the post apoc genre

L

lailahaillallah

First time out of the vault
theres been all kinds of post apocalypse games and movies, whether its wasteland, fallout 1 & 2, roadwar 2000 and roadwar europa, the mad max series .. the list goes on.

what concepts, plot lines, scenarios, features, characters etc.. do you think really exemplified the Post Apoc genre and were the most memorable?

what gripes or misgivings do you have about this genre?

what do you like most about it?

which movies or games did some parts well ? if so, what parts?
if they did some badly or could've done better, if so.. what parts?

looking forward to any responses
 
Cross-post.

Er, almost anyway. Moving this to General Fallout.
 
lailahaillallah said:
what gripes or misgivings do you have about this genre?
Click to expand...
Someone makes a cTRPG game that is intended to be a part of a series of several games in different universes and then we get stuck with a single post nuclear-series that quickly detoriate because of abuse.

lailahaillallah said:
what do you like most about it?
Click to expand...
It's rare.
 
For me, good post apocalyptic media are ones that provide context to the setting, i.e. how it happened, who screwed up and what was lost.

All too often people just throw together a load of blown up architecture/rubble/wasteland and proclaim it post apocalyptic - without putting much thought into the events behind the apocalypse, or justifying why the world is as it is. The result is usually generic and dull worlds with little character.

Hence me loving Fallout. You know what the world was like beforehand, and you can discover how it started and what unfolded in the immediate aftermath etc.

HL2, whilst by no means the worst example, could imo have benefited greatly by scattering more info pertaining to the invasion, the last stand, etc. I was longing to encounter SS2/AVP2 style notes and journals describing the events and providing better context to certain locations.
 
This is one of the best post-apoc stories I know of:

heartice.jpg


It's a gamebook (a.k.a. CYOA) in which a fubared supercomputer brings about a new ice age. Awesome setting, writing and characterization.
 
well watching mad max looking for gas/survival is so interesting. And how low one can go to stay alive. Plus the world seems to be going in this general direction, so its pretty interesting.
 
Because its using what's around you to survive. Its life after we should be dead. Its being surrounded by the memories of what was, that is now lost.

I think my favorite story, I can't remember it's name. But a tribal needs to go on a journey to test himself worthy of becoming heir to the leader of the tribe. He travels to the burning lands, then past it onto the city of the gods. Where he encounters what was New York city, and learns for himself that the "gods" destroyed themselves
 
Ah-Teen, I read that same short story in highschool and remember it quite well. EXCEPT the goddamn name! The beginning talked about "spears of fire" coming from the sky and how certain places the earth still burns your feet. The theme was more about naive interpretations of a long destroyed civilization. In 10,000 years how would someone explain a rusted skeleton of a car or a television set? We did some cool writing exercises putting ourselves in the perspective of a future archaeologist digging up modern day shit.
 
Here's one I read a while ago, can't remember if it's good or not but liked it all the same, back when.




The year is 2089.America and much of the world is a post-apocalyptic nightmare.
Ted Rockson and his small band of soldiers fight to rid the land of a Soviet occupational force bent on world domination.
But Rockson not only has the enemy to contend with, for out of the ashes of the nuclear devastation of World War III, the Earth has become one large death zone.
Mutated animals, destructive storms, and barbaric humans now roam the land.
Death seems to be everywhere. Hope seems fleeting. But Rockson will not give up.
A loose confederation of secret American Free Cities dots the countryside and awaits its time to rise and challenge the Soviet armies.
They shall be lead by the Doomsday Warrior. The first exciting page-turning novel in the Doomsday Warrior saga.
 
Mad Max RW said:
The beginning talked about "spears of fire" coming from the sky...
Click to expand...

That sounds like a line from some computer game I played a while back. Then Canada got annexed.

Orson Scott Card writes some pretty good post-apocalyptic stories. Even if they're all disguised allegories of the Book of Mormon, they're not bad.
 
It's possible the Fallout devs read the same short story. I can quote certain parts, but the title is barely on the tip of my tongue. This is frustrating enough to make me wanna visit my parents' to go digging through the basement for boxes of old school books.
 
A very good journey through various scenes of apocalyptic cataclysms and their aftermath can be had by reading this anthology called Armaggedons.

Here it is on Amazon.

It's a collection of alot of really good short stories regarding the end of the world. They cover nuclear annihilation, asteroid impacts, gender warfare, etc.
 
Fallout has so far been the most memorable experience for me when it comes to the post-apoc or nuclear holocaust genre. Although humor and satire plays a part in the game(s), the setting and foreboding narrating I find highly important. The idea of a post-apoc world is certainly something that I would hope to never see. I'm very big on anti-war and anti-nukes, so the world of Fallout was a bit of a shocker (but not at all surprising) seeing the U.S. as a wasteland. The underlying message is pretty clear and it is all too obvious (Humanity shall reap what it sows and suffer terribly). Even the added parts about racism against mutants is interesting.

About the only 'sort of' post-apoc book I've read is Ender's Game, when the aliens nearly bring Humanity to the brink of destruction. The message regarding Xenocide was fairly influential and a logical extension of what Humans are capable of (as they do unto themselves) and might happen if we were to eventually reach a space age and meet other species in the cosmos.
 
Second to Fallout (as I am assuming that is what you mean)

The Omega Man

Matthias said:
One creature, caught. Caught in a place he cannot stir from in the dark, alone, outnumbered hundreds to one, nothing to live for but his memories, nothing to live with but his gadgets, his cars, his guns, gimmicks... and yet the whole family can't bring him down...
Click to expand...

That would be the concept for me, the movie plot. The "family" referred to are the victims of biological warfare bent on returning to mid-evil times and destroying all the old technology. This movie was made back when PG meant topless chicks, blood, gore, language the whole works. Now... not even a Harry Pot gets PG. The current US society is much like my cat... I neutered him so now he is a liberal.

***********************

The second source for my inspiration on what I feel a post apocalyptic setting would be like... I guess would be a hotel I once saw overseas, it used to be a really nice place... multi story, rooms only the Lexus and Mercedes class people in the US would have been able to afford. As I sat on the edge of where the 2nd story window of a room used to be and looked out down the street, listened to the dead silence of nothing but the wind occasionally blowing the leaves around the ground and the room, the deep hollow feeling of being really really alone in a empty place really set in. It was hard to describe, it was like a hollow sense of isolation that was so still and dead that it was almost screaming for someone to break that silence, in essence it was being really alone in a empty world there for that one moment.

But then the other guy woke up and walked up beside me and being the genius he is decided to pee into the wind... so that kind of ruined the alone feeling :roll:

I hadn't looked at it at the time as post-apoc but I do now. I stayed in a hotel in Dallas about two years ago, the room was almost picture perfect the same as that hotel room. I looked out the window to downtown Dallas with all the cars and people and life running rampant and wondered if in the future perhaps someone like me would be sitting in that window, looking around at the area below. If so I hope for his sake his buddy doesn't walk up beside him and pee all over his gear. :evil:
 
I know my obsession with post-apocalyptic literature and gaming comes from a lot of my old fears of nuclear annihilation during the late 1970s and early 1980s. Stuff like The Day After, Threads, Testament on TV, and a feeling of nihilism: what's the point of getting up in the morning if the world's going to end anyway?

But I think that our (and by "our," I mean people's) obsession with the end of the world has always been there. We tend to think linearly, and if the world began it must have an end - be it something religious, scientific, or other. Post-apocalyptic fiction is kind of a natural extension of those underlying currents in our psyche.

It's also fun as hell to read and imagine "well, what would I do if I were surrounded by mutants/zombies/aliens/viruses/nukes/etc.?"
 
there was a song called "when the world ends" on one of the matrix soundtracks. poetry and the melody is nice.

most of the people who have not been touched by this literature mostly confuse the apocalypse thing. is it the last day of earth or the end of this era for humanity? if its the first then the story must be insresting indeed.
the thing is that there are alot of mentions about civilisations that lived before our history began. in religions espescially. "the ones before us" and all. some people thought this was refarral to reptiles and threw out ideas of dinasours being intelligent creatures, like us or not.
i think the reason you see alot of stuff like that is becouse there are alot of novels written in usa about bible and its stories. most populerly babel and its tower. so its usual that scenarists use this stuff. i cant say the same thing about fallout tho. its the fruit of something diffrent i think.
 
My grandparents own a farm and they used to grow tobacco there and rent graze land to cattle owners. The fields are still patchy because tobacco drains land even with rotation. There's a ramshackle 1920s-era house on a huge hill above the majority of the former fields, and I remember going up there as a kid and looking down on the land and seeing where humans and civilization tried to carve a farm out of the wilderness. That's what I think of when I think about post-apocalyptica in general: the idea that the land was once inhabited, once populated, but is no longer.

There's Chernobyl and the Marie Celeste. There's Stephen King's coke years and the original Twilight Zone.

And no one's mentioned the Postman or Canticle, so I shall.

And no matter what anyone else says, and despite the number of the Good, the Bad and the Ugly references in FO2, the western film genre also makes me think about apocalyptica. Cassidy says that the midwest is one giant dustbowl. Makes sense.
 
Sytxferryman said:
Yes, it would be the whole Western US... except in California most the dust is white :shock:
Click to expand...

I'm surprised that the coasts are still above water. Wouldn't the greenhouse effect and nuclear winter raise the ocean? This means no San Francisco, Florida, or Maryland. (C'mon, who doesn't want to see Bethsoft HQ under 20 feet of radioactive liquid?)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top