Last weekend I had the non-pleasure of playing the demo to the new XBOX 360 shooter “Prey.” Wow, what a snooze. Although it does some cool things - like enable you to walk on walls and the ceiling, or travel through portals instantly to vastly different environments - it is mostly just a retread of all the old 90’s scifi shooters. The levels aren’t designed to seem real or lived-in, but are instead merely an amusement park created for the sole purpose of giving the player a place to mow down hordes of generic cybernetic aliens.

If you strip away the portals and the zero-gee wall walking, you end up with what is essentially the original Quake or Unreal. The weapons aren’t even terribly exciting - they feel hollow and fake, unlike the satisfying weapons found in games like Call of Duty 2, Halo and Half Life 2.

I’m happy to say that the demo did its job, ensuring that I will never purchase Prey. And take my word for it, it isn’t even worth your network resources to download that 1.2 gigabyte demo, free though it is. Be kind to your ISP - use their precious non-neutral pipes for something more important, like downloading the latest series of Doctor Who episodes, the season finale of which deserves a blog entry in its own right.

Besides wasting my time on terrible XBOX 360 demos, I’ve also been working on my application package for grad school. I’m getting closer, inch by inch. Only 12 pages to go, before my submission is complete. And then it’s back to Alberic Heresies #3, Le Corneille Noir, and a revision of the zombie play I wrote for the New Playhouse in Frederick, MD.

Life is busy, but it may get worse (or better, depending on your point of view), since it’s looking more and more likely that Tina, the girls and I will be moving in with my mom, some 70 miles from work. This means lots of time on the train to write and read, to activities that compete for my precious 1.5 hours of free time a night. Maybe I’ll actually accomplish something, as I contribute to the gradual destruction of the earth through the selfish use of fossil fuels. I hate that I may become a long distance commuter, tying up 6 hours a day in transit, but at this stage, with our finances stretched to the limit, and some $24,000 a year spent on daycare, we really have no other choice.