Pick Your Apocalypse - Radiated Wasteland or Rise of Robots

I'm really not much of a gamer, but I'll dabble in the occasional game as long as it's post-apocalyptic and I can play online.  I've been playing Die2Nite daily for over a year now, and more recently I've been spending time in a city devastated by the zombie apocalypse in Zombie Pandemic.

Published by Pixel Pandemic, Zombie Pandemic is "a free browser based MMORPG featuring enriched RPG elements, including missions, advanced combat, perks and an inventory with hundreds of weapons to battle the more than 175 different NPC opponents."

I'm still on the first of three available maps, and have only gotten up to level 20, but it's been fun so far, and has definitely kept me interested enough to want to keep going.

But what I'm really waiting for is Pixel Pandemic to hurry up and release either one of their two upcoming games that look to have even more of a post-apocalyptic theme, Radiated Wasteland and Rise of Robots.

I don't have much information on Radiated Wasteland yet, but I did get a press kit for Rise of Robots.  Here's the description:

Machines have risen against mankind and those of us that remain must fight to survive in a world set in flames. As a player you are one of the few survivors who escaped the first attacks, trapped in the ruins of what used to be a metropolitan city. You are now part of the resistance fighting for whatever is left of civilization in this near future post-apocalyptic setting inspired by the Terminator movies.

Players can co-op by joining clans and constructing safe houses, hidden away from the machines who try to hunt you down. You must scavenge resources from what is left of the looted stores and left behind items in the city and you must stay well fed to survive. Combining items you scavenge you can craft improvised weapons and engage in tactical combat against the mighty robots and drones with more than 400 weapons available.

The game features classic MMORPG elements offering a fully customizable avatar which you can equip with the clothing and armor you find. The game is turn based and set on a huge tile based map of more than 3000 tiles to explore. Each tile is customized and during the explorative gameplay players are able to locate NPCs that offer missions, trading or even training facilities.

So it sounds like the gameplay will basically be a clone of Zombie Pandemic with new artwork and storylines.  But that would be fine with me, and I can't wait to play them.

From what I understand, both games will hit closed beta sometime in 2012, though I haven't heard exactly when.  You can go to the sites to sign up to be notified, or just stick around here, because the folks at Pixel Pandemic have already said that they'll throw some beta keys my way when they're ready to launch.

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The Wanderers by Carlos Sisi

I've mentioned more than once that I'm not a fan of zombies for the sake of zombies.  There are only so many ways the dead can rise before the usual zombie apocalypse stories begin to get repetitive.  But I've also mentioned that I'm interested in other cultures' takes on the end of the world, and I'm always on the lookout for post-apocalyptic books written in other languages. So, when the folks at Permuted Press offered me a copy of The Wanderers by Carlos Sisi for review, I was anxious to read it.

Originally published as Los Caminantes in 2009, The Wanderers is one of Spain's top selling apocalyptic novels, and is now available for the first time in an English translation.

It starts out with a dead body washing up on the beach, a body that proceeds to do its best to eat the police who come to investigate. We then follow a few different groups of survivors through the early stages of a standard zombie apocalypse as they watch their city fall apart around them.

At first I had some trouble keeping track of the characters, in part because I wasn't used to their names or the place names, but after I got used to them, I found the characters likeable, and believable.  They really felt like regular people, mostly young, who were caught in a desperate situation.  But luckily I didn't have to try to remember all of them for very long, because, spoiler alert, people die in this book, usually with spurting, gushing, or even fountaining of certain vital bodily fluids.

The story progresses with the survivors slowly consolidating into larger groups while they hole up in various buildings around the city, watching their reserves dwindle, wondering if there is anyone out there who can help them.

But as it turns out, there is another survivor out there, one who helps to set The Wanderers apart from the usual zombie fare.  He is Father Isidro, priest of La Victoria Church, and it is his fervent belief that the rising of the dead signals the judgement of God upon Man, a judgement that must fall on everyone, even if it means that he has to be the one to lead the dead to the living.

In most zombie stories, the zombies themselves are the primary threat, or maybe there are agressive groups of survivors competing for the same resources, but I can't think of another one where the shambling hordes are actively prodded toward the living, particularly by someone with such a religious zeal.  And it surprised me that a novel written and set in Spain, which Wikipedia tells me is 75% Catholic, would feature a Catholic priest as it's primary villain, but that may have added some of the shock value that made the book so popular over there.

The character of Father Isidro, and his raving lunacy, definitely adds something to the story, and that combined with believable characters, interesting locations, and plenty of gory action makes The Wanderers a book worth reading.

My official rating for the Wanderers is 7 Megatons.

PS Just a quick note on the translation.  Generally, it's very good, but I would guess that whoever did it is not a native English speaker.  Some of the language or vocabulary used isn't what I would have expected; for example a phrase like "The scene was splattered with blood and screams" which isn't exactly correct.  But at the same time there was never a case where the language was jarring, or failed to get the point across, and most of the time it read as any other English novel would, while giving the book a bit of a unique feel.

Return to the Planet of the Apes Animated Series

I was cruising the used DVD/book store at the mall today, and I found what I thought was quite a score, Return to the Planet of the Apes, the complete animated series.  I knew there was a Planet of the Apes tv series, but I had completely forgotten about the animated Saturday morning show that came after it.

Running for just 13 episodes in 1975, Return to the Planet of the Apes didn't follow the chronology of the films and live-action tv series, but rather was a sort of re-imagining of the mythology with many of the same characters. As with the previous stories, this one follows a handful of astronauts who are thrown into the future and find themselves in a world populated by intelligent apes.  They try to figure out what happened while avoiding the apes and protecting the humans who live there.

I'm really looking forward to watching the shows, but it turns out that if I had known to look, I could have watched them anytime because all of the episodes are posted in their entirety on YouTube.

I only paid $7 for the DVD and I'd rather watch them on my tv anyway, but if you're interested in seeing them yourself, here's the first episode to whet your appetite.

Posted Some New Media

If you haven't been to the Audio, Videos and Fiction pages recently, I just posted a few new items that hopefully will entice you to check them out.

On the Audio page, I added the end of the world extravaganza, 2012, and the post-apocalyptic classic, Cyborg, bringing the number of movie audio rips up to 34.  That's in addition to 50 other files in the audio drama, music, and audio book categories.

The latest addition to the Videos page is a cool short film called The End, one of over a hundred short films and videos I've gathered from various sources.  Two in particular that you might want to try, given the holiday season, are Peace on Earth and Good Will to Men, both classics of animation.

To round out the updates, there are three new short stories on the Fiction page.  The first is Tales of a Blood Earth, by Steven Montano, set in the same dark fantasy universe as his Blood Skies trilogy.  The other two, How to Catch a Vampire, and Magical Mystery Treasure, are Thundarr the Barbarian fan-fiction by Sheila Shillingburg.  I'm a huge Thundarr fan, so I'm looking forward to reading those in particular.

But even if none of the above pique your interest, there's bound to be something that floats your boat on the media pages, so why don't you head on over and have a look?

Sooner Dead - A Gamma World Novel

After slogging through Stephen King's 11/22/63 (starts strong, ends weak), I was in the mood for something a little lighter.  I wanted crazy mutants, radiated landscapes, and lots of action.  Not as guns and ammo as Deathlands, but more like Gamma World in a book, and after some looking around, I was pleasantly surprised to find that there are in fact a couple of Gamma World novels, both published just this year.

So I bought them both and just finished the first one, Sooner Dead by Mel Odom, and it turns out it was exactly what I was looking for.

Now it's been a long time since I cracked open a Gamma World rule book, so I forget what the mythology said about the cause of the apocalypse, but in these books it was a mishap with the Large Hadron Collider. It tore apart the world, and opened ripples, gateways to other worlds and dimensions, bringing all manner of strange creatures into ours.

Having the plot device of rampant inter-dimensional wormholes means that you can introduce basically anything you want into your story, and Mr Odom certainly took advantage of that.  This book has human-animal hybrids, cyborgs, nanobot-enhanced humans, alien creatures, and more kinds of psionic abilities than I could count, all set in what 200 years before was known as Oklahoma.

The story follows Hella, a bio-engineered young woman with a mysterious past, and her bisonoid companion, Stampede, as they serve as guides for a group hunting for a lost object in the ruinous wastes of the American southwest.  It's a fast-paced adventure chock full of gun fights, raiders, mutant creatures, mystery, loyalty, and betrayal. 

I really enjoyed it, and if there's ever a sequel following the same characters, I'd be sure to pick it up.

Overall, I can definitely recommend it, at least if you're the right mood for it.  My official rating for Sooner Dead is 7 Megatons.