Well, there are a couple of issues here: First, NP-Hard refers to the worst case. To say that a problem is X-Hard or X-Complete means that the problem is not solvable in deterministic polynomial time /in general./ It does not mean that there are not solvable instances of the problem or that there aren't heuristics that can speed up the process for certain kinds. The latter, in fact, is that to which the entire field of machine learning is devoted. For example, the AI problem of planning is PSPACE-Complete, but there freely available planners that do quite well on certain instances, but they cannot be guaranteed to work for every instance in a reasonable amount of time, because the generalized problem is PSPACE-Complete. There is a possibly deeper issue here of what these equations actually represent, and how model-dependent they are, but it sounds as though you have some misconceptions about computational complexity theory.

Actually, Sega makes a a significant number of excellent titles which no one buys, especially in America. It just so happens that Sonic Team's games sell well because they have the most mass-market appeal. Recently examples of others include the four Yakuza games, Valkyria Chronicles (the best game I've played in several years), Virtua Fighter 5, Virtua Tennis 3, and Outrun 2006. Since you mentioned Sonic, very few people are complaining about the excellent Sonic Rush games. Most of the games that people complain about not games developed by Sega of Japan, but games merely published by Sega. And to be fair, Sonic Unleashed is not a bad game. The werehog levels are not action levels; they're platforming levels. People complain that it's slow, but they only complain that it's slow because it's a Sonic game. If it had been any other slow platforming character, like all of the others, no one would have been outraged, even if they had disliked the gameplay. I think that including the levels was a bad decision, but I don't think how some evaluated it is very even-handed. Sonic games are aimed primarily towards kids, and they seem to like Sonic Unleashed, overall.

Check your statistics (and your assumptions). Democratic presidential candidates always get ~90% of the black vote; so, it's just unreasonable to suggest that this is because Obama is black. Kerry got ~88% of the black vote in 2004, while Gore got ~90%. Current estimates suggest that OBama has ~91% of the black vote, which is essentially unchanged. In the Democratic primaries, Senator Clinton was doing very well among black voters in polls, until certain incidents in South Carolina.