Live from Austin!

A friend recently commented on the imperialist narrative of most video games: travel to exotic places, meet interesting people, kill them, and exploit their resources.

Well, yes, there are a lot of video games like that, ranging from the hundreds of first-person shooters that only an enthusiast could tell apart, to the cerebrally imperialist Civilization series. However, there are also video games which manage to have a more progressive message. I thought I’d write about a few of them.

(Note that there are a few mild spoilers below; this is a guide for parents, rather than necessarily for players. If you’re a video game enthusiast you should have played these all by now…)

Beyond Good and Evil

(PS2, Xbox, Gamecube (or Wii), Windows)

This game is something of a cult classic, though it sold badly on initial release. Designed by French software house Ubisoft, it’s a 3D third-person action-adventure in a mostly open world, with some puzzle solving. The protagonist, Jade, is a female journalist investigating the activities of a military dictatorship which has emerged to defend the planet Hillys from an apparent alien invasion. Jade mostly relies on sneaking around and collecting photographic evidence, though she does resort to martial arts when necessary.

I have the PS2 version, and I strongly recommend the game, even though the PS2 version was the most criticized. For what it’s worth, I didn’t have any problems with the frame rate or other alleged shortcomings. Metacritic scores are 83% or higher for all platforms.

Like most cult games, BG&E commands a hefty price for a new copy, but used copies in good condition can be tracked down. You can also rent the Windows version on Steam or GameTap. Rated T for Teen.

Psychonauts

(PS2, Xbox, Windows)

Another cult game, this time from Tim Schaffer. Also another 3D third-person action adventure with puzzle solving. The protagonist this time is a psychically gifted kid named Raz, who runs away from the circus to sneak into a summer camp and try to become a Psychonaut. Before long, he must psychically journey into the minds of various disturbed individuals in order to heal their minds. Each person’s insanity manifests as a different surreal world with its own logic and graphical style.

Again, I played the PS2 version. I found it worthy of the praise it has been given (Metacritic scores in the high 80s on all platforms), though the final circus/tightrope world was infuriatingly difficult and spoiled an otherwise delightful experience. Unlike BG&E, I didn’t keep my copy.

Commands an even higher price than BG&E, and you’ll pay like-new prices for a good used copy. Rated T for Teen.

Ico

(PS2 only)

Third person action-adventure, again, but with a more distant look that often resembles classic isometric games. The most graphically beautiful game on the PS2, in my view, and one of the most sadly overlooked when it was new. Now commands premium pricing even for a used copy. (No, I’m not selling mine.)

The young boy Ico, apparently born with horns, wakes up in a mysterious ancient fortress. He is forced to go on a perilous quest to save himself and a young girl who is apparently some sort of princess. On the way, he learns about the mystery of what the fortress is for, and why he was placed there.

The game is mostly environmental puzzles. Monsters are the spirits of the dead manifesting as black smoke, and they are driven away with a simple wooden stick or torch. Rated T for Teen, because although it’s less violent than the above games, it’s creepier.

Okami

(PS2, Wii)

Another video game which was unfairly overlooked by players on initial release, in spite of winning numerous awards, this one has the advantage that you can buy it new for a reasonable price. A 3D third-person action-adventure steeped heavily in Japanese mythology.

The graphics are unlike any other game, with cel-shaded animation and textures inspired by Japanese ink and wash painting. The protagonist is Amaterasu, the Shinto sun goddess, who manifests as a wolf and attempts to lift a curse that has fallen on her native land. Combat is carried out, and puzzles solved, by painting mystical brush strokes on canvas using the celestial brush. This game mechanic makes the game a natural for the Wii’s remote, and I kinda wish I hadn’t played the PS2 version so I could play the Wii one fresh.

Rated T for Teen. There were a couple of instances of smutty innuendo that made me raise an eyebrow, but I suspect a kid would have missed them. There’s also some cleavage and a little partial nudity. Not a game for Christian conservatives, but then again they probably wouldn’t like all the Japanese gods either. Somewhat slow to start, and probably not a good game for anyone who lacks patience.

If there is anything else that I can do for you, which is required by law, don’t hesitate to call my office. If it isn’t required by law then don’t bother asking, because I think that you’re a worthless piece of s**t and I wouldn’t p**s on you if you were on fire (my opinion). You’re a poor, lonely, jealous, old man with aspirations of being a writer. You write your lies and uneducated opinions on people and issues from behind the safety of your slobber stained keyboard with the hope that somebody will read them that doesn’t know you and believe that you’re more than the pitiful, broke-down, lizard-looking thing that you are, in my opinion. Get a life old man. On second thought, don’t bother.

I do have a question for you. Do you have family and if so do they even like you?

—Mayor Jim Kalb of Portsmouth, Ohio.

Followup story:

Asked if he regretted his language, Kalb replied: “I regret that he made it public. That was between him and me. It’s a bit harsh, but it was between him and me.”

I’ve seen a few people start saying that we shouldn’t be worrying about the misdeeds of AIG and other bailout recipients, because the problem we face makes their sleaze look trivial.

Sure, AIG paid its employees massive bonuses after receiving bailout funds. Yes, the bonuses were even bigger than they admitted, an average of about a million dollars per person, going to the very people who destroyed the company, the folks in Joseph Cassano’s financial products division. But hey, it’s only $400 million, and we’re talking about a trillion dollar problem here, right?

Sure, AIG is also suing the government to try and get back tax it tried to avoid by using illegal offshore accounts with names like Lumagrove, Laperouse and Foppingadreef. Sure, they’re paying for the lawsuit using taxpayer dollars, and the cost of the defense will be born by the taxpayer as well—but hey, it’s only another $306 million plus both sets of lawyer fees, and we’re talking about a trillion dollar problem here, right?

OK, it may be true that half the banks we’ve bailed out didn’t bother to pay their taxes last year. And yes, their CEOs lied about it. But hey, it’s only another $220 million, and we’re talking about a trillion dollar problem here, right?

Yes, JPMorgan Chase is taking bailout money and buying two new luxury corporate jets and building “the premiere corporate aircraft hangar on the eastern seaboard”. But hey, it’s only another $138 million, and we’re talking about a trillion dollar problem here, right?

Granted, MorganStanley has 158 subsidiaries in the Cayman Islands in order to dodge taxes, yet turns around and asks for tax dollars. Yes, they’re paying themselves $10.7 billion in bonuses, almost exactly the amount they’re getting in bailout cash. Yes, the offshort accounts of MorganStanley and other banks are estimated to be costing the taxpayer a few billion dollars a year. However, we’re talking about a trillion dollar problem here, right?

Well, to update a phrase widely but falsely attributed to Senator Everett Dirksen: a few hundred million here, a few billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money.

Consider it this way: Suppose you’re unemployed, and having difficulty making your mortgage payments. While you’re sitting at the table trying to balance your finances, someone breaks in through your front door, walks up, grabs your wallet, and starts walking away with it.

Apparently the right thing to do is say “Oh, hey, that’s pretty blatant–but he’s only stealing $100 in my wallet, and I’m facing a $300,000 headache, so I’ll just ignore it. I have more important things to worry about.”

Then when the next guy wanders in and tries to steal your TV, you’re supposed to ignore that too, because your problem is so much bigger and more important than such a petty triviality.

Well, I guess I’m crazy, because I think a financial crisis is exactly the time to put the smackdown on anyone who tries to rip you off.

I didn’t want to see a bailout in the first place. We should have done what every other country in the same situation has done to get out of it—nationalize the banks, fire the people who caused the mess, and then privatize the banks again once things settle down. (Listen to recent This American Life episodes and NPR podcasts for the background.)

If we must have a bailout, then the very least we should do is make sure that we don’t get ripped off. If we let Wall Street get away with it this time, imagine how much worse they’ll be afterwards, and how much worse the next resulting crisis will be. I seriously think that AIG should be liquidated. It’s time for President Obama and other lawmakers to play hardball. They need to send a message to the CEOs of the banks, showing that not only are they not getting their bonuses, but they may be losing their jobs unless they start a program of radical austerity and honesty.

Rush Limbaugh opines :

There was a promise from the Obama administration, the new era of responsibility and transparency, that all such legislation would be posted on the Internet for five days so that the public could read what is being voted on.  Ain’t going to happen.  In addition, they have reformatted the bill.  They’ve made it a PDF file when they posted it.  Now, for those of you that don’t use computers, basically what that means is that it cannot be keyword searched.  A PDF file is essentially a picture of a page, and so you can read every page but you cannot keyword search it.  It’s not a text file as legislation normally is, as posted on these public websites.

Meanwhile in reality, here’s where you can find the text of the bill .

The Republicans in Congress have issued a list of stimulus package line items they consider wasteful . Looking at the list, it’s pretty easy to deduce how Republicans see the world: anything related to energy efficiency, pollution reduction, government infrastructure or public health is "wasteful".

Oh, sure, there are a few stupid items. $246m for Hollywood to buy film with is a waste of money; there are already more crappy Hollywood movies being released than anyone wants to go watch, and film is a dying technology anyway. Better would be to spend $246m on grants for independent movies and tax breaks for digital upgrades to cameras and movie theaters.

Then there’s $2b for clean coal. If you think it won’t work, it’s a dangerous distraction. If you think it will work, it’s a great idea–but still fantastically expensive and unlikely to produce energy at affordable prices. So yeah, that’s a bit of a waste of money.

I suppose you could argue that reducing substance abuse amongst Native Americans will harm the already-suffering alcohol, tobacco and illegal drug industries, but I’m going to give the Republicans the benefit of the doubt and assume that’s not the actual point they’re making. Similarly, floods are good for the GDP, but I doubt that’s the reason why spending money on flood reduction projects is being described as wasteful.

But overall, considering that the purpose of a Keynsian stimulus package is to spend government money on buying stuff and employing people, most of these items fit the bill. Several also help shore up and improve vital infrastructure.

So what would a non-wasteful stimulus bill look like, according to the Republican party? Go on, take a guess. I think maybe you can predict the answer.

It’s H.R. 470, the "Economic Recovery and Middle-Class Tax Relief Act of 2009". And if you take a look you’ll see that it’s one or two trillion dollars of tax cuts, plus a token 1% spending cut on discretionary government spending. It includes a couple of the usual hobby horses: repealing the AMT and cutting capital gains taxes, both utterly irrelevant to the current situation. (If there’s anyone out there who has capital gains this year and is worrying about AMT, I’d like to know who his fund manager is.)

We had eight years of tax cuts. They failed to prevent the crash. The Republican response seems to be "Tax cuts didn’t work? Well, it’s because we didn’t cut them enough! More tax cuts!" Still, looking at their speeches about the evils of the Obama stimulus plan, it’s nice to see them belatedly taking an interest in the budget deficit, considering they were the ones who ran it up to the highest level in recorded history.

The Wall Street Journal offers an opinion piece from Michael Stokes Paulsen stating that the Minnesota election of Al Franken is unconstitutional, based on Bush vs Gore (2000).

I don’t have any strong opinion on whether Franken or Coleman should be declared winner, not having followed all of the shenanigans. However, there are two things that spring out from the article.

The first is that Paulsen ignores the fact that the Supreme Court said that "Our consideration is limited to the present circumstances…", and was not to be used as prededent. You’d think that a professor of law would know that minor detail of the highest profile legal case of the last 10 years, given that it was mentioned in most of the press coverage.

The second thing that struck me was the following quote:

The problem with the remedy was that it arguably violated the same principle that led the Court to invalidate the recount: the need to treat all votes equally. It had the practical effect of awarding the election to Bush (though subsequent media counts confirmed that Bush won anyway, under any uniform standard). This has led to enduring partisan criticism of the case, some fair and some unfair.

Note the comment I’ve highlighted. Wikipedia has a nice summary of the Florida recounts , and a quick perusal shows that what Paulsen states is the exact opposite of the truth. In the first media consortium recount, under every uniform statewide recount scenario Gore won Florida. The only way to get a Bush win is to have a non-uniform standard by only re-evaluating a limited number of ballots.

The second media review cited by Wikipedia, run by BDO Seidman, held that if you recount the votes by the strictest standard, Gore won. The third media review found that either Bush or Gore won, depending on whether you made an attempt to determine the meaning of apparent overvotes such as those caused by the poor ballot design. (If you did, and used a consistent standard, Gore won.)

So Paulsen’s throwaway comment assuring us that Bush won fair and square is the exact opposite of the truth. If the votes in Florida had all been counted according to a declared uniform standard, Gore would have won. The only reason Bush won is that a statewide uniform recount wasn’t performed. It’s important that we remember that.

(Still, what do you expect from a Murdoch rag?)

Chicago Tribune:

The U.S. Supreme Court will consider Friday whether to take up a lawsuit challenging President-elect Barack Obama’s U.S. citizenship, a continuation of a New Jersey case embraced by some opponents of Obama’s election.

But this isn’t just any normal political theory. After Internet blowhards started circulating rumors that Obama was born in Kenya, the Obama campaign published a scan of his birth certificate.

So the wingnuts moved on to claiming that the scan was a cunning Photoshop fake. They said that the black rectangle covering the certificate number was deeply suspicious, as was the lack of a state seal.

So factcheck.org had their people personally inspect the birth certificate, and take high resolution digital photos showing the embossed state seal, and the redacted certificate number.

The Director of Health for Hawaii has issued a statement saying that she and her deputy also personally inspected the state’s copy of Obama’s birth certificate, and found it to be genuine.

People have even tracked down the birth announcement published in the Honolulu Advertiser, available in the microfilm archives in Hawaii libraries, and published a scan of that.

All of which puts the lawsuit into hilarious tinfoil hat conspiracy theory territory. We’re asked to believe that not only did the Obama campaign fake a legal document and sneak copies into the state archives, they also went to the libraries that have copies of the Honolulu Advertiser in their archives and made sure the microfilm was replaced with edited film images, no doubt carefully aged to look genuine. Or perhaps Barack Obama immigrated from Kenya and took the identity of the real Barack Obama, murdering him and disposing of the body–that would explain why he doesn’t look like a Muslim, right?

Yeah, that’s the kind of theory the Supreme Court may decide to evaluate on Friday. So for maximum amusement value, let’s hope they take on the case, then lay the smackdown–because obviously that would prove that even the Supreme Court has been inducted into the conspiracy.

Inspired by an awesome FARK thread:

I skipped the presidential debate, but I think I might watch the VP debate. If Caribou Barbie really is as bad as rumors say, there could be lulz.

"The notion of a rigid separation between church and state has no basis in either the text of the Constitution or the writings of our Founding Fathers." — Ron Paul.

"The goal of the Constitution Party is to restore American jurisprudence to its Biblical foundations and to limit the federal government to its Constitutional boundaries. [...] The U.S. Constitution established a Republic rooted in Biblical law, administered by representatives who are Constitutionally elected by the citizens." — "Constitution" Party platform.