If somebody's dog manages to vote for John Kerry, then, in effect, Velma Thompson (or whomever) failed to vote for that nice man, George W. Bush, even though she tried. Whiskers cancels out Velma. Here's another way to make the same point. Each Bush vote is paired with a Kerry vote and they're both thrown away. The winner is the one who has votes left on the table after all the other guy's votes have been chucked. Pairing legitimate voters with voting felons, dogs, corpses, and Frenchmen has precisely the same effect on the outcome as shooting legitimate voters before they can get in the door of the high school gym.

Republican vigilance about keeping illegal voters from voting is democratically equivalent to Democratic vigilance against Republican attempts to suppress the legal vote. Republican vigilance has the semi-intended side-effect of suppressing likely Democratic votes. And huge Democratic registration and GOTV drives have the semi-intended side-effect of canceling out a large number of Republican votes with illegal ballots. I bet I can tell from your party affiliation which you think is worse.

Read the whole article.

Making computer games has its drawbacks. But one nice thing about them is that you know when they succeed. They can succeed commercially (i.e. make a profit) and they can succeed critically.

With The Political Machine, it appears we've done both.  Which lets us breathe a sigh of relief because it was a very close thing for us.  I had the idea for the game floating around my head since the 2000 election. And even before that, I had given some thought to doing a game based on politics.  But after the Bush/Gore 2000 election, I knew that we needed to make a game before the next election.

But we almost didn't have time.  We went a bit late on getting the expansion pack for Galactic Civilizations done.  So in January of 2004, we began development of The Political Machine.  We had to finish the game by June in order to have the game out in time for the election season.

That gave us 6 months to come up with a game, write a 3D engine, and put it all together in a single solid package.  I was vaguely aware that there were other games out there but didn't have much time to look at them. The main impression I got was that they were focusing more on being election simulations. I didn't want to make a simulation. I wanted to make a game. Specifically, I wanted to make a strategy game with very well defined game mechanics and rules that would be easy to understand for casual gamers but satisfy hard core political junkies.

In June, we did indeed finish the game and we got it out the door in time. It was pretty solid other than not realizing that our use of True Type Fonts would prevent it from working on those older (but more common than we realized) integrated Intel video adapters (which is one reason why user reviews tend to be a bit lower than the actual review - doesn't take too many ticked off people who can't run the game to lower a user review).

Here's a round-up from slate:

http://slate.msn.com/id/2108292/

and

Here's a look at the games of this genre from Gamespy.

http://pc.gamespy.com/articles/559/559987p1.html

The Slate article is by no means definitive since it's one reviewer's point of view.  But it choosing The Political Machine as the best game of the pack definitely made us feel pretty good here. I think it really boils down to whether you're looking for a simulation or a strategy game. If you want to play politics as a strategy game then I think The Political Machine is very strong.  If you want a more in depth simulation, then one of the other games may be your ideal.

How much we can update the game really depends a lot on our publisher. All our updates have to go through them and they have a finite QA budget so we have to make it worth their while to do more updates.  But we do plan to release an update after the election that takes into account the new political realities.

Check out this article over at Gamespy that goes through the various US presidential based games and what their backgrounds are.

The article is located here: http://pc.gamespy.com/articles/559/559987p1.html

Each week I'm going to try to highlight a WinCustomize Personal page. Personal pages will be one of the major highlights of WC2K5.

This week's personal page of note is Ian Black. He is the 20th most popular skinner on WinCustomize of all time with nearly a million downloads. Most people know him for his WindowBlinds skins such as the currently popular Longhorn one which is very complete.

What isn't as well known is that he's the 4th most popular wallpaper artist of all time with over 300,000 downloads of his wallpapers.

He's ranked 124th in terms of # of websites that link to his home page (2 sites currently - JoeUser and Google).  And right now, his home page is the 43rd most popular here on WC but that is about to change I suspect.

Take a visit to Voodoo-Freak's personal page, sign his guest book and check out the cool stuff he's contributed to the community!

This is a little off topic but I decided to finally go in and get my eyes "lasered" with a procedure called custom LASIK.  For those of you who wear glasses and contacts and have had interest in this, I'm running an on-going diary on this.

I've gone back and forth on this for years since I'm pretty squeamish about messing with my eyes so I'll be giving how things go on this.

If you're a current WinCustomize premium subscriber you can now check out the BETA. The look and feel is still under development but you'll be able to get a general idea of where it's going.

If you're not a subscriber but find this site useful, we hope you'll consider purchasing a subscription. It's only $20 and you get a lot of good stuff with it besides just access to the new site early. And it is subscriptions that are increasingly paying for this site. Go to the store link to get a subscription.

For those of you who are subscribers, it's www2.wincustomize.com. You'll have to relogon to the new site.

Imagine if we hadn't invaded Iraq. How would the election be different?

Well, first we now know that the oil for food program was a total scam. We also know Saddam was in the process of bribing France, Russia, and China in the hopes of ending sanctions.

We still wouldn't have gotten Osama Bin Laden in all likelyhood so there would be this terrorist dictator in Saddam who was openly opposing us who, by all accounts in 2003, was in possession of WMDs with every intent to aid terrorists.

This article gives a pretty credible alternative timeline of how things might be.

This is a response to the associated link. Was going to make it a response but the amount of editing it would take made it too time consuming. So I used Blog Navigator Pro to do it up in its built in blog editor.

Questions to conservatives:

Why is it that the right attacks anyone who questions the war in Iraq for not supporting our troops, yet impugns a decorated war veteran's integrity, including things like purple heart band-aids? Why is it members of the military tell me that no one but a soldier should have the right to say anything about the military, yet attack Kerry for speaking out against the war? He was a soldier, right?

I don't accept the premise of your question. Conservatives don't "attack anyone who questions the war in Iraq". But the reason why conservatives impugn Kerry's war record is because he has inflated it beyond recognition.

A very very bad man in Sudan is a tragedy. But he's a very poor bad man.  A very very bad man with lots of money and resources can do great harm to us here in the United States.