Gun Metal Gaming Chapter 12: Crisis on Earth Fun

In “Gun Metal Gaming: A 2009 Retrospective,” Wolfman Jew covers one game from 2009 a month for all of 2024. Each is one he’s either never played or played for only a few forgotten minutes well over a decade ago; he’s coming into these about as fresh as a player can. Hopefully, his experiences will give us a good view of one of gaming’s lesser years.

“What have I become? Something less than human. But also something more. One virus. Three weeks. Millions dead. And I was there. My name was Alex Mercer. And my work is almost done.”—Alex Mercer, Prototype

One of the most unmitigated gaming success stories in 2009 was Batman: Arkham Asylum. Rocksteady’s take on the Caped Crusader was brilliant, because it was laser focused on the experience of letting you embody one of pop culture’s greatest icons. The proudly shallow combat made the most random button mash seem calculated and powerful. The inverted stealth mechanics let you feel predatory. Every feature hid how wildly biased it was in the player’s favor. And while the story and script were bad, the tone captured not just Batman’s darkness and grit, but also his camp, surreality, and kitschy charm. This was a lightning rod for superhero games, which could suddenly go from crunchy arcade fighters and fitfully inventive shovelware to a focus of prestige design. They could win Game of the Year awards. Works like Insomniac’s Spider-Man series have taken the tenets of Arkham Asylum to create games that are accessible, cinematic, energetic, and maybe basic at times, but deliberately so in the interest of giving everyone a sense of immediate empowerment. As it turns out, something that “makes you feel like X” is as perfect for the superhero as superheroes are for games. Now we live in a world where a great Superman game is the “white whale” of adaptations, even if that’s mostly because Warner Bros. Interactive hasn’t the good sense to respond to my pitch. It’s unfinished but quite good, I assure you.

You might have noticed that this final chapter of “Gun Metal Gaming” is not about Arkham Asylum. This is about games I haven’t played (perhaps I’ll do a series on the Arkham quadrilogy some day. I dunno. How does that sound?). It’s also not about InFAMOUS, the Sony superhero game from the same year, because that one’s trapped on PS3. No, I’m tackling Prototype, which isn’t a superhero story officially but is one in practice. Antihero Alex Mercer is an off-brand Eddie Brock, an alleged everyman possessed by an unstoppable Eldritch virus. He fights with Wolverine claws and can shapeshift into his foes, though unlike the Martian Manhunter he has to eat them first. He can’t leap a building in a single bound but can run up its side just as quickly. He’s chased by the military like the Hulk and uncovers a Cadmus Project-esque clandestine plot. His villains Elizabeth Greene and Robert Cross are twisted counterparts à la Bizarro and Sabertooth. Some of his attributes bring Spawn to mind, most notably how his actions worsen the world, and he secretly suffers the classic Swamp Thing twist. His turf, like any good Marvel hero, is NYC. And the game got a tie-in miniseries through DC’s Wildstorm imprint. One year after The Dark Knight and Iron Man hit theaters, capital-M Major superhero games experienced a Cambrian explosion, including the surprisingly well liked X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Perhaps that was the last stone in the wall that sealed the fate of Marvel and DC Comics: not curators of imaginary stories but “IP farms” for multimedia empires. And this game was right there.

Image: Source Gaming. Basic gameplay of Prototype. Each power, like those “we have Wolverine at home” claws or stretchy tendrils, largely works the same way. It’s that “X, X, X and sometimes Y” button mashing.

Let’s get the basics out of the way, because Prototype follows enough tropes from “Gun Metal Gaming” that it works as a series finale. It’s an open world game like The Saboteur and Chinatown Wars, littered with pointless collectibles and missions that feel disconnected from the map despite being set there. Many follow the strict, almost railroading guidance of H.A.W.X and Modern Warfare, with only one way to get to the end. Others are more open ended, but all have high difficulty spikes. That incentives maxing out the skill tree, like with Borderlands and Dragon Age. Some challenges require very specific abilities, and while I found that mildly annoying in Plants vs. Zombies it’s worse here given how frenetic everything is. Mercer is also a classic Bald Whitem’n thanks to his ornery nature, convenient amnesia, and strict obedience to whatever mission he’s currently on. The color palette is ugly, and the cutscenes are filled with quick cuts and paranoid ramblings. Oh, and the big name casting! Kari Wahlgren as the mass murdering Greene, Phil LaMarr as a scientist you browbeat, and Lake Bell as the younger Mercer who gives her brother missions (ironically, its “additional voices” actors are a murderer’s row for games: Khary Payton, Yuri Lowrenthal, Fred Tatasciore, Nolan North, Steve Blum, Troy Baker, and James Patrick Stewart, a.k.a. Kingdom Hearts’ delightfully asinine Xigbar). This is one of the most “2009” video games you could imagine; it is Gun Metal Gaming.

It took a while for things to get going. There’s a prevailing clumsiness in the mechanics and movement, whether gliding between buildings or slowly walking over the bazooka you want to use (or the person you want to eat). The control scheme is unique in that shooting isn’t done with the trigger button, which never stops feeling awkward and pushes you away from guns—not that that’s a bad thing when you’ve got a sword arm, but you often need a long range bazooka. Game feel’s weak at a granular level, though it does feel good when you’re slicing up fleshy bruisers and running up buildings. Because of that, the fun is strongest in the times where you’re let loose without caveats or strict goals. You get to run over buildings, awkwardly transition into your bloody glide, and descend on goons. You blow up whole tanks with your rock fists, because hijacking them requires a tedious quicktime event and beating it up yourself feels raw. You delight in the sounds of slicing and squelching. This has a grindhouse-adjacent “Double-A” feel, like a budget project you’d find at a Gamestop and end up really liking. I mean that sincerely. In fact, a lot of the games in this series captured that, even the ones like this that were Triple-A, and that feeling is missed today.

Image: Source Gaming. The final boss is a good barometer of how this game deals with this tone and direction. It’s a dumb fight, albeit a lot better than every other boss fight, and can be won or lost in a matter of seconds. It’s also patently hilarious, since the best strategy is to run over this aircraft carrier named after Ronald Reagan and chuck missiles and planes at him. The final boss, I mean. Reagan the man was dead by the time this game came out.

However, Prototype goes out of its way to undercut this. Most notable is a long stretch where Mercer loses his combat powers, meaning that although he can run and glide and cannibalize, he’s stuck pinching weapons in atrocious combat sequences. Targeting and grabbing are often ungainly. The vehicle sections where you drive a tank or chopper are unpleasant, and it’s a bit of a bummer when you need them for a mission. It’s fine that you take damage badly, but your avenues for healing are limited when the military can, say, shoot at you and blow up the soldier you’ve just grabbed for takeout. And because gaming in the late 2000’s was increasingly hostile towards the value of boss fights, even in a game that should be tailor-made for them and has crazy flesh virus monsters, bosses are bad. A late game tussle with Elizabeth Greene in her tentacle monster form is so awful; you die constantly, it takes forever to knock her health down, hitting her is a pain, and the military soldiers added to help you are useless even for health. Fortunately, the battle with her son—the military’s top man, Mercer’s inside source, and the not so shocking final boss—is a lot better. It’s all about throwing stuff. You know, like Donkey Kong.

But in the end, it’s all rather typical. These problems were normal for the time. They were ever-present throughout this series, which represented so many common pitfalls of game design. Granted, the pleasures are more unique thanks to the carnage. I had fun whenever I was able to fight, without having to run away to lick my wounds (though I wish I’d have started on Easy Mode and recommend that to any prospective player, especially since you can’t adjust the difficulty partway through), but I don’t think there’s a ton to uncover here.

Because of that, I think Prototype is most interesting when viewed through that superhero lens, because of how it is and isn’t a new take. Taken in today’s oversaturated superhero climate, it’s very much off brand. That’s primarily in how Mercer, or rather the virus that has absorbed his consciousness, is comically psychotic. These days we expect heroes with either stodgy “no kill” rules or repeatedly broken moral stances, but… look, there’s an Achievement for only eating ten or fewer civilians in a single playthrough. Not accidentally slicing them up with your sword arm or crushing them with the car you were trying to throw at a helicopter, going out of your way to consume their flesh for health like a vampire. I did not get this Achievement! He saves a grand total of two people but kills over a thousand innocent New Yorkers, at least in my playthrough. Despite this, Mercer never relishes in his doings the way Venom, his most patently obvious influence, does. Instead he’s po-faced, ornery, and mean like a good Bald Whitem’n, to such an extent that he’s indistinguishable from every other late-Aughts gaming hero. Even his hoodie is boring, as all his iconography comes from his metallic, tentacled transformations. So this isn’t a natural start for a franchise, nor does it have a star who’s so clearly built for merchandising purposes like Deadpool or Gambit. You know, Gamestop had an ugly Mercer toy as a pre-order bonus, and it’s hard looking at stuff like that without thinking about how much labor and capital went into them. A lot of people were banking on this guy being the new hotness. It’s crazy.

Image: Source Gaming. Here’s Mercer, flanked by collectibles (and if there was any greater sign of the game’s excess, it’s that you can regularly have two collectibles in your line of sight). Pretty bland looking for a cape, right?

Granted, it’s not as though this was some alien thing. It actually has roots in two games based on Marvel’s jolly green giant: movie tie-in HULK and demented sandbox brawler Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction. Both were products of Canadian studio Radical Entertainment, and they were polished, strong, and well received—the latter especially, which judged you based on the scale and mechanical diversity of your mayhem. The success of HULK (and, much more so, The Simpsons: Hit and Run) got Radical picked up by Vivendi, and for a few years things were good. The team had considered an idea for an Avengers game but drifted hard towards the idea of a shapeshifter. Inspired by John Carpenter’s The Thing, the protagonist could alter their body so extensively that it’d allow any powers the designers could imagine and gameplay Hulk could never do. Things like consuming a soldier, taking his place, and framing his squadmate for your crimes. As the development went on for this, Scarface: The World as Yours, and Crash: Mind Over Mutant, Vivendi merged with Activision, who positioned Prototype as a major new IP.

It’s honestly a natural end point for superhero stories from the 2000’s, which were bucking against ethical conventions in ways that were sometimes subversive and mostly juvenile. Batman might spy on all of Gotham City in a regrettable Patriot Act allegory, but Morgan Freeman would be on hand to explain how that’s actually bad. Or maybe the Punisher would be Captain America for a spell when he wasn’t off in an exhausting R-rated side comic. Or you’d have Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver as an incestuous couple, or goofy DC villain Dr. Light being retconned as a rapist, or the original comic book version of The Boys luxuriating in edgy, wanton cruelty. Hell, there was even an Ultimate Spider-Man game that let you eat people as Venom, which only pushes how much of a knockoff Mercer is. I’d put this one as obviously juvenile but not really cruel, if that makes sense. You kill a lot of people, and horribly, but the Manhattan of Prototype never feels like more than a bunch of gray cardboard boxes and its NPCs never feel like real people. There’s certainly no comedy, even in the many satirical posters. Tellingly, even though the city gets more infected as the game goes on, it’s impossible to tell the infected humans who attack you apart from the normal ones who run away. They’re both prey. Somehow, its sheer shallowness makes the world less nasty.

Image: Source Gaming. Mercer, about to indulge in his favorite midday snack. The little head icon indicates that this character has memories that explain the plot, though I didn’t collect every one.

Of course, capes back then were far from exclusively juvenile. They were often proudly political, especially in the Big Two’s biggest events. Identity Crisis and Dark Reign represented our governments’ evils through superhero teams; the former showed the Justice League doing heinous acts in the name of self-defense, and the latter put the Avengers under the thrall of the Green Goblin. House of M depicted the fear of an underclass seizing power. Civil War pitted not liberalism versus conservatism against each other, as Mark Millar cannot fathom liberalism, but two ugly forms of conservatism. The voyeuristic, 24-inspired 52 looked at an interconnected DC Universe racked by unrest. Final Crisis processed the existential terror of the Bush years through Darkseid’s horrifying end stage capitalist nightmare. Secret Invasion suggested that anyone you know, even you, could be a foreign sleeper agent. Kryptonians and Asgardians became immigrants living alongside humans who had never given them a thought, while the mutant haven of Genosha was destroyed. Lex Luthor became President. Batman and Captain America uncovered secrets from their pasts—cruel experiments, deadly ex-sidekicks, and other provocative retcons—that exposed their worlds as far scarier than we had been led to believe. Millar’s Ultimates also made Cap racist for the Aughts’ jaded sensibilities. And that’s just books, as the likes of Justice League Unlimited, Heroes, the Dark Knight Trilogy, and the unorthodox Person of Interest all showed superheroes as chaotic political assets (though for anyone in want of a comically aggressive counterexample, look no further than NBC’s The Cape). These stories were openly about terrorism, imperialism, military and corporate malfeasance, global upheaval, overwhelm, surveillance, geopolitical moral quandaries, and living in a world that was worse than you were told and too out of control for even the likes of Superman and Thor.

Those were, admittedly, mixed. Final Crisis was an incoherent mess, even if it was really fun and eerily reflects my current despair. Heroes was garbage from the word go and only got worse with every beat. Plenty of stories perpetuated Bush-era cynicism, and they’ve aged terribly. I cannot in good faith recommend you check out Identity Crisis, anything Mark Millar ever wrote that wasn’t a tie-in to a Superman children’s cartoon, or that The Boys comic. But writers like Grant Morrison (whose theory about 2000’s event comics I’m openly lifting here), Ed Brubaker, Greg Rucka, Dwayne McDuffie, and all manner of Nolans were unashamed to use capes in service to questioning a scary 21st Century. While I doubt Prototype was ever invested in engaging with this, it’s still part of the discourse. It is exceptionally cynical about all aspects of American life, seeing the country as a festering rot of corporate abuse, military and police brutality, corruption of the masses, and all-encompassing conspiracies. Which it mostly is, but still. The plague that killed Mercer and now acts as his wrath was created by the government as a bioweapon that could target specific racial groups, and the game’s woes come from its creation, propagation, and coverup. Manhattan is being eaten alive from the inside, and while our “monster all along” protagonist is trying to save his city from both the black ops cabal of Blackwatch and the monster-spawning Greene, he’s not too fussed about the people living there. Nor should he be, perhaps. Why put stock into anything other than survival if the world and its people will do nothing but hold you down? You can’t save the day if there’s no day to save, an idea reinforced by how the entire story is a flashback leading up to what 2009’s greatest gaming villain would call a “complete, urban saturation.”

Image: Source Gaming. Ignoring the somewhat ungainly way Mercer flies (or the black crows that show up a lot as though he’s the Crow / Raven / any number of bird-themed comic book characters), New York here really is just a sandbox. There’s no attempt to make it seem like anything other than a space for the player to move through. This isn’t really a complaint.

The gameplay supports this reading. There are no towers to climb, no districts to liberate. You don’t buy safehouses or unlock new areas. You can destroy military bases and hives to lower your wanted level, but their destruction is only temporary (and escaping Johnny Law is never a problem when you can just run in a corner and transform). At the same time, you take so much damage so quickly that it’s often better to strike once before running off and waiting for your health to regenerate, which artificially lengthens the end game missions by a lot. There are few supporting characters, and most of their cutscenes are terrible “half conversations” like those in Fire Emblem Engage that undermine whatever little narrative investment the game has. The bonus missions are given by the game itself, sans goofy in-universe explanation. The only material reason to murder people is to finish a level or grind for Evolution Points, though “for the hell of it” is ultimately the best justification. It is pretty dang fun to galavant around SoHo and fight monsters. And I suspect that’s how most of its fans primarily engaged with it, as was the standard in the golden age of sandboxes. The game is at its worst when it’s punishing you for this behavior, which is admittedly all the time thanks to artillery being everywhere.

Maybe Prototype is the last gasp of this pre-MCU era of the genre. Maybe. To be honest, its “place” in the culture is hard to parse, especially given those two elephants in the room. So Arkham Asylum was the definitive superhero game that year (and kind of ever). It’s the polished, influential one that got a sea of awards and three sequels of progressively lower quality. But when it came to earning the silver, InFAMOUS and Prototype were rivals. They both released weeks apart, reviewed similarly, and discovered the pitfalls of sandbox design two years before Batman. InFAMOUS scored better, if only by a little; its story was stronger, even if it was one of the first games to really experience the backlash to moral choice systems. Prototype sold better, if only by a little and thanks to a multiplatform release. However, although neither side definitively won and both IPs are dead, one certainly seems to have a nicer grave. All three got sequels at around the same time, each reviewed about the same as their predecessor, but Prototype 2 fully flopped a year after InFAMOUS 2 and Arkham City. This may have been an issue of changing tastes towards sandbox games or marketing or it being a suspiciously smaller project due to probable budget cuts. No matter the cause, Activision declared the brand unworthy of the investment, and Radical soon suffered mass layoffs before turning into the Vancouver branch of “Activision Central Technology.” It’s a support studio working almost exclusively on Call of Duty, because that’s the eventual fate of every team at Activision.

Image: Source Gaming. One thing Prototype had going for it was its immediacy; it’s rather fun to run up buildings and move across the city.

Though I’m being a bit rude here, as—for the last shocking twist of “Gun Metal Gaming”—I actually did play Prototype 2 when it came out! And I liked it! It was the rare game of the era to star a character of color, I found that compelling, and it ended up being a pretty okay time. It’s fun that Mercer’s the fake villain, and the powers are still neat. Part of why I added Prototype 1 to the docket is that I wanted to double dip on the sequel, whose 360 original release isn’t backwards compatible on Series X, and a bundle of the two games is regularly on sale. I remember little about the game other than a sensation that I enjoyed it more than I did this one, but that may be nostalgia. I was younger and more amenable to sandbox nonsense.

InFAMOUS’ fate was sort of an inversion. The series got a third game and the questionable honor of gifting “Evil Cole” to PlayStation All-Star Battle Royale, but it’s still dead. Unlike that Prototype bundle, Sony has not seen fit to port or remaster the first two games, making them more lost blockbusters from living memory. But Sucker Punch moved onto bigger and better things with Ghost of Tsushima. Now Ghost of Yōtei is set to be a 2025 standard bearer after a mostly dismal year for Sony. And while we’re reminiscing, after the negative reception to Batman: Arkham Knight, Rocksteady spent a decade working on Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, which came out at the beginning of 2024 to become one of the biggest live service boondoggles in a year full of them. They’re recovering from that by making a director’s cut of Hogwarts Legacy, a game they did not direct. So I guess Arkham Asylum won as a game, and InFAMOUS won as a studio, but this one won… nothing.

Image: Source Gaming. The red imagery is constant throughout Prototype. It’s in the blood, of course, and Mercer’s black appendages often have red lines coursing through them. But the sky is red in infected areas and kind of brings to mind both mass death and the red skies of comic book events.

Prototype ends with Mercer killing Cross, a symbol of both the military and the uncontrolled virus, before flying an exploding nuclear bomb out of Manhattan. Beat The Dark Knight Rises to it by three years. He comes back thanks to a crow eating some of his flesh and falling under his consciousness—crows are a prominent motif that indicate when you’re in infected areas—and decides to keep fighting the bad guys as something less and more than human. You instantly brace for him to pivot right into the final monologue from Spider-Man. On the surface, this is blatantly insincere. It’s only there so you can pick up the bonus challenges, all two hundred blue orbs, and other time wasters. But it does perfectly capture the “never the end!” lives of superheroes, who are trapped in an unending cycle of stoic vigilance. We love these characters partially because that state offers endless stories for us as readers in a way that’s a tragic burden for them as people. We want them to be always challenged and always there to feed our hunger for adventure. Perhaps that’s why the power fantasy is so good for action games; they’re all about making us learn, dominate, improve, and stay ever-vigilant through updates and expansions. And even though his never-ending battle didn’t take, Mercer’s game does capture that idea of the superhero in the 2000’s. It has it all: the crazy powers, the hero worship, the absurd twists, the fakeout sacrifice, the conspiracies. He may not have a great legacy or a lasting brand, but he can stand and be counted.

Well, that’s Prototype done and dusted. And I’m left with one question: what did I learn from “Gun Metal Gaming?” Well, first off, that 2009 was far more interesting a year than I had given it credit for. It was still a year full of bad games, bad directions for the games industry, and bad trends from previous years. We certainly got to see it prop up tropes like sandbox bloat and ugly gritty aesthetics. And yet, the year also produced many good games, including several subjects in this series and others that I had played years ago. I think it holds up well compared to 2008, which has a few flawed masterpieces and not a ton else.

Image: Source Gaming. I really wasn’t expecting much out of 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand, and that was entirely justified, but it ended up becoming one of the highlights of this project.

The second is that even though decades and eras are ultimately a product of mass apophenia, singling out one year can do a lot for seeing how time periods operate. And wow, does the games industry back then look so crazy fifteen years later. The concept of the modern live service hadn’t reared its ugly head; neither had the horrors of the mobile market. Indies were barely there and many were dependent on one storefront. Smarter and more thoughtful games were limited, and many of the biggest games were kind of embarrassing in retrospect. The modern Triple-A prestige aesthetic hadn’t fully settled, so even big games like The Saboteur feel smaller and rougher in a way that’s hard to express. Perhaps that’s nothing more than looking back from a day with higher graphics and resolution, but many of the biggest names of this era do feel oddly quaint. And while the space did allow for those super cheap, super polished casual games, that kind of design philosophy would die soon. So I’m mostly happy we’ve moved from this time, but also aware that we lost good things, too. 2009 shows an industry on a precipice; it would soon change in ways I could have never imagined as a late teenager.

And I think that’s made clear just by looking at the people who made these things. Eat Lead, The Saboteur, and Blood on the Sand’s studios died largely on the failure of their projects. It’s hard to see Radical Entertainment as doing more than marginally better. Five others—BioWare, Rockstar, Gearbox, Infinity Ward, and Ubisoft (via Ubisoft Bucharest)—have actually grown in size, but their creative, commercial, and labor problems are all high profile and hard to ignore. Chair Entertainment has released little over the last few years, and an entire decade’s worth of their work has been delisted. PopCap has been trapped in a monetization cycle ever since EA bought them. I suppose the best-off studio of the bunch is Nintendo EAD, which technically also doesn’t exist, but only because it was merged into Nintendo EPD and has been involved in many of the Switch’s biggest projects. Gaming is more volatile and capricious than it was fifteen years ago, yet we seem to have learned nothing.

Image: Source Gaming. Games like Plants vs. Zombies feel legitimately like relics from a bygone age, not because they’re out of fashioned or clunky—this was one of the most polished games I played all year—but because it feels tied to another era. It’s hard to find games like this anymore. If you can play the original on Steam or Xbox, you really should.

More practically, I learned that even a monthly series still has its limits. “Gun Metal Gaming” was planned with the idea that it would take up some of my time, but not all of it and leave me mostly free to pursue additional projects. After two weekly series that took almost all of my attention, it seemed easier, and I expected to coast a bit. That… didn’t happen. I did write typical in-depth articles, but only about ten (though I did comfortably play dozens and dozens of video games, many for the first time). Most of my drafts, including ones started back in 2023, have been left on the back burner. The majority of my time went here, because I still had deadlines. Start preliminary research and writing at the start of the month, a few days earlier if I had the time, try to beat the game in the first half, then spend the second on polishing. In December, this meant the likes of Crow Country, Mark of the Ninja, Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown, and Oracle of Seasons were all second tier experiences. Last year’s screenshot gallery had a shot from Control; that was for an article I intended for this year that hopefully you’ll see next year. There are well over a dozen drafts like that burning a hole in my mind. I want to finish them and set them free.

As for what’s next? Well, I suppose I could conceivably reuse this series in the future if I want to tackle another 2009 game in a way that doesn’t fit into my other series. I do own Final Fantasy XIII, not that I’m looking forward to playing anything that “gets good after twenty hours.” And I have an all-new project in January that should prove interesting—and very challenging to my schedule—in different ways. For now, though, I’m happy to say goodbye to this one. “Gun Metal Gaming” was an excellent way for me to discover games I had missed, uncover historical artifacts that seemed intriguing at the time, and in four cases, actually use DVDs I owned from years ago. I’d like to think it added to this site’s canon of work. And it’s okay to let it end. Thanks for joining me on this escapade, everyone who read these.

Image: Source Gaming. Only two games from this series will stay on my hard drive: Plants vs. Zombies and Dragon Age: Origins. Dragon Age was clunky and standoffish and hard to get into, but it was also magnificent and fascinating. Horrible final battle or no, I’m on the train and am excited to retain this save file for Dragon Age II. I even bought Inquisition at 90% off.

So goodnight, Morrigan. Goodnight, Captain Carpenter. Goodnight Commander Lucius, Soap MacTavish, Mordecai’s pet Bloodwing, Miis, Dr. Zomboss, all characters and “additional voices” courtesy of Steve Blum and Nolan North, and, of course, 50 Cent. May we all sleep the sleep of kings, and when I wake, let me never have to think of any of you again. Except those of you I like.

Read all of “Gun Metal Gaming” here.