Daily Loaf

It’s hard to feel guilty when people don’t even bother to move out of the way of your tank when it’s about to run them over. That’s good, because Prototype is a game that clearly doesn’t want you to be thinking too much about innocent bystanders, especially if doing so would get in the way of tearing the hell out of anything and everything around you. Still, even I felt a twinge of discomfort while going for the achievement points for running over 500 people with a single tank. In retrospect, this actually works within the convoluted framework of Prototype’s story, but at the time it was just one more way of causing mayhem. Prototype’s all about the mayhem.

You play as Alex, a scientist who always wears a hoodie for some unexplained reason, and who has been infected by a virus that’s quickly turning him into a monster/superhero. And of course you have amnesia. So you’ve got to find out who did this to you while Manhattan dissolves into a chaos of nasty soldiers and even nastier infected who’re constantly attacking each other and you. You get to tear your way through both sides in a blood filled, high speed romp up and down the length of the city as you unlock the secrets of your recent past and search for who’s responsible. If the story sounds typical and uninspired, that’s because it is – amnesia, virus, shadowy government agency, trust no one, and did I mention amnesia? Blah, blah, blah. We’ve seen it all before. Protoype’s setting and story don’t break any new ground and are almost throwaway.

But it’s not the why’s and therefore’s that draw you into Prototype – it’s what you do. Read the rest of this entry »

I had a dream the other night that I was on a transatlantic flight on its way to Africa. I was sitting next to a man in a brown jacket, clown pants and Jesus sandals who kept repeating, “Down we go.” That should have given me a clue to the unfortunate end to my dream, or nightmare, but it didn’t. Suddenly, the no-smoking sign started flashing a blood-red color and the pilot got on the intercom and said something along the lines of, “We are going down, hold on to your fucking hats.” I couldn’t really make out what he said, but I’ve always thought that would be the best way to break the news to the passengers. If we’re going to die, I don’t want to hear, “Ladies and gentlemen, I’d like to bring an unfortunate situation to your attention. Blah, blah, blah.” Cut to the chase, man! Anyway, to make a long story short, we plummeted thousands of feet into an island and, magically, I was the only survivor. That is the point when I woke up. And for some batshit crazy reason, the first thing I thought of was an episode of The Office when the employees play Desert Island. This taught me something about myself: Apparently, if I were the sole survivor of a plane crash on a deserted island, the most important thing to me would be what movies I was carrying on me and how I could watch them. So, if that were to happen, and if there were a television and DVD player on this said island, these are the movies I would take… Read the rest of this entry »