The worst thing about Quantum of Solace is that it has to follow Casino Royale. That’s the capsule review I’ve been hearing in the past few weeks: “It’s not as good as the first one, but still okay.” And that’s a shame, because it’s not a bad movie; in fact, it’s still in the top six or seven of the Bond movies (unless you count the Bourne movies as Bond movies). But it’s frustratingly not there. It’s got all the ingredients of a phenomenal Bond movie, but they never quite congeal into something great.

What’s good:

1. Daniel Craig is still a total bad-ass.
2. M gets out of the office and does stuff, and the movie wisely builds the relationship between Bond and M.
3. The Tosca sequence is great from start to finish; exactly the kind of balance of espionage and spectacle you want to see in an updated Bond movie.
4. The giant computer screen at headquarters actually looks cool and somewhat functional. How it functions is still every bit as ridiculous as it is in any other movie or TV show, but the interface looked like it was designed by someone who’s actually used a computer before, and I didn’t spend the entire sequence smacking my forehead.
5. Great choice of locations, and they were all shot very well. The franchise-holders get just the right balance between the new, more realistic reboot and the obscene displays of excessive wealth we expect from these movies.
6. There’s nothing as clever as Bond and Vesper’s conversation on the train in Casino Royale, but there are still some great snatches of dialogue.
7. Nobody in the cast gives a bad performance. American mustache guy comes closest, but he’s supposed to be annoying. I think we’ve been blinded by nostalgia and have forgotten that Bond movies in the past have traditionally had awful acting.

What’s not good:

1. The villain’s pretty dull. He’s basically just Roman Polanski with more interest in real estate.
2. The action sequences were all basically five minutes of 3-second cuts followed by one long shot in slow motion that let you know something dramatic just happened. I still don’t know what made half those cars or boats flip over.
3. “Strawberry Fields” is a decent Bond girl name, and I still haven’t decided whether I like or dislike that they never actually say her name in the movie.
4. The death-by-oil slick is fine as a nod to Goldfinger, but not more than that. It just kind of happened, it didn’t really fit in with the story or characters, and it wasn’t even filmed particularly well.
5. Usually I prefer it when a movie doesn’t talk down to me, but this movie was withholding information. I’m still not clear on exactly how Vesper was tied in with the main bad guy, how they found the main bad guy, Bond’s whole revenge plot, or — well, basically everything of significance except for the girl’s revenge story.
6. The villain’s ultimate motivation, assuming I understood it correctly, was inexcusably lame and non-threatening.
7. Considering the above, the whole “the world has lost its moral center” theme didn’t ring true at all. Plus, they kept pounding on that message a little too clumsily.
8. The theme song sucks hard. It ruined all the momentum that confusing car chase had built up, and distracted attention away from the sandy naked ladies.

Still, it’s a net win, and it did a decent job at keeping the franchise reboot going. As long as they keep Daniel Craig and Judi Dench, and probably Paul Haggis, they can churn out a dozen more of these things and I’ll gladly pay for each one in the theater and on disc.

It’s disturbing how dependent I am on television; I think I’ve never gone more than a week without access to live TV of some sort, and being without it makes me inexplicably nervous.

A year ago I did a price comparison between keeping satellite service, or dropping it and getting shows via the internets, and it was absolutely clear that there was no good reason for me not to ditch the live TV. And still, like a junkie who keeps pledging to quit, here I am a year later, paying even more in monthly fees.

Because I live in the San Francisco Bay area, I’ve psycho-analyzed myself, and I think it goes back to when I was much younger and would come home from school before my parents got back from work. I’d turn on the television just to be reassured that there were still people left, and the Rapture hadn’t occurred and left me behind. (Later I realized that if the Rapture were to occur, the people on television would be the last to go). Even now, coming home to an empty and quiet house gives me the creeps.

But now there’s the internet to reassure me that there are still millions of stupid people all around me. And I haven’t been watching much television ever since I stopped freelancing. I hardly have any free time outside of work. Netflix keeps sending me movies I don’t have time to watch. I’ve bought movies that I was absolutely convinced I had to have, and they’re still in the shrink wrap. I frequently find myself making the asinine complaint that I’ve got more videogames than I have time to play. I’ve got a folder on my Mac called “Projects” that mocks me with half-or-less-completed programming projects I’ve abandoned. And even though I keep pledging to become more literate, I’ve got stacks of books I haven’t read past the introduction. Something’s got to give.

I wouldn’t give up TV shows, of course — that’s just crazy talk. I’m not even embarrassed by that, as I might’ve been ten or even five years ago; TV is where all the good stuff happens these days.

But I did the whole price comparison again last week, and the numbers are even more damning of cable or satellite: I could be saving a little over $300 a year. And that’s buying full seasons of everything I watch, even the series I don’t like that much, and in high definition. That’s right, I could own an entire season of “Heroes” in HD for less than what I’m currently spending to not enjoy it.

And get this: that includes the cost of an Apple TV box. Something is seriously messed up when buying stuff through iTunes and getting an accompanying piece of Apple hardware is cheaper than the alternative.

So I’ve pledged to finally cut the cord for good. No, for real this time. I can do it. I know I can. You’re the one with the problem! Now, whether it means I’ll instantly have more time and become instantly enlightened and read more and learn languages or how to play an instrument, that remains to be seen. If nothing else, I can think about how many cigarettes I can buy with all that extra money.

Update: When I called to cancel this morning (I got up in the morning! See, it’s already working!), as part of the usual customer retention spiel, they offered to give me “free” HD and “free” DVR for a year. That would’ve cut the bill by $20 a month and all but negated the price advantage of going all-internet, and let me keep Sci-Fi channel original movies and those weird “America’s Most Haunted Theme Parks” specials in my life. But — BUT — if they could do it when I threatened to cancel, they could’ve done it all along. And that sense of righteous indignation is far more valuable than $240 a year.

But in case anybody in the Spectre Collie Army is balking at the high cost of your media feed, it might be in your best interest to threaten to cancel.

Strong Bad’s Cool Game for Attractive People Episode 4: Dangeresque 3: The Criminal Projective is out now, and everyone with money should buy it. Everyone without money should ask for some and then use it to buy it.

It’s my favorite of the series (although episode five is coming along pretty good, too), partly because Mark is really good at his job and also because it’s based on one of my favorite Strong Bad e-mails. Plus I think its format is what Telltale does best: taking a concept and running with it, and keeping it tight and focused.

My favorite gag: “Now, we are out of the boat.”

I’m mainly posting just to get this blog back on the weighty topics of rambling about videogame design and making shallow observations about pop culture, instead of whining about McCain and whatshername.

I tried my hardest to get all enthusiastic and inspired about the election, excited that the lines were too long for me to wait in the morning, thinking about record voter turnout and planning to head back into the city during lunch to do my civic duty, only to get knocked down yet again by the city’s idiotic ballot measures. Man, I’m driving my hybrid car over the Golden Gate bridge, thinking about clean energy and ending the wars and universal health care and equal rights for everyone, and San Francisco manages to smack me back over to Moderate.

There’s been at least one stupid, time-wasting measure on every ballot since I’ve lived in San Francisco, and this year it was a proposal to rename the city sewage treatment plant the “George W. Bush Sewage Plant.” Grow the hell up, morons. Or just change the measure to read, “Shall the City remain hopelessly out of touch with the world at large and continue to be dismissed as a laughing stock by the rest of the country?” I hate to think what we’d do if we didn’t have Berkeley to make fun of. (As friend Mike S. said: “The problem with that measure is that a sewage plant is useful.”)

And of course the more serious problem: for all the talk about a historic election and anything being possible in America and how having a black President is a victory for civil rights, two and a half states voted to write discrimination into their constitutions. As I’m writing this, California’s proposition 8 is leading by 4% with 50% of the precincts reporting. There’s no excuse for that. It simply should never have come up for a vote in the first place; the entire purpose of the judicial branch of government — the “activist judges” the assholes complain about — is to ensure that the rights of a minority are not subject to the will of a majority. It violates the system of checks and balances. The funding of these propositions violates the separation of church and state.

It’s unfair, it’s immoral, it’s intrusive, and it’s just plain wrong. The three million-as-of-this-writing people who voted for the proposition should be ashamed of themselves. Each one who voted “yes” decided to strip away the rights of strangers and try to convince these people that their relationships are inferior. The couples who they’re affecting have been told for years that they should be ashamed of who they are, and it’s long past the time for that kind of bullshit to stop. Any kind of legal system that forces consenting adults in San Francisco to have to justify their relationships to bigots in San Diego and over-stepping religious zealots in Utah is a legal system that is not functioning as intended.

But for now: we’ve got honest-to-goodness hopefulness. Not the desperate, polarized clutching-at-power of the last Democratic “victory” in Congress, but a real hope for change. An acknowledgement that things are broken, and that this is not how America is supposed to work. There have been plenty of attempts to undermine or trivialize Obama’s speeches as just rhetoric, from the vapid cynics so self-satisfied in their inaction they can no longer recognize true insight.

But that message is exactly what we need right now. We’ll see soon enough whether the policies of government work as promised, but government can’t work at all unless people are inspired to make it work. He’s already started to wipe away the fear, mistrust, paranoia, and divisiveness that have plagued us for as long as I’ve been an adult, and he hasn’t even taken office yet. This is the first election I can remember where I wasn’t voting against the “opposition,” and I wasn’t voting for a chosen party. And although I’ve got profound respect for Obama’s intelligence and leadership from what I’ve seen, I wasn’t even voting for the man. I was voting for an ideal.

Hey, did you guys hear? Sarah Palin said something dumb that was picked up by the “gotcha” media again!

I can remember hoping for more substance than sound bites and petty insults in this election, more talking about actual issues instead of transparent attempts at media manipulation. And I keep trying to rein in my under-informed liberal rage, reminding myself that these people are not idiots to be dismissed, but merely sometimes fallible adults with differing political views than mine. I genuinely, sincerely want there to be intelligent debate again, instead of increasingly polarized name-calling.

But the issues come down to one candidate whose economic, domestic, and foreign policies have been proven failures over the past eight years, and one candidate whose policies may or may not work but at least he’s genuinely committed to improving the country. And as much as it dismays me to fall in the “Economy and wars are boring! Let’s point and laugh at the funny pretty lady!” camp, I’ve got to acknowledge that it’s a pretty serious issue when your candidate for the second-highest office in the country doesn’t understand the United States Constitution.

I mean, come on:

“If [the media] convince enough voters that that is negative campaigning, for me to call Barack Obama out on his associations,” Palin told host Chris Plante, “then I don’t know what the future of our country would be in terms of First Amendment rights and our ability to ask questions without fear of attacks by the mainstream media.”

That’s right: she said that freedom of the press violates the First Amendment.

It was alarming enough when she revealed a basic misunderstanding of the role of vice president — not at that Q&A session that was quickly dismissed as “gotcha journalism,” but during the vice-presidential debate, where she ominously hinted at giving the role even more power than Cheney has given it.

But explaining how the First Amendment works is something that you have to do for stupid excitable people on internet message boards. You shouldn’t have to explain it to a candidate for Vice President of the United States.

Should the unthinkable happen, and she gets elected, are we going to have to explain everything to our VP? That the freedom of speech does not mean freedom from people pointing out that you’re saying stupid things? That the freedom of religion also guaranteed by the First Amendment means that even if the GOP weren’t blatantly manipulating suspicions about Obama’s religious faith, that that still wouldn’t bar him from office? That when she types MAVERICK in all caps it comes across as shouting? That it’s improper to mix up your official and personal e-mails — oh, wait. I’m sure she’d have no problem recognizing the ;) smiley, but will we have to explain that ad hominem attacks are lousy for debates, and that RTFC stands for Read the Fucking Constitution?

I can’t imagine what other basic internet truths the conservatives could manage to screw up, maybe Godwin’s L… wait, hang on, what’s this article in the New York Times all about:

On one, polls that are “tightening” are emphasized over those that are not, and the rest of the news media is portrayed as papering over questions about Mr. Obama’s past associations with people who have purportedly anti-American tendencies that he has not answered. (“I feel like we are talking to the Germans after Hitler comes to power, saying, ‘Oh, well, I didn’t know,’ ” Ann Coulter, the conservative commentator, told Mr. Hannity on Thursday.)

Ah, there we go. Don’t ever change, Ms. Coulter.

On the one hand, I want to believe that this country is founded on cooperation and the fair and just resolution of conflicts, and that only by working together as mutually respectful adults can we accomplish anything. But on the other hand, I think that after all this, anyone who would vote for a McCain/Palin ticket has to be a fucking moron. I’m having trouble reconciling these disparate philosophies.

In the meantime, my advice for Governor Palin: lurk more.

It turns out that Dead Space wasn’t able to hold my interest very long, after I saw a friend at work playing Fable 2. The game was completely off my radar, because I could never get into the original Fable; I was disappointed in the unfulfilled potential of Black & White; and I was unfairly biased against this game because it’s such a heavily-marketed, big-budget, big team title.

Plus, Fable 2 seemingly breaks all of the “rules” about videogames I’ve been going on about for months. I say that player choice isn’t the end-all of game design; choice is this game’s entire reason for being. I complain that games do too much hand-holding and don’t give the player a chance to think; this game spells out your quest objectives and gives you a glowing trail leading directly to the place you’re supposed to go. I say that if a story’s included in a game, it should be of highest importance; this game has a fine but not particularly groundbreaking overarching story. I say that story events should arise as a direct result of the player’s actions; the events in this game are pre-determined, and will play out the same way whether your character is a saint or a demon.

Which is all just further proof that what works for one type of game doesn’t work for another, and the whole “all games must be like this” mentality is best left to pointless internet arguments. Because I really, really love Fable 2. It’s easily the best game I’ve played all year, and the most enjoyable experience I’ve had playing a game in the past few years. While I can appreciate the storytelling of BioShock, and the cleverness of Portal, the imagination of World of Goo, the art direction of Team Fortress 2, and the sheer production value of the Half Life 2 series, where Fable 2 wins is that it’s just plain fun. It’s like a lightweight version of The Sims combined with a middleweight RPG; it’s a good thing that it doesn’t include a city-building or farming component, or it would’ve taken me hostage completely.

For everything that I like about the game, there’s at least one thing that bugs me, but ultimately they don’t matter because the entire experience is so enjoyable. For examples, here’s

Twelve Things I Love About Fable 2

1. Childhood. When I worked at Electronic Arts, they made a big deal about “the first five minutes” of every game. What’s the player’s first impression, what compels them to keep playing. It could come across as off-putting, valuing surface over substance, and emphasizing the lede over the feel of the entire game. But it also makes a lot of sense. One of the reasons I could never get into the original Fable was that the story was so cliched. That was the point of it, of course — giving the player complete control over a timelessly generic fantasy story — but it never quite rose above the cliche. Fable 2’s story is still relatively simple, but it does a much better job of setting it up and introducing story events that will have more significance later on. (Midway into the story, you can randomly come across a diary in the world, and reading it is actually heartbreaking).
2. Tanks. That’s the name of my dog, which I was allowed to type in once I bought a collar and put it on him (the one you get for free was too ghetto). And they did just a fantastic job of making him act like a dog. He runs out ahead of you and barks when he finds treasure, and he jumps on top of enemies you’ve knocked on the ground — you can find training books to make him better at treasure-hunting and combat. When he finds something buried, he digs furiously at the spot in the ground until you dig it up. When he finds a treasure chest, he barks and then runs up and points at it. When you go into a building, he curls up in front of the door and waits for you. When you’re entertaining a crowd of people, he jumps on his hind legs and joins in. When you run too close to a lake or pond, he’ll jump in and splash around for a little bit. When you go into a dark cave, he whimpers and cowers until you encourage him.
3. Attachment. Tanks is also responsible for the first real moment of panic I’ve gotten from a videogame in recent memory. I was in the middle of a long battle with a bunch of werewolves (see below), and I noticed I couldn’t see or hear him anymore. After it was all clear, I ran everywhere trying to find him, convinced that he’d gotten killed in the fight and I hadn’t noticed, really cursing myself for not paying attention and cursing the game for letting that happen. I went forward, resigned that I’d lost him, and then found him in the next room, pointing at a treasure chest.
4. I got widowed. I said that the story wasn’t groundbreaking, and the reason that works is because the designers realized the story isn’t the point; your attachment to your character is. For another example, there was a scripted side quest where I had to seduce a woman from the village, and then ended up marrying her and having a child. The human characters are so shallow, and marriage/childbirth is so abstracted, that the whole thing felt very simple and game-like. But much later, I took a different randomly-generated side quest to kill some monsters that were ravaging a farmhouse. As I got closer to the destination, I started to realize it had randomly chosen my farmhouse. When I got there, the monsters had killed my character’s wife, and the child had gotten taken into whatever kind of protective services exists in this fantasy world. It was an oddly compelling moment; this “family” that’d just been flipping bits in a list had suddenly gained a new significance. Emergent drama, I guess, the kind that I never saw in The Sims.
5. Unconventional Morality. Speaking of marriage, my character is a bisexual bigamist with a husband in one city and a wife (remarried) and child in the other. And the game still thinks he’s virtuous and pure enough that his hair is turning blond and he’s getting a little bit of a halo around him. Seeing as how even in the ridiculous fantasy world of The Sims, they insisted on a distinction between “marriage” for heterosexual couples and “civil unions” for same-sex ones, it’s nice to see a game so matter-of-factly say that it doesn’t matter whom you love as long as you’re good to them.
6. Julia Sawalha. She voices one of the main NPC characters in the game, and she does a great job. The writing throughout the game is better than average, but it would end up being mediocre if it didn’t have the conviction of the whole team behind it. They don’t treat it as acting for a videogame, but really try to make it come alive, and it shows. Her character in particular would be pretty forgettable if there weren’t a sense that there’s a real person behind it.
7. Reading. Just about every role-playing game has books and item descriptions that you can find and read. And just about every videogame player skips all this text to get back to the action. But I actually enjoy reading the stuff in Fable 2: every house has a story behind it, books and diaries explain the history of the world and motivation of the villain, and every single item you can carry has a description. And it’s all well-written and genuinely clever, with a mature British sense of humor that doesn’t try to wail you over the head with each joke.
8. Pervasive Goofiness. Speaking of the sense of humor, that carries through the entire game, and it’s masterfully balanced. This is a game where you convince people to marry you by farting and whistling, after all, but it doesn’t descend into pure slapstick (even when you fail the fart expression and crap your pants). Characters acknowledge the goofiness, mentioning that they all sound the same, or that they have a cliched life story, but it doesn’t descend into pure self-aware fourth-wall-breaking. Instead, you just get a sense that the people making this game know what they’re doing. They’re not striving for pure realism, they’re going for the overall experience. So the abstractions are simple and goofy, but the game acknowledges they’re goofy and then moves on. Plus, it transitions effortlessly from goofy to genuinely tense and creepy, and back. The whole thing just seems mature, not in the juvenile “hey you can shoot prostitutes” mentality that passes for “maturity” in videogames, but genuinely mature: confident enough to be silly without wallowing in it.
9. Eating tofu makes you pure. That’s one of the goofy abstractions. If you eat pies, your character gets fat. Eating celery makes him thin again. Most places that offer food sell live baby chicks that you can eat; this increases your “evil.” Fable 2 has multiple “sliders” for your character, instead of just good vs. evil there’s also pure vs. corrupt. This is a great way to split it up, and it gives you all kinds of things to play around with, like the obese, raunchy saint, or the vegetarian villain. All these are reflected in your character’s appearance, not just getting fatter or thinner, but moving towards a glowing Aryan as you get “good” and I’m presuming horned and demonic as you get “evil.”
10. You can’t die. Death in videogames has always been a problem, and it’s never been completely solved: every attempt to make the player’s actions in a game have consequence either becomes unfair and frustrating, or so watered-down as to have no consequence. In Fable 2, your character never dies in battle, but instantly resurrects. The important difference is that each resurrection leaves him with a permanent scar, a visible record of how many times in the game you screwed up. I believe this worked the same way in the original Fable, but in any case it’s ingenious. Again, it shows that the game just has the right focus: this is a role-playing game, so the player’s character is what’s most important. By that logic, having a permanent scar on your character is the ultimate consequence. Everything that the player does is building up that character, not some list of stat numbers or pre-scripted story moments.
11. Pre-scripted story moments. The game does these really well, too. Earlier I mentioned a battle with a bunch of werewolves; that entire section of the game was just masterfully paced. Everything up to that point had been fairly directionless free roaming and finding side quests, but at this point they needed to funnel the player towards a story event. So the game does exactly that: starts you with a bit of open-ended exploration, gradually and almost imperceptibly getting more and more focused towards a single destination, and then introducing a section that is almost completely linear. They do it with clever level design touches, like a path that gets narrower and enemies that spawn more frequently; some terrifically tense music; and a few pre-scripted events that happen at just the right time. It was done so well that I didn’t even notice that I’d “lost control” of the game until after it was over. There’s another fairly long sequence later that’s well done, even though it has a much more obvious purpose as a good/evil check. Overall, Fable 2 has moments that I think are as well-paced and dramatic as some of the best of Half-Life 2, but without that feeling like you’re in a long linear canyon.
12. Brutal styles. The battle system is every bit as satisfying as the one in Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, in that it seemed designed entirely to make you look like a bad-ass with a minimum of effort. Fable 2 lets you swap easily between melee, ranged, and magical combat, and you never have to deal with stuff that game designers care about but players don’t: ammo and mana. It’s always bugged me that movies and TV shows have magic characters casting these powerful spells left and right, and that videogames always manage to reduce this to tedious inventory or potion management. Switching between spells is still an enormous drag, but it’s satisfying to be able to just lob a bunch of fireballs at a pack of bad guys. My favorite aspect of the whole battle system is that when you get a critical hit, it transitions to a slow-motion and a cinematic camera angle, making you feel like you just did something more impressive than mash on a button.

It can come across as condescending and a little dismissive to describe a videogame as “charming,” (I know this from experience), but that’s the best word I can think to describe Fable 2 overall. It’s clear that a ton of work went into making the game, so there’s no condescension implied, and the best thing about it all is that it’s all so focused on that end experience. The visuals are so pretty that I keep being reminded of Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, but this game is just so much more fun to run around in, while also doing its dark and gothic moments even better than the “more serious” game.

And speaking of Oblivion, I also got my pre-order of Bethesda’s Fallout 3 this week, and took a short break from Fable 2 to check it out. It’s even more focused on giving the player the ability to shape his character and his story however he wants. And I just kept thinking how the experience I wanted was to enjoy myself, so I quickly went back to Fable 2. I think when this guy’s done, I’m going to play through again as evil. Or maybe just corrupt.