Ayn Rand is dead! Bioshock is coming true! Greenspan has the credibility of Jim and Tammy Fay Bakker!

The free-wheeling financial economy begun with Reagan, expanded by Clinton and completely let loose by George W. has completely collapsed. Ayn Rand's theories that the best of humanity can only occur in a completely free market have been totally invalidated. Sorry Boz!

Short term profit trumped common sense everywhere, especially with mortgages. Immediate fees and points are way higher for subprime mortgages, making a bundle for the broker, who found a ready market to immediately take the loans off their hands. This all was OK while housing prices were rising, because once the ARMs and other subprime loans reset their rates or otherwise became unaffordable for the house owners, they would merely have to refinance, taking advantage of the higher value of their homes. This whole house of cards collapsed once housing prices started to fall and the house owners could no longer refinance their troubles away. The foreclosures started and brought down the whole economy with it.

The solution? Well, hard to know, but it certainly won't be the free market. Many banks are currently zombies, the living dead. If they recognize the real value of the mortgages they possess, their balance sheets will fall below zero and they will collapse. If they don't recognize the real value of their holdings, they will be destroyed piecemeal as loan after loan defaults. Either way, they are vulverable to runs on the bank, where all the depositors, afraid of losing their savings, try to withdraw their money all at once. Of course, this money was lent out to fund the mortgages and is not there anymore, so the bank could die without even having bad mortgage on its books.

Meanwhile, those forclosed upon or about to be take everything of value, including wiring and piping,from their homes as they leave, destroying most of what value was left in the house. My neighbor, knowing his family was about to be forclosed on, rented his house out to three different families, collected their deposits and skipped town. This leaves once thriving neighborhoods and commercial centers shuttered and abandoned, or home to squatters. Violence expands and the remaining residents are driven insane by remembering what they once had and what they have now become.

Use of plasmids and tonics become rampant as the residents try to escape their tortured lives. Oops, I mean meth and alcohol. Well, OK you get the picture. Look like Bioshock, eh?

Luckily we have a strong, new president rather than Andrew Ryan, George W. or Herbert Hoover.

God Bless America!

Edit: Also, ZGreenwell and I are having a race to get to 50K gamerscore. Sure, I have a head start, but I'll take every advantage that I can get!

I got 3 big name games over the holidays, Fallout 3, Guitar Hero World Tour and Rock Band 2. The one I had been greatly anticipating was Fallout 3, and I did spend a good amount of time with it, but the best description of it really is 'Oblivion with guns'. Enough said.

The other two games are similar, especially with GH's addition of vocal and drum tracks. Unfortunately they made a few other changes that did not make the game better. They also copied Rock Band 1's gig and solo playthrough system. This makes the game much more unwieldy and you have vastly less choices and have to play songs you don't especially like. You also have to solo play all of the instruments to get all the achievements. But the worst is really the music choices- it was nice to have a LOT of cameos- Sting, Ozzy, Billy Korgan, Ted Nugent, Zakk Wyld and a few more, but I'd say 50% of the songs are on the level of hard core heavy metal.

Rock Band 2 is way more diverse. You have a good selection of 70's, 80's, 90's and modern hits, all of them master tracks. And World Tour mode is vastly improved. You can play solo in World tour if you want, making venues much easier to unlock. A few other features were added, challenges and Battle of the Bands, both of which are pretty fun. Also, your characters look better and feel like real Rock Stars, while every Rock star I made on GH looked deformed and didn't feel right. The premade stars all work fine on GH though, so I stick with them. My one complaint with RB2 was that it promised 20 free downloads. I expected to be able to choose, but it's basically a 20 song download pack, and none of them are famous songs. But that's a minor quibble with a game that already has 84 huge songs, of which I was already very familiar with about 70.

So My daughter and I are diligently playing RB2 and even getting my wife to sing a song or 2 (like Spirit in the Sky and One Way or Another).

I start another new job on Monday, so wish me luck!

''

I know they are scraping the bottom of the barrel for reviewers here at Gamespot (no offense yeah_write) but the recent review of Culdcept Saga was truly pathetic. Not only was it about a year after it was released, but the review makes no mention of Culdcept's most glaring problem- it's slow as a turtle. He extolls the virtues of playing multiplayer games but makes no mention that each additional player beyond 2 increases the already long game length exponentially. This is a lazy port of an older game. Plenty of stuff could be skippable, most notably lame fight animation and combats that you don't even take part in.

Good lord, I wonder how many players actually have all the achievement points for that game? It would probably take a year of actual play time.

My Xbox is back! Just in time to play Rock Band with my 3 nephews on Thanksgiving.

We have lots to be thankful for- I had lost my job in September but I now have a new job, and it's not on night shift! I am sleeping more and gaming less, so it isn't all good. Today we will see if my new sister-in-law, fresh off the boat from the Philippines will be able to eat that most American meal, the Thanksgiving turkey dinner. To make it easier on her, there will also be 3 different filipino dishes at this get-together: Laing, Bistek (sounds like beefsteak, which is pretty self-explanatory) and embutido.

But I only have stomach for turkey, stuffing and gravy. and maybe a baked potato.

Happy Thanksgiving everybody!

Supermutants have trashed my Xbox and carted it off to their homeland (Texas)!

At least this time it was under the warranty that I got when I paid MS to fix it the last time.

I was wrong about the election.

Obama will not win in a squeaker, aparently.

He will win by A LOT.

YEEEEEHAAAAAAA!

The game feels like Fallout. There are people worshipping a bomb and explaining why you should. The computers look like the little 'Colecovision' lap games I had when I was a kid. The Brahmin have 2 heads and you can eat human corpses (with a certain perk).

The decisions are permanent and affect the world; not all are necessarily good or bad. But best of all, I like the VATS system- it is affected by your stats and it feels like a good compromise to keeping a strategic system similar to the original fallout, while not reducing the speed of combat by a lot. You can still fire at will, but in a world with limited ammunition and a greater chance at criticals, I tend to use VATS for all but the wimpiest encounters. VATS also evens the playing field for RPG hounds that aren't quite as used to the twitch combat of hardcore FPS players.

Like Elder Scrolls (and unlike Fallout) managing inventory and collecting massive amounts of junk and seeking out people with caps to sell to is a big time consumer- this perhaps is my one complaint. But I have now discovered a special rock-it launcher that uses junk as ammunition- I knew I was carrying around those tin cans for a reason! Otherwise I love the game; it is huge but feels more like Fallout than Elder Scolls.

The character customization is huge- there are about 50 perks to choose from so you won't be able to take them all. You also have to make hard decisions about skills. Tagging skills is less effective than in the originals; they go up 1 point each whether tagged or not. But there are tons of quests and items that increase your skills and stats, and the drugs also seem more effective in this regard. (I admit I am wary of getting addicted and have not tried any of the addictive drugs yet, just healing ones.) Food and water heal you, but the vast majority of it is irradiated and will eventually cause you to have to use up a precious supply of anti-radiation medication.

I am loving this game and can't wait to wake up early this morning and play some more.

Cannibalism

NOTE: This is not a screenshot or even related to the game, except that you can be a cannibal if you want.

Well I just picked up my copy of Fallout 3 and I have the rest of the week off to play it. I'll let you know how it goes.

Edit: Well I am loving the atmosphere, but I am rather miffed that I have already accidently ruined my chances with the love interest.

Back to the vault!

A lot of people are predicting an Obama landslide. While I would love that to happen, I believe it will be much tighter than that. My prediction is a squeaker with Obama winning all of John Kerry's states plus Iowa, Colorado and New Mexico, giving him a narrow 273 to 265 Electoral point victory.

I went door to door in my neighborhood for Obama today and told a few people that early voting was already open here. There certainly seemed to be more Obama supporters than McCain supporters in my neighborhood. They were both outweighed by people who weren't home.

Be Afraid!

Your candidate is a Socialist!

Your candidate is a terrorist!

Your candidate is a *gasp* BLACK MAN!

*faints*

PS: I voted today in a swing state. Those of you registered in states like New York, California, Texas or Alaska may as well not vote since your votes basically won't count. So BOO-YA! My vote is worth more than yours! Nyah nyah!