I apologize for my month of blog abstinence recently; I was wrapping up a summer class that filled my last degree requirement. But that ended yesterday, so now I've got the time to blog like I want to. And I'll start off with beginning the election feature I proposed back on May 31st.
Starting today, you guys will have about a week to nominate your favorite heroes and villains to campaign for the titles of Prime Hero and Supreme Villain. The primary round we're holding now will be a simple vote based on each character's political party (otherwise known as console exclusivity). Non-exclusive characters will be running as Independents. For example, Mario would campaign as a Nintendo character, and Isaac Clark would campaign as an Independent. However, characters like Solid Snake have the ability to campaign as Independents OR exclusives, since at least one entry in their franchises has been exclusive to one company's machine. So Snake would be able to run as Sony's character due to MGS4 being a PS3 exclusive, or he could run as an independent since the MGS collections have been released on multiple platforms. To qualify for this option, the character MUST have a game that released only for one of the three consoles. Even though Bioshock was never on Wii, Andrew Ryan still is an Independent because it was on PS3 and Xbox360.
The four parties we'll be using are Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft and Independent. Feel free to nominate up to three hero and three villain characters for each party, and feel free to take from any particular franchise as much as you want. For example, if you nominate Solid Snake, Raiden, Ocelot, Vamp, Big Boss and The Boss for their respective positions, that's perfectly acceptable.
Once we have the tallies from the primaries and we know which characters will be campaigning, I'll start assigning roles to people who are interested in participating. You can go ahead and sign up now if you'd like and tell me your preferences, but I'll confirm everything with the participants once we know for sure which characters we're dealing with. What these participants will be doing is taking on the role of their assigned character and actually campaigning for a at least a week or two against the other characters. Everything for this campaign is to be done in character; the participants will take on these roles and will be speaking as those characters. We'll have debates and the occasional preliminary poll to make things interesting.
The issues for these characters are up to those who participate. You can take the high road and tout your character's strengths, or you can smear your opponents and put them on the defensive. How you campaign is up to you. Anyone who chooses to support these candidates may also do so with their own support blogs and propaganda imagery, so long as they respect that their support must either be specific to the character itself or to the party (if you want to be a blind party supporter). Support blogs that break the fourth wall will not be included in our campaign roundup (a collection of everything campaign related to celebrate the feature just before the election day), so please don't just talk about how great the game is or anything that acknowledges the player's involvement.
Right now I'm looking at August 5th to be Election Day. That will give us a week to do the primaries and two weeks to really campaign. During this election season, feel free to show your support for your characters of choice by including a support pic in your comments as you peruse MyIGN. Campaigns are all about spreading awareness to your side, so don't be afraid to make your voice heard.
For today, let's get started with the nominations. The primaries will run until the following dates:
- The Microsoft Primary will conclude on Wednesday July 16th at 11:59 PM US Central Time.
- The Sony Primary will conclude on Thursday July 17th at 11:59 PM US Central Time.
- The Nintendo Primary will conclude on Friday July 18th at 11:59 PM US Central Time.
- The Independent Primary will conclude on Saturday July 19th at 11:59 PM US Central Time.
Vote now for your favorite characters. Remember that for each party you can nominate up to three heroes and three villains. Order matters, and will be used to help break any ties.
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"...Jack Bauer made me poop me pants. 
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Today In Music (July 11th)
Sacrifice by Motörhead released on July 11th, 1995.
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