This past weekend, my wife was away on an extended shopping journey. Not satisfied with any of my video game selections, I hurried to GameStop, bound and determined to pick up a game or two. After spending the better part of an hour going back and forth over the Xbox 360 and Wii games, I finally decided on two unlikely choices: Prototype and Ghostbusters.

Why? They were each $19.99.

The teenage guy behind the counter wasn’t impressed by what I was buying. “Something to keep you busy,” he dully remarked as he bagged them.

I knew neither of these games were big hits — they both received pretty lukewarm reviews. But something pulled me toward these games. Today, let me tell you about Prototype.

This is an amazing game. You’re an shapeshifting anti-hero given free reign in New York City. You can consume people and steal their memories and appearance. Your powers include super jumps, super strength, super speed, and a vast array of weapons (like the giant claws seen above). As you go through the city slaughtering the police and military, you earn more experience, which rewards you with more powers and stronger abilities.

Sure, there’s some kind of story that goes along with it. But it’s so much fun to terrorize the good citizens of New York, that I really don’t care about actually doing the missions. I’m not ignoring them completely — you have to complete missions to gain more abilities and powers — but I spend an enormous amount of time between missions bringing death and destruction to the city.

My only real complaint is that there’s not much variation in the scenery or the people throughout the city. The playable map is very large, but everything pretty much looks the same.

I love this game. It’s a steal right now for twenty bucks — go get it.

Bald Bull
AKA “Dirty Son of a Bitch”

This week I’ve been obsessed with the Wii’s Virtual Console, where I have purchased a pile of games for the 8-bit Nintendo and the Super Nintendo. The wonderful thing about this is that my wife doesn’t mind me tossing money at the Nintendo — she loves these games as much as I do.

So I’ve rediscovered that fond feeling of being completely pissed off at a stupid game. Oh sure, I get pretty upset with the latest Wii games too, such as Super Mario Galaxy and MX vs ATV, but not like I got upset with 8- and 16-bit games. When I get pissed at these games, I’m brought to the point of doing something very irrational.

Like when I keep mistiming my punch against Bald Bull’s bull charge in Punch Out.

Or dying in World 1-1 in Super Mario 2.

Or being totally overcrowded with alien ships and bullets and fire and bubbles in Gradius III.

These are things that may just cause me to throw one of the end tables into my TV. Or burn the house down.

As I looked up news on Les Claypool’s web site, I found out that he has recorded original music for the upcoming Wii game Mushroom Men. As I’m a big Wii fan (and a huge Les Claypool fan, of course), I began to investigate this game by going over to its official web site.

Maybe, just maybe, I’ll spring for this game when it comes out in November. But probably only because I can listen to new music from Les while I play.

And I’ll be damned — as I was writing this, an interview with Les and Ler (Primus) just came through my feed reader. It was done by Boing Boing, and the lady interviewing them — “Xeni” — is annoying as hell. At least Les and Ler are cool.

Beware of the retarded commercial they put in the middle of it. That’s downright annoying too — forcing that advertisement crap on me. I know it helps pay the bills and all, but come on. Boing Boing already has fifty million ads on their site as-is . . . do they really have to shove more in wherever they can?

I’ve been going by this notion lately: if there’s an ad somewhere that really bugs me — not necessarily the content of the ad itself, but even the timing/placement of the ad — I’ll make it a point to not patronize whoever the ad is for. And I’ll also badmouth the company.