seattleSavant.com

I wanted to make a different kind of gaming best-of list this year, but it’s hard. Indie gaming is growing, but there’s just not enough for a catch-all critical list like you’d find at Pitchfork Media for music. But I do my best for now. Here, you will not find Metal Gear Solid 4, LittleBigPlanet, Wii Fit, or most any other bloated crapware in this list. Sorry. I did mention a couple of those in my buyers’ guide a few weeks ago, and I apologize for that as well.

Best Gaming Award: “Soulja Boy Award for Games To Play If You Drink And Get Drunk or Smoke And Get High”
GiantBomb.com isn’t great, but it is good.

Best Interactive Art: Braid
No release this year better combines creative puzzles and artistic design with an emotional goal. It’s remarkable when you press a button to make time rewind in Braid. It’s more remarkable when, a few levels in, your attempts at memory recall are jumbled because some things don’t follow you to the past. And when the character’s emotional toil in the game catches up to express why this gameplay trick exists? The result is beyond literary.

But there’s an important question to ask before diving in: when you close your eyes, can you see exactly how the original Mario jumps? His bounce, his weight, his gravity? You better, because this game demands that you jump all over the place, carefully, repeatedly, in tricky situations. Rewinding time helps here, but old-school frustration doesn’t do Braid’s storytelling any favors. Oh well. Still incredible.

Best Toy: World of Goo
On the other end of the spectrum—games as shameless toys—World of Goo wins handily. You’re given clumps of stringy goo and are told to build towers, bridges, and ladders from point A to point B. Cartoony architecture. But you can’t just throw digital Legos on a screen and expect success; here, half the fun is in the learning curve. Each new type of goo and each gameplay tweak is eased into the game so that most puzzles serve as an instruction manual without the player realizing it. The strain-to-satisfaction ratio is divine as a result, helped even more by a unified, quirky aesthetic experience that’s more Seussian than any motion picture tribute in the past decade. With everything WoG gets right, consider it a living design primer.

Most Inconvenient Game to Love: Left 4 Dead
Do not play this game alone. Do not play this game with anonymous assholes on the Internet. Fanboys have complained about L4D’s relatively small size, but there’s a reason—it’s hard to round up three other friends for this game’s hour-long zombie kill-gasms, and you need a four-strong team to make it work. And as a short-burst group game, L4D spends its resources not on more maps, but on the thrilling bits that have made it infinitely replayable since its release last month. The game’s balanced thrills do not wane. Shame that they damn near require a LAN setup in the basement—pizza is not optional.

Best Arcade Game: Primeval Hunt
At Seattle’s GameWorks, Big Buck Hunter meets Jurassic Park. Not a typo; this showed up in town maybe a month or so ago. Shoot a Diplodocus in the head with a crossbow. Nail a T-Rex in its abdomen with a shotgun. Jonah will never have to write one of these posts again.

Best Game to Play Badly: Burnout Paradise
You can play this racing game the “right” way—win races, pull off stunt runs—and have a fine time. But Burnout Paradise is far more fun as a wreckfest. Fling your SUV off a bridge into a rocky river. Drive to the top of a parking garage and try to jump your car on top of a bus. Earn the super-powered van and clear the roads with your Bub Rub driving skills. It’s the best-looking driving game of the year, which makes endless wrecks through a massive gameworld all the more satisfying. I have played no game more this year than Burnout Paradise.

Most Interesting PS3 Game: Pixeljunk Eden
The PS3 is a disaster, which is sad, because Sony’s Santa Monica studio has been quietly pumping out gold for the thing—typically cutesy, 2D designs under the Pixeljunk moniker. Their Monsters game is a cool mod on the Desktop Tower Defense craze, but Eden, whoa boy. You hop around a living screensaver, revealing floral forms across the screen that you then hop and swing along. Up to three can play together. Music’s awesome; progression is breezy and rewarding. Nothing transcendental here, but you’re wasting your PS3 if you miss this.

Best Game For Assholes: Fallout 3
You can blow up an entire fucking town. And you should, asshole. Quit griefing me in online games, and go screw with the virtual citizens of post-nuclear Washington, DC instead. Fallout 3 has hookers, booze, and makeshift rocket launchers, too. Combine all three and write to Dan about it.

Most Interesting Wii Game: Cubello
This WiiWare puzzler isn’t perfect, but who wants another recommendation for Smash Bros. or Mario Kart? For $6, you can get the first great 3D mod to the Puyo Puyo/falling-blocks puzzle genre. Cubello is a rare bit of joy in the Wii’s otherwise awful 2008. Maybe Nintendo will smarten up and pound out a sequel next year, fixing blatant errors and adding an obvious multiplayer mode. Or maybe they’ll fart out Wii Music 2: Caribbean Queen, and I will shit my heart in exasperation.

Best Fighter: Hulk Hands
No, I do not mean some Incredible Hulk video game. Go buy Hulk Hands and punch your friends in real life. Until someone makes a fighting game that does something new—uses the Wii remote for motion-controlled combat, or uses analog sticks to control individual limbs—everything else is a rehash, and you’re better off with fake, green glove-fists. If you disagree, you are a fanboy who already owns Favorite Fighting Game Part 7, so what do you care?

Most Interesting DS Game: Space Invaders Extreme
Space Invaders finally gets some speed and replayability, and it’s not a bastard to figure out. Play it to shoot stuff, or learn the new combo systems and go nutty for the high score. Professor Layton is a very close second, even if the game is worthless after one playthrough. And the new Phantasy Star game out this week in Japan is a treat—here’s to hoping it sees American release next year.

Most Interesting DS “Lifestyle Application”: KORG DS-10
Lots of dinky, adult-focused stuff on the DS lately—like when CD games first came out for PC, and all you’d find on shelves were Mavis Beacon and Encarta. Guh. Same thing nowadays, with Jamie Oliver Cooking and the Quit Smoking game topping the current DS lists, but stuff like the fully-fledged KORG synthesizer actually proves worthwhile, as its touch-screen techno party is a rare case of requiring the DS. My hope for 2009? That the Quit Smoking game gets a sequel done in the style of those weird boy-boy touch-fests for Japanese DSes. You wouldn’t want your habit to disappoint poor, shirtless Yahto, would you?

Most Interesting Gaming Machine: Xbox 360
The Xbox 360’s Community Games portal is a monster, and it’s the perfect platform to attract indie developers with any hope of making money, a huge contrast to piracy-stricken PC development. There are other big games on the Xbox as well, sure, and its Xbox Live Arcade selection is stellar, but the community portal is the most hopeful thing a major gaming corporation has done since id Software welcomed game modders with open arms in the mid-90s.

Worry not, computer purists. This award will go back to the PC as soon as someone comes up with an MMO that doesn’t hang for dear life from Dungeons and Dragons’ fender.

This just in to the Dear Science SNOWPOCALYPSE 2008 ™ (Hannukah eve again, bitches) crisis center war room control:

Dear Science,
Do AWD or 4WD help me STOP my vehicle faster in inclement weather? I’ve always assumed that even with my extra weight and wider tires this was true… hence my absent mindedness when tailgating other drivers and driving 5mph above the posted speed limit (cops are too busy dealing with traffic accidents to be shooting a radar gun anyway) when it snows.

Thanks Dear Science!

Your all-wheel or four-wheel drive does not help you stop or steer. It only helps you reach a speed at which you will be unable to control anything. So, stop tailgating. Stop now. Stop. Park your car and stop. Stop. Do not drive. Stop. Go home and eat soup. Have you stopped yet?

If you want the science, read on at dearscience.org.

But here’s what you need to know: The amount of frictional force generated by your tires determines how fast you can change the speed of your car–up or down–and how fast you can turn. The less friction, the slower you can make your car change speed or direction. Snow and ice on the road reduce the friction.

Let’s play this out. You’re attempting to go up Denny Way, despite the road closed sign. Your (idiotic) strategy? Floor it, fuckers!

Just before you start, your tires are still stuck to the road; that’s static friction. You press the gas all the way down, causing the tires to apply a huge force to the road, speeding you up a bit. Pretty quickly, this force exceeds the modest static frictional force your tires are producing. They start to spin. Force exceeding the static friction dumps you into kinetic friction, and that means you’re slipping.

Not only is your car not going forward, now you cannot steer or stop as you slowly drift into a pole. You panic and slam on the brakes, figuring you should at least be able to stop since the brakes worked a few seconds ago. But they don’t. Because the kinetic friction generated by your tires is so much less than the static friction you had to work with before, even the modest force generated by braking exceeds it.

Once your tires start slipping, it’s really difficult to get them stuck to the road again. The solution? Do things slowly. Accelerate slowly. Turn slowly. Brake slowly. Go unbearably slow, slow enough that the forces you’re applying to turn, accelerate or brake are less than static friction.

If you start to skid, you’re told to take your feet off the gas/brakes and turn into the skid. And now you know why–because you want your tires moving at about the speed your car is moving relative to the road, which shifts you back from kinetic friction to static. Then you’re back in charge and can start steering.

And this is why tailgating is such a profoundly bad idea. If you try to stop too quickly, you’ll totally lose control and fuck over someone more responsible than you. Stop.

Lips
(Microsoft/iNiS, Xbox 360)

I’d like to prattle about the potential of Lips, Microsoft’s first-ever karaoke game, but I’m just as tempted to merely say that my family adored it, and my nerdy friends did not.

Mom and sis each had favorites out of the 40 songs spread across all genres (John Denver and Rihanna, respectively). They liked the songs’ original videos as the backdrop while they sang; they liked the focus on duets and people taking turns singing; they liked the no-fail aspect and not having to “unlock” any songs. And they liked having a reasonable scoring system that proved the “winner” on a given song’s duet.

On the other hand, I’ve had short spurts of play that ran out of steam quickly with friends. Like when Savant co-creator Jon Golob came by and put his special atonal twist on Destiny’s Child and “Survivor.” You have a limited song selection, not much progression for solo play, and a lack of Rock Band’s bells and whistles. Fun, full of laughs, but brief. (Though if each copy of the game came with a shlub who badly sang the Beyonce tracks, replay value might skyrocket.)

I should note that Singstar on the PS3 is just about the same. Licensed songs with videos. Duets. Easy to learn and use. You probably don’t own both of these game consoles—and if you do, you’re possibly not the target audience for owning every karaoke game ever made. So, sure, you’ll be fine with either, though Lips has a couple of things going for it. First off are its slick microphones. Wireless is good; motion-controlled “dance moves” are not, as the sensors in the things aren’t perfect. You can ignore the dance stuff, and well you should. Lips also has some cheeky battle modes, which I tend to ignore, but they’re there if you really want to make your on-screen avatars, um, kiss.

More interesting is the ability to import songs from a networked PC or an MP3 player. The game will sift through whatever’s connected to the Xbox, show a list of songs, and let you pick favorites to import. Bad news—no lyrics or official music videos are on the screen while singing these songs. You’ll have to bust out a laptop, Google a given song’s lyrics, and wing it.

If you’re okay with that hurdle, Lips’ vocal recognition is pretty durn good. In repeat tests on imported MP3 songs, the scoring reflected who was superior—even after I attempted to cheat my way to a win by mouthing the guitar noises in a song or two, since the game will give you points for any noise you make mid-song. Besides, why pay $2 per track—TWO BUCKS, REALLY??—when you can rig up the iPod and have a Beatles karaoke-off for free instead? The official Lips song store for extra songs is currently barren, so MS is making your mind up for you there.

Once the iPod’s in the equation, you can use Lips as a party’s stereo system, and the game’s promo videos encourage this. Import your favorites to the game, delete the default game songs you don’t like (peace out, Trace Adkins), and hit “jukebox.” Your Xbox will then play all of its tunes on shuffle mode. During a party, if people decide they’re drunk enough for karaoke, they can shake the remotes and get a duet battle going for whatever song is playing. Or you can totally ignore the Xbox and let it play on as a stereo system, no harm, no foul. It’s this implementation that kinda blows my mind—treating Lips as a party centerpiece, rather than a dedicated game, makes more sense when you consider that the title has nothing in the way of progression, unlockables, or other typical game shit.

But what are you paying for, then? Two nice microphones, a half-decent set of songs that’ll run out of steam too quickly, and a chance to sing over songs on your iPod without lyrics on the screen to help you along. The potential for an infinite karaoke machine is interesting, but the hassle makes it less than ideal, and I gotta wonder if another, less massive company would’ve greenlit the ability to type in your own lyrics and give the import feature actual legs. Still, for a music game without the intimidation of plastic drums and guitars, Lips is slick and interesting enough, and Mom still loves it, so I guess Microsoft deserves credit for a decent music product… for once.

The big Hank Paulson-lead bailout has failed by all objective measures. It’s a complete, trillion dollar, failure.

(For those of you needing a refresher, here’s the present crisis in a nutshell. The banks, filled with lazy and overpaid assholes, fucked up. Trillions of dollars in money that could not be lost, were shoveled into pyramid schemes that, inevitably, collapsed. Burnt, and well aware of their total incompetence at what should be the easiest task imaginable (lending at 6%, paying out depositors at 3%, pocketing the difference), the banks stopped lending to just about everyone. Businesses suddenly had their lines of credit evaporate. Lines of credit are critical for almost all companies to function on a daily basis.

In order to restart this sort of critical lending, Paulson shoveled money into the hands of the banker fuckups—paying taxpayer dollars for the detritus from the failed pyramid schemes, buying chunks of their failed banks with the same pool of cash and so on. The banks still didn’t lend, and continued to freeze lines of credit. Without credit, businesses were forced to rapidly shrink and scale back, leading to the largest monthly job losses in decades.)

In other words, the economic team of these waning days of the Bush administration are like Slim Pickins in Dr. Strangelove:

Obama’s crisis management plan—laid out this weekend-is better, but still does little to solve the underlying dynamic that lead to this disaster. In other words, Slim Pickins again:

Americans have been living beyond their means, right? That’s the line we’ve been fed. We’re just adjusting, being forced down to earth after decades of flying higher than our wings could support. It’s an odd explanation, a bit like telling someone dying of cancer that their problem was letting the cancer go metastatic. “Why’d you allow those cancer cells spread all over? That’s your problem right there!”

For most of the Americans drowning in debt, it wasn’t extravagance that lead to their downfall. It was the mundane—trying to keep themselves living indoors, to return themselves to health, to educate themselves—that precipitated collapse. In real dollar terms, Americans have been paid steadily less for decades. As wages for work decreased, costs of living increased. The typical worker in the United States has no more control of this dynamic than the weather.

It’s not like the productivity—how much a worker can get done for a given amount of money—of American workers has declined. In fact, this period of stagnated and declining wages corresponds to a time of fantastic increase in American worker productivity. Americans, going over the lip of this collapse, are among the world’s most productive people—second only to the Norwegians.

Yes, American workers tend to be expensive in absolute terms. It doesn’t matter. This productivity, by definition, means American workers should be some of the most competitive in the world—capable of producing more for less than just about any other person. American workers—factory lineworkers, service industry workers, agricultural workers earn their high wages by being better at their jobs than just about anyone else on the planet. Those are the numbers.

If “free-trade” worked, Americans should be among the winners. And yet, the United States accrues a massive, growing and ongoing trade deficit year after year.

It’s this imbalance, more dollars leaving the United States in trade for goods and services than return, that is at the rotting core of the present fiasco. As a consequence, our trade partners built up massive piles of dollars—dollars that had to be invested by government bureaucrats, who gave the money to self-aggrandizing idiots on Wall Street, who promptly shoveled the dollars into get-rich-quick schemes.

Why can’t Americans sell goods abroad? How does China, whose workers don’t even make it into the top fifty of productivity, maintain a massive trade deficit? Manipulation.

Nearly a year ago, I wrote on this very question after reading an exemplary Atlantic Monthly article lucidly describing the mechanism and effect of these manipulations by James Fallows.

Here’s James’ description:

Let’s say you buy an Oral-B electric toothbrush for $30 at a CVS in the United States. I choose this example because I’ve seen a factory in China that probably made the toothbrush. Most of that $30 stays in America, with CVS, the distributors, and Oral-B itself. Eventually $3 or so—an average percentage for small consumer goods—makes its way back to southern China.

When the factory originally placed its bid for Oral-B’s business, it stated the price in dollars: X million toothbrushes for Y dollars each. But the Chinese manufacturer can’t use the dollars directly. It needs RMB—to pay the workers their 1,200-RMB ($160) monthly salary, to buy supplies from other factories in China, to pay its taxes. So it takes the dollars to the local commercial bank—let’s say the Shenzhen Development Bank. After showing receipts or waybills to prove that it earned the dollars in genuine trade, not as speculative inflow, the factory trades them for RMB.

This is where the first controls kick in. In other major countries, the counterparts to the Shenzhen Development Bank can decide for themselves what to do with the dollars they take in. Trade them for euros or yen on the foreign-exchange market? Invest them directly in America? Issue dollar loans? Whatever they think will bring the highest return. But under China’s “surrender requirements,” Chinese banks can’t do those things. They must treat the dollars, in effect, as contraband, and turn most or all of them (instructions vary from time to time) over to China’s equivalent of the Federal Reserve Bank, the People’s Bank of China, for RMB at whatever is the official rate of exchange.

With thousands of transactions per day, the dollars pile up like crazy at the PBOC. More precisely, by more than a billion dollars per day. They pile up even faster than the trade surplus with America would indicate, because customers in many other countries settle their accounts in dollars, too.

The PBOC must do something with that money, and current Chinese doctrine allows it only one option: to give the dollars to another arm of the central government, the State Administration for Foreign Exchange. It is then SAFE’s job to figure out where to park the dollars for the best return: so much in U.S. stocks, so much shifted to euros, and the great majority left in the boring safety of U.S. Treasury notes.

And thus our dollar comes back home. Spent at CVS, passed to Oral-B, paid to the factory in southern China, traded for RMB at the Shenzhen bank, “surrendered” to the PBOC, passed to SAFE for investment, and then bid at auction for Treasury notes, it is ready to be reinjected into the U.S. money supply and spent again—ideally on Chinese-made goods.

At no point did an ordinary Chinese person decide to send so much money to America. In fact, at no point was most of this money at his or her disposal at all. These are in effect enforced savings…

Both James and I publicly wondered how this imbalance would unravel—gracefully or in a sudden and sharp panic. For the former to happen, the Chinese government would have to recognize that such schemes are unsustainable. They didn’t. It’s ending now in the panic.

To this very moment, a scant 35% of China’s gross domestic product is consumed by Chinese people—down from about 50% in the 1980’s. That’s astonishingly low.

If Chinese workers and factory owners were allowed to keep more of what they earn, everyone would benefit. The Chinese would be able to enjoy a plusher life, as well as the trappings of a modern industrial society (such as, ahem, pollution controls and nonpoisonous infant formula.) Some of these goods would be made by Americans—such as smokestack pollutant scrubbers—starting a proper flow of goods back and forth between the countries—rather than just a huge pile of dollars growing on one side. China, as a trading partner, must become more like Canada.

The US government printing dollars, to maintain the illusion for a short bit longer that ongoing trade deficits don’t matter, won’t fix the global economy. Nor will throwing more Americans into poverty. Instead, ending this crisis will require the Chinese to become wealthier. That’s the policy we should focus on, rewriting trade deals and industrial policy to make it so, if we are to ever recover.

A few months ago, after testing the new Animal Crossing game for the Wii — Nintendo’s cutesy “life sim” where the fun is in the mundane — I yawned and passed on seeking a review copy. What story could I break? Same game as the last version: wander around a little town, grow fruit trees, talk to virtual neighbors, buy decorations, obsess over feng shui. Meant to be played in 5-10 minute chunks on a daily basis, so it was an interesting twist in 2005. Now, not so much.

Boy, do I feel dumb bailing on that press racket. I could’ve gotten the limited, press-only nigga edition.

(image lifted from Kotaku’s report)

Explanation’s in order: Nintendo wanted game writers to test the new version’s wireless function, in which it talks to the older DS version. So the company mailed out old DS carts and loaded them with an employee’s complete “save file,” full of “rare” game items and new virtual neighbors.

In the DS version, you can customize the neighbors’ text—give them new exclamations, make them give you nicknames. Creative gamers can get over that part’s vulgarity filter, as evidenced by this press copy’s use of the ñ and á. Two outlets have already confirmed getting the same chatty sheep; lord knows how many of these editions were sent out to “mainstream” outlets.

Jonah, I know you’re tops on the fired Nintendo employee beat, so have at it. But I don’t bring this up to join the overreaction party. This is pretty fucking stupid on Nintendo’s part, but far as I’m concerned, there’s a lot more gaming content out there that gets away with wanking on racial stereotypes. Have you seen the commercial for Call of Duty 5, in which a Japanese narrator talks about seeking revenge while a bright-eyed white kid with a Wii controller flashes on the screen, creating his own mental version of World War II on the spot? How about Saint’s Row 2, the Grand Theft Auto clone that overjoys in racially insensitive content, then throws out the word “satire” in a lame attempt to claim innocence?

And, good Christ, what about the “hip-hop” options tossed into the shitfest that is Wii Music?

Federal regulators announced late Sunday night that the government had approved a radical plan to stabilize Citigroup in an arrangement in which the government could soak up billions of dollars in losses at the struggling bank. President Bush said on Monday that more such rescues could be arranged if they became necessary.
….
The complex rescue plan calls for the government to back about $306 billion in loans and securities and directly invest about $20 billion in Citigroup. The plan, emerging after a harrowing week in the financial markets, is the government’s third effort in three months to contain the deepening economic crisis and may presage other multibillion-dollar financial rescues.

Nominally, in my posts this would be the time where I make a nicely reasoned discussion of the negatives and positives of the latest action. I can’t. I’m apoplectic–consumed with rage beyond rational thought.

Citigroup is eponymous for the sort of financial bullshit that sank all of us–the entire fucking global economy–into what is increasingly likely to be a decade (or decades) long period of abject misery. I. Cannot. Even. Start.

In 1998, the formation of Citigroup unilaterally ended the Depression-era Glass-Steagall act. That’s right, this fucking financial monstrosity simply decided a cornerstone of American financial regulation shouldn’t exist, and acted accordingly.

At a dinner in Washington in February 1998, Sandy Weill of Travelers invites Citicorp’s John Reed to his hotel room at the Park Hyatt and proposes a merger. In March, Weill and Reed meet again, and at the end of two days of talks, Reed tells Weill, “Let’s do it, partner!”

On April 6, 1998, Weill and Reed announce a $70 billion stock swap merging Travelers (which owned the investment house Salomon Smith Barney) and Citicorp (the parent of Citibank), to create Citigroup Inc., the world’s largest financial services company, in what was the biggest corporate merger in history.

The transaction would have to work around regulations in the Glass-Steagall and Bank Holding Company acts governing the industry, which were implemented precisely to prevent this type of company: a combination of insurance underwriting, securities underwriting, and commecial banking. The merger effectively gives regulators and lawmakers three options: end these restrictions, scuttle the deal, or force the merged company to cut back on its consumer offerings by divesting any business that fails to comply with the law.

The lawmakers–lead by professional Republican asshole Phil Gramm, triangularization expert Rubin and President Clinton–moved out the way.

It took a decade for the repeal of these protections to crater the economy.

And now they want a bailout. The same fucking management team, the same collection of self-important idiots.

Let me tell you something. I could pick twenty random people off the street, hand them a billion dollars each, and I’d be confident they’d create a better bank than these shitheads. And if these random men and women fucked up, I’m absolutely certain their collective mistakes would total less than $300 billion. Starting a bank, particularly an inept and greedy bank isn’t that fucking hard.

In comparison, the shitty management teams running other US companies–the airlines, the auto companies, the energy companies–are pure amateurs at colossal fiascoes. Even the guys who green lit the AMC Gremlin? Better at their fucking jobs.

Citigroup attempted to cover up their losses–their own epic fuckups–through the government financed purchase of Watchovia. Only Wells Fargo’s last minute bid revealed their latest deceptive depravity. The morons at Citigroup couldn’t even build a headquarters successfully.

I’m heading home to Detroit in a few days, for Thanksgiving, where I will witness firsthand the agonal struggles of your countrymen to feed, clothe and house themselves–people who have done nothing but work hard, design well, and vote to care for one another. They’re, we’re, failing–with no bailout in sight.

Citigroup just got theirs.

Apoplectic

This week, National Geographic announced it would publish its first-ever video game: Africa. Sony released this photography game in Japan on the PS3 but thought Western gamers would have a distaste for its pacifism. Going on safari, looking at semi-realistic African wildlife, and not hunting it all to extinction with a rifle? A-hyuck.

Having been to Uganda, I have watched this title for some time, and I’m glad NG is taking the risk of bringing it Stateside. In many respects, Africa appears to get the experience right—the slowness, the waiting, the appreciation as time lapses and you realize the world around you doesn’t need an animal sighting to be rich. (The above trailer doesn’t reflect that, trying to make the game look tense. It’s not, thankfully.) But while Sony has tried to tout the PS3 as the ultimate 3D machine, this game only goes so far. The environments and animals look fantastic on first impression, but once you try living in it, the vegetation looks digital, and the animals interact in a robotic way. But the hyper-realistic photojournalism genre needs to happen—call it lamer than the real thing, but it’s more interesting as a game than another friggin’ shooter—and I can only hope this game’s release next year lays some groundwork.

In other news, Seattle’s Penny Arcade turned 10 this week. Congrats. Since I’m cheap, here’s your birthday gift: Your second video game is a little better than your first (reminder: I really liked the first), and I look forward to the time when I can actually sit down and play it.

Of course, same goes for Fallout 3 and Fable II, two titles that I haven’t sat with much since their release. Wuz the holdup?

Fable II (Xbox 360) lost me early on. It tries to be a lot of games—a Zelda action-quest, with swords and arrows and magic; a life sim, with friendships and karma and marriage (Fable 2 voted no on Prop 8); a money management sim where you acquire property, steal, and/or work odd jobs. You can kinda do what you want, and for people who aren’t typical gamers and like dicking around with houses and wives and whatever, that’s there for you to do, but it’s not very engaging. If you want to be a “good guy,” interacting with other people is done via expressions (wave, pose, fart, give thumbs-up gestures) and gifts. For a little kid, this may come off like a deep version of Zelda, but the game’s rated M, so there goes that. For a person with an actual social life, it’s hokey and gets old mighty quickly; there’s little of the virtual give-and-take that The Sims is obsessed with, so it feels tacked on to the action-quest stuff rather than a core mechanic worth messing with.

Or you can roll as the bad guy. That playstyle matches better with Fable II’s hokey nature—kill civilians, steal their knickknacks, and bang loose men/women (though you’ll get debilitating STDs if you don’t wrap it up).

The main game, an action quest, is a straight-line affair that you’ve played before. Looks nice, controls well, has some hidden treasures, lots of killing and magic, not many puzzles. This is where the extra stuff should hook us as players, but even being evil becomes one-dimensional after a while, and the lack of a solid story that keeps anyone’s attention is a death knell for a game so obsessed with virtue and karma.

Worth noting: you get a dog as a quest pet, but that’s as cute as you want it to be. I know people who repeatedly pet and feed their virtual dog because they love dogs, not because the game requires it. It’s a tangential gimmick, but for some people, it’s an incredible one—certainly better implemented than the pets in the world’s largest game—and that’s more than fair.

Fallout 3 (PC, PS3, Xbox 360) - I lump this in with Fable because they’re both obsessed with karma. In that comparison alone, Fallout 3 wins handily… on the surface. It’s not perfect—you can be a jerk and steal/pickpocket/hack people’s things all the time and still be called “good.” But those are petty decisions. More pronounced choices—piss someone off in conversation, give a criminal over to the police, do work for a mysterious benefactor—change the gameworld dramatically, and often surprisingly, enough so that you’ve changed your entire play experience from that point on.

It’s an overwhelming design decision. In Fallout 3, you’re in an open, post-nuclear world with a simple goal—find your dad. But this goal turns pretty epic thanks to large numbers of quests, conversations, choices, and varied environments. And the game’s not just huge; it’s playable and compelling. The story truly works, complete with serious voice-acting, a smart crew of writers, and proper presentation to keep the plot essential to the experience, not distracting or annoying. And you have full-fledged gameplay choices; you can play as a sneaky guy, a combat guy, or a conversational charmer (or a mix), and each style is discrete.

But because of this, Fallout 3 forces an immense amount of OCD onto gamers. An example: You approach a guard at a gate that you’d like to enter. You save your game, then ask him if you can get in. He gives you a few options, and you ask yourself—do I bribe him, try to charm him, kill him, or sneak around him? And you try all of these out, loading the old save file after a likely screwup. Then you get into where he was guarding and realize you could’ve tried another way, so you load the old file again. Or you kill him with a silenced pistol, get into the stronghold a long distance away through the gate, and suddenly find a bunch of people trying to kill you—how could they possibly know you were the murderer? The AI will short-circuit like this often enough to make your “real decisions” feel less than authentic, forcing yet another reload.

Fable II may have felt more linear and non-controllable, but it never got tiresome as a result. When a game gives you every option in the world, “value” and “worth” for a huge game become meaningless if the options take you out of the game in a save-load-save-load way. Your mileage may vary; for me, the way Fallout 3 punishes failure, I spent too much time watching load screens and trying, trying again.

As a huge sandbox, Grand Theft Auto IV proves better as a basic game. But as a huge quest, Fallout 3 has more content worth investing in beyond the mere stimulus-response of running around and fighting, which just about makes the OCD stuff worth slogging through. If only the two games met halfway.

There are typical things people love doing in video games—killing, solving puzzles, jumping up and down, getting pissed. More so than those, they love looking at themselves.

The Wii proved this two years ago from today, loosing “Miis” on a world starved for more mirrors. The Wii lets you craft a little 3D dude or lady, which you then take as your player character into Wii Bowling or whatever. Games have done character creation before, but with the Wii, it was the first thing you did when you powered the console, so it was a root experience. Therefore, nobody bowled as the generic brown-haired boy. Why do something so stupid, when you could spend 20 minutes perfecting your virual nose instead?

So Microsoft’s choice to update its Xbox 360 menus today, complete with virtual people-makers, probably isn’t a coincidence. And the update as a whole is pretty slick, but if the Wii “make yourself” feature seemed silly, this one seems doubly so; MS hasn’t released any games in which your dude bowls, dances, or gets into slapfights. He/she merely stands around the screen, reminding you that you indeed exist. [EDIT: These games are coming, and Kingdom of Keflings is a good example of what may come.)

Though if there's anything worth pointing out, it's that this mode's programmers are total fucking hipsters. Your clothing options are limited to layered, untucked, trendy, and Urban Outfitters-approved garb (along with what looks like Kurt's tee from the "Smells Like Teen Spirit" video). Way to go, friends in Redmond; the whole of Xbox Live will soon look like Capitol Hill.

The main brunt of the change is a menu update that borrows from the iPod's album-flipping mechanic. Hard to go ape over a menu, but this stuff shortens the time between menus and gameplay, so it's fine by me.

Better than that is the "community games" portal, which has finally been opened after months of teasing. This means garage developers can now create and submit their own Xbox games by using dirt-cheap tools and licenses from Microsoft. Once submitted for review, if enough other garage developers give a thumbs-up on MS's forums, that game'll go live on XBL in 72 hours. I tinkered with a couple of the games—one was a compelling, double-gravity version of puzzle game Columns; the other was an even worse version of Too Human. Every community game can be tried out for free with a reasonable time limit, and the full versions didn't appear to top $5. Assuming the community servers stop crapping out soon, this portal is a potential tide-turner, full of free and dirt-cheap experiments.

And Jonah and I are in agreement about the new Netflix portal. After confirming your Netflix info on an Xbox, you can load your PC's "instant queue" on your TV. This was possible before, but never so seamlessly, and while the video isn't HD-pristine, the on-demand nature and wide film/TV show selection make up for it. As a bonus, friends who share a Netflix membership will someday be able to watch movies together through the new Xbox "party" system. MST3K junkies, watch out.

Oh, I suppose I should mention—I was over at Sony's PR HQ yesterday. I received an invite, timed just before this whole Xbox 360 refresh thing, to talk about their forthcoming Home service. Guess what? It's got virtual avatars, too! (I'm afraid neither me nor my guildmates were given sufficient time to build yet another self yesterday, sorry.)

The PlayStation 3 will someday get this Home service for free, but what exactly is it? From my time with the unfinished beta yesterday, it's a watered-down Second Life. Your 3D self walks around a small, central plaza between buildings, and you talk to other people via text or voice chat. Some of the buildings have mini-games, from pool to Flash games, and others have music players. During my test, most of them had screens blasting Sony advertisements at all times.

Sorry, Sony fans. The whole thing felt like a junior-sized, no-quest World of Warcraft region. People stood around, had idle chatter, clicked through dance "animations," and tried to get groups together to play such-and-such video game online (the last of which they could've done in that particular game's menus instead). I can't stress enough how tiny this "virtual world" felt; there was nothing to do other than try out little flash games and talk to strangers on the Internet—the latter being close to my least favorite activity in life. Home came off like a desperate grab to get people to notice the PlayStation 3—or spend real money to get fake clothes/accessories/furniture—rather than a thought-out, compelling way to gather nerds online. [Note: Microsoft hasn't ruled out charging people money for extra virtual clothes on their service.] I’d rather load an Xbox friends-only party than stand in a virtual lobby and listen to random dudes type cuss words in Spanish.

And today, Nintendo has nothing new to announce for the Wii. This is because they are too busy outselling the dickens out of everybody else. What recession? Bring on the spoiled brats for Christmas!

I tend to agree with people like Joseph Romm. The management of the Big Three doesn’t deserve salvation–which I didn’t make that clear in my original post. What I demand is a second chance for the engineers and line workers.

The poor decision makers presently running GM, Ford and Chrysler need to go–as a part of a bailout or bankruptcy reorganization.

It’s wrong to think of GM only as Hummers and Suburbans:

GM’s heavy-duty hybrid technology would be far more revolutionary than Toyota’s.

The Toyota technology can only be applied to smaller, lighter vehicles–topping out at perhaps the Highlander SUV. Such vehicles are only suited to commuting. In contrast, GM’s technology (developed with BMW and Chrysler) can be applied to huge vehicles–pickups, commercial trucks, and buses.

Why is the GM technology superior? The efficiency gains from hybrid technology are vastly larger in big vehicles. A Prius has only about a 20% gain in operating efficiency, compared to a similarly sized and shaped car. In contrast, the improvement for a full-sized pickup is more like 200-250%.

The Prius, in many instances, is replaceable; bicycles for short trips, mass transit for basic travel. Commute-shmommute; abandoning those cars will give us greater gains than switching to slightly better engines. But those larger vehicles, their tasks are still imperative.

Even if you buy into the environmentally clean car commute bullshit, GM’s approach here is objectively better than anyone else. The Chevy Volt drives its wheels only with electric motors, supplementing the energy stored in a modest battery pack with a gasoline-fired electric generator.

Electric motors produce all their torque right from the start–obviating the need for any sort of energy-sapping transmission system, particularly the ornate sort required when both gas and electric motors are driving the wheels. The small battery pack is sufficient in capacity for the vast majority of trips taken by people with these sorts of cars. The vast majority of energy in vehicle is stored as liquid fuel–that is more weight, space and energy efficient than batteries will ever be. And, since the gas-fired motor is only attached to a generator, it can always operate at its optimal speed using only fixed gearing. The whole package uses each part to its maximal advantage, while being overall simpler than the Prius-hybrid approach. If people are going to continue to commute by car, and live in sprawl, this is the better approach.

Compare these technologies to the bullshit hydrogen fuel-cell cars being touted by Honda. Hydrogen is a total nightmare. It’s vastly more difficult to distribute than liquid fuel or electricity. When it leaks out, it acts as a greenhouse gas. And, the vast majority of hydrogen fuel is made by inefficiently converting fossil fuels–still dumping carbon into the atmosphere. The fuel cells require a tremendous amount of rare metals, the mining of which is a total environmental nightmare. Hydrogen cars, from a net environmental impact, are likely worse than a traditional gasoline-fired small car.

In contrast, the technology in the Volt really is revolutionary–a true net environmental benefit when you consider life of the car from start to finish.

The work done by American assembly workers is as good as any around the world. JD Power’s initial quality survey tells you that. Or the quality of US-made Hondas and Toyotas. US-made cars are objectively better in build quailty to those made in Europe or even most factories in Asia–on par with the best Japanese-manufactured cars, and have been for nearly a decade. You sound like a fool when claiming otherwise. If you seriously believe American’s cannot assemble things, when blessed with a proper management, I suggest not flying anywhere, ever.

I strongly disagree that there can be a healthy post-industrial US economy. A huge contributor to our present woes is the idiotic policy stance that we can somehow transition to a service-based economy, shedding all manufacturing to other nations while living on credit and currency imbalances. Manufacturing jobs allow people willing to work hard to live well–without the burden of years of education, for which many do not have interest, aptitude or access. One in ten jobs in the country is directly related to the auto industry–the sorts of jobs that still provide things like retirement benefits and health care for employees.

The dirty truth is, the migration of manufacturing jobs away from the US has been an environmental, economic and social disaster for the entire globe. Shipping heavy goods around the planet carries a heavy carbon footprint. Allowing imports from countries with lax or non-existant labor and environmental regulations leads to things like the brown cloud of doom choking people throughout Northeast Asia. The state-supported export-based Chinese economy has proven as brittle and unstable as many feared.

I’m not opposed to industrialization around the globe. Just, more of this growth in production needs to be for domestic consumption–where the people assembling can afford and purchase that which they are making. India took this path. China didn’t. Compare the states of their economies today.

We’ve had no industrial policy in this country for decades. Should we be really surprised that the auto industry is a total fiasco? So, yes. It’s time for the hand of government to enter into this sector of the economy–promoting manufacturing in the US through good policy. Policy like enforcing the environmental and labor standards in existing trade agreements. Policy like demanding the auto industry prepare for a post-carbon world. Policy that promotes and shares innovative technologies to US manufacturers. Part of this, I still believe, should be a helping hand to those who have done right by all of us–the engineers and line workers–right now when they need it most.

The iPhone crashes. A lot.

Calls drop all the time. Safari, the Apple web browser, crashes continually. Woe on you if you navigate a partially-loaded page (fed up with the abysmally slow AT&T network). The mail app creaks when opening, often leaving you with a blank white unresponsive screen. The SMS program occasionally refuses to open.

Owning an iPhone–even the second-generation iPhone–is much like fighting through Internet Explorer 5 or Netscape 3.0 on Windows ‘95. When it works, you get a clear sense that this is the new way of doing things. Through the grime of incompetent implementation can be seen glances of what could, and likely will, be.

But holy shit, man. For the first time in a decade, I have to periodically shutdown and reboot a computing device in order to keep it working. What?! This is the era of protected memory spaces, of preemptive multitasking, of garbage collecting programming languages. The rats nest of memory leaks, of shuddering freezes and race conditions underlying the gloss, is totally inexcusable. How come nobody talks about this?

Apple justifies their aggressive control of their products–refusing to allow third party hardware manufacturers, third-party web, mail or SMS apps on the iPhone–by claiming this control makes sure things “just work.” Apple, things aren’t just working.

I can’t say I regret my purchase. The iPhone–and particularly Safari–have changed how I interact with the Internet and organize myself. That browser is incredible. But I’d suggest people take a long and hard look at Google’s android platform-based phones. Not everyone enjoys reliving the Windows ‘95 era.

Good thing I didn’t try posting this from my iPhone–gotta go reboot the thing again.