Joe The Plumber guy and what I found, quite frankly, shocked me. . .

That Oktoberfest directly precedes election day in this country is perhaps the one well-placed blessing of the year. It certainly seems as though the McCain boys are all taking part, because rarely does a campaign, even one as desperately beleaguered as this one, go so far off the deep end so quickly. The GOP bought too far into its own bullshit rhetoric over the past eight years, assuming that the public would still come along for the ride. Terror! Fear! Evil Do-ers! They were lurking in every shadow, hiding in corners and subway stops. Scheming behind Fourth Amendment protected phone lines. Loitering just outside the the cold sweat nightmares of innocent Americans. How quickly we forget that insanity, that Manchurian Candidate hysteria. Some six long years go, swarthy vigilantes from parts unknown were going to put anthrax in your cable bill and blow up your local supermarket. And those damn filthy terrorist sympathizing Democrats weren’t going to lift a finger to stop them!

And like the stumble-stepped ravings of some four-AM drunk, the Republicans just go on shouting those same old lines out into the darkness. Barack Obama is a secret muslim. A terrorist. An arab. A Marxist. He is other and different and impossible to understand. He’s whatever the thing you fear right now happens to manifest itself as. But the Republican party has just now realized that most Americans are shaking in fear, not of the invisible enemy, but of the paper monster. To hell with anthrax - if there’s a letter more toxic than a notice of foreclosure, I’ve yet to read it. People care a lot less about terrorism when they suddenly don’t own anything worth blowing up. And it’s a bit hard to care about something called the Weather Underground when you can’t even make the rent on your shitty basement apartment.

But don’t tell that to old man McCain - he’s got his heart set on pulling out a sqeaker through a carpet-bomb campaign of brick-shitting fear, and he will keep hammering away at the cloudy, smoke and sawdust suggestions that despite better than half the country supporting the man, Barack Obama hates America. McCain tried to scare people with claims about inexperience, and that didn’t work. He tried to scare people with tall tales of taxes, and even that GOP staple fell flat. So now he’s going full on fearmonger! Going, as he openly admitted to Jon Stewart several years ago, “to crazytown”.

It used to be that they secluded this stuff. Kept it hidden, away from the prying eyes of the traditional media. If there were competent sociopaths running this cowardly mud drag, we wouldn’t hear about push polls to Jewish towns in Florida saying that Obama supported the PLO until sometime next March. I’ll say one thing for Cheney, he knew how to keep his minions on a tight leash, and he wielded his brand of bowel liquefying hate like a samuri spinning a katana. The McCain folks, in comparison, are blasting away with a twelve gauge in a crowded mall.

They’ve forgotten that the nastiest of this sort of filth needs to be kept inside the base. It needs to be the quiet thrum of that fringe freakshow ten percent that would vote the party line even if they tried to run Zombie Reagan for office. The majority of Americans don’t want to hear that much crazy coming out of a man to whom they might be handing nuclear launch codes. And they’ve grown tired of the implausible deniability of sending your hatchetmen out to spread the lies and then waving them away, innocent faced, the next day in front of the press. The public knows what Swift Boating is, Johnny boy, and they don’t like it.

They’re tired of hearing about how Barack Obama might be Kenyan or how John Kerry looks French. They want to hear about how they’re going to pay their electric bill. How they’re going to send their kids to college. How they’re going to retire before they hit eighty. John McCain’s wonderfully insulated world, while not as cushy and worry free as George W. Bush’s, doesn’t have room for those sorts of plebian concerns. And he knows he can’t win by speaking to them, because all he has are empty platitudes about low taxes and something he daren’t still call trickle-down economics. Because by now the public is tired of being pissed on.

I’m trying to have rational thoughts this morning, but before my brain was even all the way switched on, I saw the trailer for No More Heroes 2 - Desperate Struggle. So that pretty much nuked my ability to have a normal conversation with just about anyone (with a brief interlude to make sure that everyone else found the season premiere of South Park to be as lame and re-tread as I did). Unfortunately, the trailer is only available as an embedded file right now, and the damn thing is choppy as hell. But it’s No More Heroes 2. So we both know I don’t care.

Granted, No More Heroes wasn’t perfect - far from it. But there was so much that was fantastic in that game, and I have faith that Suda 51 can get a lot closer to his original vision than he was able to on the first pass. Hell, even Yahtzee liked No More Heroes in spite of its flaws. Enough to tell you to play it, anyway. So far, the trailer doesn’t give away much, and considering how much the final product differed from Suda 51’s original Heroes trailer, it’s awfully hard to make a serious prediction about the game.

Admittedly, my only fear is that the subtitle “Desperate Struggle” is a sly allusion to the fact that this will be a DS game. Not that it wouldn’t make a good DS game, as I can see a stylus interface working well here. But what made the original No More Heroes so engaging was the balance that Suda 51 created via the control scheme. It was a sword-based brawler that actually made clever use of the motion based Wii controls without causing a severe case of Wii Shoulder. It will be interesting to see if he embraces the Wii Motion Plus or if he retains the feel of the original game. Hopefully the amazing (and surprising) reception this game received from gamers will give Suda 51 a bigger budget to work with and grant the game more coverage as it is developed.

Either way, Travis is back, babies.

I have to say, this was the single most dangerous Presidential debate in recent memory. I say that because I only got two hours of sleep last night, and I listened to it in the car on the way home. I damn near fell asleep at the wheel. In some small way it amuses me that I made a flow chart for the Biden / Palin debate. If there were ever an event whose energy and spark could best be summed up in a corporate office tool that no one ever reads, it was tonight’s debate.

So let’s get the preliminaries out of the way. The format sucked. I mean, really. It was boring, it was dry, and all it really offered was stump speech snippets and wind-piddling comments back and forth about the gritty details of each candidate’s plans. Details that won’t be remembered by most of the people who listened partially because they were number stew and partially because most of them probably drifted off. About the only thing this debate did for me was crystalize the need for universal health care, because I imagine that half of the people in that audience have since slipped into comas.

Tom Brokaw was, to be blunt, lame. I know he didn’t have a lot to work with, as some of the audience drawn questions were tortured and vague, but his follow ups were equally bad. The format itself left no real room for actual debate, and even when both candidates chaffed under those rules (which they agreed to before hand, admittedly), Brokaw stuck to them, often cutting off or curtailing the more interesting material in the interest of moving on. The one minute follow ups were an equally bad idea, since they were never one minute and rarely acted as follow ups. Though it’s not like he had any real brain teasers in there. This felt a lot more like the Republican primary debates, if not in substance than in pacing and stammer.

As I said, the economics section was a jumble of numbers that even I can’t entirely remember, and I’ve studied both economic plans. Both candidates avoided saying who they would appoint as Secretary of the Treasury, which annoyed me at first. Though in retrospect, that could have actually been a violation of a federal law that prevents candidates form promising cabinet positions to individuals in exchange for their political support. Which means that Brokaw asked a stupid question. Though that loophole also allowed McCain to avoid mentioning former Texas Senator and noted boobie enthusiast Phil Gramm. That was a win for McCain, since blame for the nightmare of default credit swaps, the key deregulatory blunder in this recent financial crisis, can be placed squarely on Gramm’s greedy, lightbulb shaped head. Though really, does anyone believe that a Republican President would ever appoint William Buffett to a cabinet position? Give me a break.

Then came the section of “Obama will raise your taxes!” “But only if you’re really rich!” that had all the intellectual depth of a lolcat caption. McCain didn’t really score any points on the economy, though the only point that Obama scored was in the question about prioritizing the government’s domestic policies. McCain said that America was capable of making everything a top priority, which is both technically impossible and a weasel way of not wanting to put off single-issue voters (if those elusive creatures really do exist). Obama clearly stated that energy would be his top priority, and I agree with that idea. Nothing else can really be accomplished unless America regains its energy independence. Without that, whatever gains we make can simply be siphoned off at the pump. Comparing his goal of total independence in ten years to Kennedy’s promise to reach the moon in a decade was a nice piece of rhetoric, but it could come back to haunt him in 2012 if he wins the election and doesn’t make enough headway on that plan.

To be honest, the only moment that’s going to stick will be John McCain’s point-and-pout calling Barack Obama “That One” in reference to which Senator voted for the 2005 Energy Bill. Some people are going to throw down the Race Gauntlet here. Don’t. Really, just don’t. I honestly don’t think it was meant to be a racially charged comment. It sounded to me like a zinger that just fell on dead ears, like so many of McCain’s other little jokes tonight and just about all of Palin’s jokes on Thursday. He was trying to sound adult and dismissive, and he failed. He managed to do, in that moment, exactly what Biden went to great lengths not to do in his debate with Palin: sound like a smug, condescending old prat.

Then came the foreign policy segment, where McCain really had to make some ground. Unfortunately for both candidates, it was as mushy and meandering as the domestic policy section, and the questions just kept getting stupider. Granted, I was performing a three-lane change at the time, but did Brokaw really ask if Russia was  once again an evil empire? As in “Evil” evil? What the hell kind of question is that? I mean, I know it was a throwback to Saint Ronnie. I get the reference. And believe me when I tell you that I have no love lost for Putin. But what future President is going to stoke the flames by answering a flat yes to that question (sit down, Tom Tancredo, I said “future President” so that term automatically diqualified you)?

Ultimately, I feel like Obama should have come on stronger during the foreign policy section. He should have hit back harder on McCain’s judgment in going to war. He has the fine distinction of having publicly decried giving Bush the authority to use military force in Iraq, and the overwhelming public opinion is that invading Iraq was the wrong move. Don’t get me wrong, he hit that note. But he presented it like a bullet point when it should have been the fist of an angry god. What frustrated me most was that the entire foreign policy segment seemed dominated with hypothetical what-if questions. I suppose that’s what made me think of the Republican primaries, with its infinite doomsday scenarios that allowed the candidates to out-macho each other in their red-blooded, chest thumping Jack Bauer circle jerk.

The argument can be made - and will be made - that a draw in this debate was a loss for McCain. It’s common policical wisdom that the candidate trailing in the polls needs to use the debates to gain ground, while the candidate in the lead need only effect a stalemate. Add to that the fact that Obama out-performed him by a reasonable degree, and it’s a net loss for McCain. The immediate polling from CNN marked Obama as the more informative, stronger and likeable candidate. In short, McCain couldn’t even perform in his preferred debate format - wasn’t he the one pissing and moaning about Obama not debating him in Town Halls all over the country?

Personally? I don’t give a shit one way or another about those arguments. They are meaningless. To be blunt, this debate really didn’t matter all that much. The debate that mattered took place last Thursday. That was the true refferendum on John McCain as a candidate and what sort of judgment he would exercise if given free reign. The crap-tastrophe that is Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin will weign more heavily around McCain’s neck than anything he could have said tonight, or anything he could have gotten Obama to say. Frankly, unless he shows up to the third debate with Osama bin Laden’s head on a war pike, I don’t see how he’s going to win this thing come November.

Author’s Note: I somehow got through this enitre post without making a single “My Friends” joke. Don’t you smarmy bastards worry, Johnny Mac’s got it coming.

So, last night - technically this morning, at about 4:30 AM, I finished a rough draft of a chart intended to add a tiny bit of snark to an otherwise embarrassing debate. A comment on how formulaic our political process has become. That the conversation that takes place in our commercials, our campaigns, our debates. . . it has nothing to do with the business of governance or the bettering of our nation. I threw that chart, a slapdash gif file, up onto a few sites I frequent as well as my own, and called it a night.

Then my inbox exploded.

To be honest, I’m a bit blown away. And flattered. And, let’s not mince words here, pleased. This blog has always been a bit of an experiment for me, culling and combining the different subcultures of my life into one living, raging, visceral, flowing document. These were the types of things I was saying, politically, in 2002. Back in a time when I got hate mail on a weekly basis for being either a communist or a terrorist or a fascist - and varying combinations there-of. Now I get far more people telling me that I’m a breath of fresh air, for most common definitions of the word “fresh”. Those of you who dislike my language should feel free to peruse one of the other fifty ho-jillion web sites out there on the internet. I’ll consider less swearing when our leaders start acting less stupid.

I’ll admit to being taken a bit by surprise. Hell, if I’d known I was going viral, I’d have cleaned up the place a bit more! But for my long term readers (you poor, glorious bastards), I promise that nothing around here is going to change. Well, maybe my templates. And probably my update frequency. But certainly not my attitude. For my new readers, you should know that I am not married to every aspect of liberalism. At least not as conventional American politics defines it. And there are times, though admittedly less often than not recently, when I agree with conservatives. What I’m sick to death of is neo-conservativism. And that is what I will attack mercilessly in this space until something even stupider comes along.

And yes, regulars, I’ll still be covering gamer culture. Sony is due to do something incredibly stupid any day now, and I’ll be there!

Now, with that bit of business out of the way, I’m happy to announce that fans of the Sarah Palin Debate Flow Chart can now reference it on the go, over morning coffee, on a cold winter day, or even in the comfort of their own pants! Because I have a new CafePress site up where you can get the flow chart on damn near everything.

I’m also rather psyched to note that the original post that garnered all of this attention over at DailyKos has been Dugg nearly 10,000 times. If you like the chart, or just like my site in general, click on over and show the love!