and Youtube version w/ commentary
Here’s a game/console project I worked on back in 2005. We didn’t get around to making a vid capture until now, heh. The project was both an original arcade hardware called the Impulse and a playable game, Starcell XF-1. I was tasked with creating the 64-color (fixed unified palette) pixel art and music for the game.
For me, a lot of time went into learning the art of pixel art, which essentially meant figuring out how to create the illusion of detail, lighting and texture using a grid of colored blocks (pixels), so it was a pretty interesting project. I also had to tackle things like ocean waves, clouds and animated explosions. I hate how the final product over-used the crummiest of my three explosion animations though :’( This is one of those cases of artist/coder disconnect I’ve heard so much about.
I generated a lot of artwork and assets that we never bothered to put into the final game– several enemies, a morphing boss, and a trio of characters on the left. We originally envisioned having some Aero Fighters-style dialogues in the game. The game is playable, but there’s only like 3/4ths of a level. Eventually the waves stop coming and you’re left to scroll across the remainder of the background sheet until it enters a starfield loop. It’s just a case of a deadline coming and going and us not being motivated to work on it past that point, since it was just a fun school project/diversion.
Now we move on to the second part of this blog post which has nothing to do with the first part. It’s called…
Obama will win the election…
…for the same reason Bush won in 2004. If I were a betting man, I’d place my money on Obama– but anyone looking at the polls would tell you the same thing, right? They are certainly sliding in Obama’s favor. As election day draws nearer, the math is looking increasingly grim for McCain unless he can perform some kind of miracle to turn everything around.
However there’s a more fundamental reason Obama will (most likely) win, and why he has gotten so far in the first place despite his youth and “inexperience”– it has to do with something beyond extrapolating poll numbers. It is the same reason Bush was able to unexpectedly take the nomination from Kerry against all odds and logic. Obama and Bush play to the popular narrative.
At a time when America was under attack from an ideological nemesis, the public was looking for someone who could both protect their “American” “values” and take the fight to the enemy. Security and so-called values were the two major issues in the minds of voters, and the man who embodied those aspects best was not John Kerry, the lofty anti-war intellectual.
Now the narrative is different. The public wants a fresh face to break through the partisan bickering of the legistlature and unify an ideologically torn America, solve critical issues with comprehensive and nuanced plans, restore America’s standing in the world with mindful foreign policies and bring a sense of closure and resolution to two wasteful wars. The public wants to put the devistation of the past seven years behind them and lay the groundwork for a better tomorrow.
Obama, a fresh face who embodies the brave idealism of the American dream, fulfills the narrative that an old war veteran and his spunky Alaskan sidekick can’t. This dichotomy could not be made more apparent in their first debate. While Obama spoke of putting the unproductive policies of the past to rest in a vision for the future, McCain continually reached back in time. In any other election, this tactic would have highlighted McCain’s strengths. However McCain only highlighted his incompatibility with today’s popular narrative. This was further exacerbated by his angry tirades of “Obama doesn’t understand!” (get off my lawn!) when Obama clearly had a deep understanding of the subjects being discussed.
While both candidates did well overall during the first debate, the public gravitated towards Obama as they viewed him as the candidate of the future. Meanwhile McCain has already exhausted his ability to grab Obama’s appeal as an agent of change, and the public has already grown weary of his campaign’s stunts and surprises. His campaign, along with much of his party, has come to represent the past in the minds of voters– a past they want to start putting behind them come 2009.
Does this mean Obama will win the election for sure? Bush beat Kerry by a small margin. If Karl Rove hadn’t been there to charge America’s culture wars and mobilize the Evangelicals for instance, Bush would not have won. If Kerry had managed a campaign more resiliant to attack ads and silliness, Bush would not have won. The fact that Bush, despite being far and away the worst choice for president by any measure, played into the popular narrative is what allowed him to stay competitive in the election.
Obama now has the advantage of the popular narrative. The public is on his side, and the McCain campaign is in jeopardy as their tactics prove increasingly ineffective in swaying popular opinion. McCain also has a deficit both in the budget and scale of his campaign versus Obama’s legions of volunteers and stockpiles of donated money, not to mention registered voters. Unlike Kerry, Obama has everything going for him. If things continue at their current trajectory, Obama will definitely take the election by a substantial margin.
The only way Obama can lose is if something occurs in the election that discredits his narrative to the extent that McCain becomes the lesser evil. If Obama can hold his alignment to the popular narrative for the remainder of this month, there’s nothing that McCain do can otherwise to take the election from him.