#Gamers #EnergyDrinks Are More Dangerous Than #Zombies In #DeadIsland2:

 

Excessive energy drink consumption might be more dangerous than excessive zombies.

Once, when I was in high school and had barely slept after staying the night at a friend’s house, I went by the gas station in the morning, bought two Rockstar Energy Drinks, and downed them both before basketball practice. When I got to the gym and started running laps, I felt like my heart was going to pound right out of my chest. I survived, but I was worried my capillaries would burst the entire time. Playing Dead Island 2, I can’t help but think that my character must be feeling even worse.

In the zombie slaughtering game from Dambuster Studios, many of the health pick-ups are energy drinks. You find and fabricate med-kits, too, but as you wander through each level, you’ll find way more of the smaller healing items, which are divided into two categories: protein bars and energy drinks. So, you eat too many protein bars, too, but that doesn’t seem especially hazardous for your health. Though the lack of toilets in most levels could become a problem.

Dead Island 2’s levels aren’t particularly short, either, which means that, over the course of one mission, you probably down a few dozen energy drinks. That’s dangerous — way more dangerous than charging into a zombie-infested building with a boombox blaring. You can fight off the zombies, but the chemical reaction that happens inside your body is out of your control once you metabolize the liquid. You cannot slash your guts with an electric machete and expect the problem to go away.

There are documented cases of young people having severe reactions to drinking too many energy drinks. “In one case, a young 28-year-old who drunk eight cans of an energy drink actually went into cardiac arrest, and they found the arteries of his heart were completely locked up,” sports cardiologist Dr. John Higgins told CNN back in 2017 for a report on the potential health hazards of drinking too many energy drinks. “When they were able to open them up, all the testing revealed nothing wrong with this person other than he had high levels of caffeine and taurine.” Other, similar stories have been reported in the years since, and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has a page outlining the danger of excessive energy drink consumption on its official website.

But a real person’s “excessive consumtpion” would be rookie numbers compared to what my survivor puts up each play session. Over the course of one Dead Island 2 level, my character drinks several times that amount, often slurping down two or three in quick succession. If, in real life, I came across three unopened Red Bulls sitting on an abandoned computer desk, I would take one to sip and pack the others in my backpack, or leave a few for another weary survivor in need of some caffeine. In Dead Island 2, that isn’t a possibility. It’s drink or get drunk.

Which means that as I wander around the post-apocalyptic world of Hell-A, I’m thinking much more about the troubling implications of too much caffeine than societal collapse. I’m much less worried about the monsters outside the walls of Emma Jaunt’s mansion and much more worried about the Monsters sloshing around inside my character’s belly. It’s a good thing the game doesn’t have a rest mechanic, because I don’t think my character would be able to sleep at night.