MAD MAX!!!! Ahem... sorry for shouting

But I can't help it, not really.

This looks amazing, and I hope it lives up to the hype. I will be on the beta bandwagon if I can help it. Or not. I've had mixed feelings about playtesting something not so polished and ended up feeling like my post-armageddon joy got tempered with a sandpaper scrub. Take Fallen Earth, for example, a post-apoc online RPG centered around Hoover Dam. I got to beta that one and I was unimpressed. I knew the gameplay would be a little wooden, but shooting was a nice touch. A nice change from the glut of fantasy RPGs out there, but when the premise seemed to be about cloning to play a character who could be killed over and over, as is wont to happen in such RPGs, I uttered a 'meh' and moved on.*

But this still looks amazing.

And it's Mad Max.

The only thing which would be WAAAAAAY cooler is just getting to play around in the world as a character I've created. Not just Max. Although it will be awesome to BE Max for a little bit. Am I rambling? Sorry. Just dreaming. Really looking forward to this one.

Mad Max.

Need I say more?


*Not that there hasn't been cloning in my fave post-apocs. Wasteland featured the ability, closer to the endgame, where you could fix a pod, pour in the right chemicals and scrape off a little DNA. I never did try it. And its not that I don't like clones (I've got a few stories I've written about the very subject) but I didn't like it in that particular setting. Kinda like eating a huge juicy steak with a scoop of mint chocolate chip ice cream. Two great tastes, does NOT taste great together.

Flash Fiction...

... I will keep this one short and just link to the post on my writing blog. I posted here because the short story I submitted for the contest has --drumroll-- a post-nuclear theme, called "Mourning Chorus."

Edit: The story was added to the site, but  too late to qualify for the May entry. I still got a few comments on it, however.

Changes

As of late, I haven't come across anything really exciting in the post-apoc genre to get me hot and bothered enough to post --

I have to stop there for a moment. How many of us get so excited by anything that the first reaction we have is to log into an account and type away. What? Oh, wait... yeah. Facebook. Twitter. Nevermind, hah! --

But a few things out there look promising. When I actually have some money again (separation and divorce are emotionally AND financially painful. I don't recommend it, but at the same time, its not worth fighting someone to get them to change their mind. Only makes them hurt you worse), I plan to plunk down a few bucks to see if they live up to the hype.

One of those things is: The Last of Us

When I saw the trailers for this one a while ago, I admit I was excited AND deflated. Years ago, I read about the zombie ants, due to the cordyceps fungus. Interesting, and best of all, REAL. I wondered then how I could work that into a story, but never found anywhere appropriate.

Fast forward. A few months ago, I am listening to a podcast with my husband and the guy mentions his regimen of vitamins and supplements. Among the items he lists were the cordyceps. Bells and whistles went off, as I recalled the cordyceps word ("Why does that sound familiar?") and, with the handy-dandy iPhone, pulled it up.

Here was a guy mentioning cordyceps as a supplement, and suddenly I had a vision of "THAT's where zombies are coming from! People taking these as supplements and the fungus mutating, taking over their brain and turning them into zombies that climb to the tops of buildings and --" Well, okay, not about the part where they climb to the tops of buildings. But being the instigator of zombification.

Fast forward again (gotta love that virtual remote) and I see the trailer crop up, and said "YES!" and then said "Oh no." Someone else came up with the end of the world scenario involving cordyceps before I could write and publish it. I do not know if it had anything to do with body-building supplements, but all the same, I am looking forward to playing The Last of Us, to see how the conceit plays out. Along with having an entertaining time, of course.

On a side note, this is a fantastic representation of the cordyceps at work, among his other magnificent pieces. Beautiful work, Mr. Fleming.

NaNoWriMo has begun!

Or will, by midnight. Head over to my writing blog, Torrie Burke, to view updates on my writing project for the month of November. Hope to see you there!

Writing is a Chore... but I Can Whistle While I Work

While working full-time doing something that is just a little tiny bit like writing, I realized that I once again needed to bounce back into the blogosphere in order to give my creativity a renaissance.  I don't want my job to kill it, even though I stare at a computer screen for most of the day making sure the grammar is correct (with the irony being I am not going to get it right most of the time here, and frankly, I don't care so much here).

In order to resurrect the space without deviating too much from the original content, I have attempted to find something new and exciting in the world.  Zip. Nada. I have found nothing apocalyptic by which I might find intrigue, and pique a new interest in this jaded, old heart.

So I go back to commenting on my writing progress. Yes, yes, anyone who has read me for any amount of time realized that I am working on my own novel.  I got caught up in other things, because Life, after all, Does Happen.  After two revisions, I am STILL not happy with it, but I did find a writing course which has, so far, been taking it to a new level of satisfaction for me.  I recommend her courses because now I can actually afford them and the methods really work to build a crane over the work and pull it out of the mire in which it sank.

I thought what swam around in my head could be a great novel, but I realized I lacked enough scenes with great conflict.  Even though what I saw in front of me was prose, I resorted to reading Blake Snyder's book on screenwriting called Save the Cat!  It still proves to be a good resource so far, by giving you a basic skeleton for the three-act structure (screenplays or novels) and it allows the writer to see where they are missing material.  I suspect I have the same problem as a lot of people, in that I can come up with a great setup and slam my characters with a zinger of a main conflict to get them out of their comfort zone and into the thrill of the story, and I know how the story will end, and I can even see a few great scenes play out in front of my very eyes, but it is too thin. 

What it doesn't do, however is offer much in the way of how to actually fix that problem.  It just tells you what you needed when you were done. Seemed a lot like baking a cake without a recipe. Someone says "You mix ingredients, stick it in the oven and out comes a cake." That's true, sure, but not precise. What ingredients go in it? How much? What order do you mix? How long do you bake?

Enter the course "How to Think Sideways" by author Holly Lisle.  I stared at it for many, many months.  Lack of a job and accompanying pay made me balk at the price tag, but I kept staring.  I finally got a full-time job, had money to drop on the course and... wham.  She doesn't run it quite the same way.  BUT... she did release the courses individually online for a much more affordable price.  And, the courses were always on the writer's timeline, with no datelines or homework, as such.

I am loving the results, but I am not quite ready to post anything just yet.  Let me say that Holly is 100% correct in that little ends up being the same when you let your muse play.  I've come up with so many new things that really add the punch I looked for that I wish I had scraped up enough and taken the course way back when I wrote the first draft.

The bottom line is that I need to get back to writing, both working on my novel and writing here.  If I have any readers... drop me a line and let me know if I am taking too long between posts.  I need something standing behind me with a cattle prod.

Wasteland Empires revisited

So I've been playing the FB game from Crowdstar called Wasteland Empires, and so far, I have to say I'm impressed. Of course there are a few things that could be improved, but this game is a beta, so enough people giving the creators feedback on these issues can only serve to assist at this point.

To start: the people are nomads, several generations beyond the devastation which ruined a futuristic society (not unlike the premise of Fallout, although Fallout's was the "future" of the 30's and 40's while this one seems to be the future of the 70's to 80's). Your people found an oasis, literally and figuratively; there is the wreckage of a sign which belonged to the Oasis Hotel and what was presumably a well or other water source just beneath the sign, long ago serving as mere decoration but now the heart's blood of a new colony. Your people decide to settle here and call this place "home."

The tutorial is essentially the first "Chapter," telling you how and what to build, how to scavenge the rubble to simultaneously gather resources and clear space for new structures. Characters who are supposedly part of your band of nomads tell a little story with comic book-style balloons in order to further the quest chain of that chapter. What irritates me about that is that they appear to give the last few lines of dialogue every time you load the game, so if you step away from the keyboard too long and it prompts you to replay, they pop up and those dialogue scenes can be fairly lengthy.

Most of the strategy I've experienced comes several flavors.

First, well placement. It's a big deal, because sources of water are the only structures that cannot be moved once placed, and require car batteries to complete, which you can only acquire by enlisting friends (so far I've needed three batteries per well, and you only get one battery per friend. The first couple of batteries are freebies, though). Since you have a limited number of batteries, you need to put them out at the edge of your oasis' coverage in order to maximize the footprint of your colony and allow the least amount of overlap.

Second, your deployment of offensive forces while in the raider colonies. You get to train 50% of your colonists as warriors, like scouts, crushers, spearmen, but whom ends up in battle is limited by your level. At my current reputation level, I get three squads of ten men to commit to battle. Most of the time I simply deploy them all in the same spot at the edge of the map where I can hit towers one-by-one without being aimed at by more than one tower, although that tends to bunch them up a bit for the scary boulder-throwers, which can knock out quite a few of my unarmored troops in one shot. But generally, if I cram enough folks onto one target, I can have it down before too many are lost. Once the towers are gone, there seems to be no more opposition to just bashing the crap out of the remaining buildings in order to scavenge supplies.

What I love: the feel of a real-time strategy in post-apocalyptic flavor. There's just enough cooperation required of nearly all the games written for Facebook, meaning that you have to invite your friends to play and they have to actually play the game (or at least log into it) in order to send the "gifts" you need to complete buildings. For instance, if I want to build out onto more territory, I have to place and complete wells. In order to complete the building of a well, I will need several batteries, and they can only be acquired when inviting friends into your gaming circle. Other items necessary for the completion of structures come directly as gifts (more cooperation), found when you attack the raiders' or other players' settlements, or when you scavenge the rubble around your colony.

What can be improved:
Get rid of the constant barrage of dialogues upon loading the game.
When placing a building, I am limited to the small window if I don't want to play full screen. Having the ability to move the screen about even when holding a building command would be fantastic.
The jumping from map to raider camp back to map then to the home colony is a bit cumbersome. Just have a function that will take you back to your own colony immediately after an attack.
There really does not seem to any sense of urgency. Even when, in the course of one quest chain, it says I was attacked, I was never attacked. Every battle at this point is offensive.

Overall, I've been entertained in a way that I have never been using a Facebook game. We'll have to see if it lasts.

Jumping on the RTS Bandwagon

So I'm tooling around on Facebook today to check out something my friends sent me, and I see this add for "Wasteland Empires." Anyone who know me knows that I get that "deer-in-the-headlights" look when anything remotely apocalyptic crosses my vision.* So naturally, I click.

What I found was a somewhat interesting beta for a real-time-strategy (RTS) game. Being a big fan of Starcraft and Warcraft (gotta love those orc Peons!) I decided I would give it a shot. So far, I've been pleasantly surprised. It doesn't play much differently in that the player is required to gather resources, build defenses and buildings which allow the next level on the technology tree to be built.

A short cut scene plays at the beginning to get you into the feel of the game, not dissimilar to the Fallout series of games. They find "Oasis," call it home and start building from there. The resources are in the rubble around the initial spot, and sending your colonists out to scavenge not only nabs you the materials you need to build but also the space in which to expand as well.

The sounds effects and soundtrack are great for a game built into a Facebook app. I'd even go so far as to compare them to the original Fallout as far as dreariness and appropriate feel for the game. Certainly better than the drek Inon Zur cranked out for FO3.

The drawings are comic-book style, alright but not spectacular. Some of the icons used for the resources don't fit the gritty and grimy feel of the rest of the "world" but this game is a beta so I'm being lenient. I would be happier to see the people wearing real items in lieu of armor instead of the ridiculous fallbacks to oversized skulls on their shoulders. Otherwise, decent effort for the concept art.

At the end of the day, what the makers of the game really want me to do is to give it Five Stars as-is, but I wouldn't. Not yet. Would I recommend it to my friends, however? Sure. A great little app is a great little app to pass the time while chatting on an otherwise boring social networking page.

*There was a time when I was sitting down to watch television and I saw ads for "Friday Night Lights." Not being the closest thing to a sports fan, I missed the few sports references and was a little bit thrilled with the creepo, wastelandish look. I bet you can imagine my disappointment.