End of the World (or not)

So, as you may have gathered, the world did not end on the 21st of December.  The end of the world topic got me thinking about games which portray the apocalypse in them, and how it can relate to the player. The most obvious one would be, of course, The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask. Which I must confess, I've never played. Feel free to shoot me some hate mail. It's regarded as the darkest the Zelda series has ever gone, with the moon (pictured) going to crash into the world in three days and it's up to Link to stop it. I do want to play Majora's Mask, but I just haven't got around to it. I'll have to fire up the Wii and load it on the Virtual Console some time. 

Another 'end of the world' game would be Sonic the Hedgehog (2006). This is a bit of a spoiler, but the game is so rubbish, I doubt you care. Sonic dies and the human girl who he's been getting unnaturally close to cries. This triggers the end of the world as her tears cause an monster called Iblis to be released and fuse with Mephiles to create the demon Solaris. Solaris splits up the planet into seven stages, which coincidentally have seven chaos emeralds on. It's up to Sonic's friends to find the Chaos Emeralds and bring Sonic back to life.

What follows is some of the worst platforming I have ever seen. Forgetting the abysmal camera, and the glitchy terrain which can suddenly kill you if you step on it wrong, you have to fight against black holes which are pulling you in, enemies shooting fireballs from off camera and a general messy level design as you play as everyone but Sonic. If you run out of lives (which you will. Multiple times), then you have to start right back at the beginning of the stage. I forgot to mention you play as Amy in one of the stages. She moves at a snail's pace and has to be right next to the enemy to attack. It's as fun as it sounds.

But getting back to the topic, the story about the world being destroyed is well done, especially the scene where the world gets enveloped by a giant white light and all the civilians screaming and panicking.  I would not recommend you play Sonic '06. I'll probably complain about it some more later.

The Fallout series doesn't actually show the end of the world, but rather after the disaster. On October 23, 2077, China and America initiate World War III and bring down a nuclear apocalypse upon the Earth. It's not known who fired the first shot, but it doesn't really matter in the end. The Fallout series takes place around 200-300 years after the event, where humanity is still living in vaults built from the pre-war era. These vaults were designed to protect humanity in the case of a nuclear attack.

You take the role of a survivor in the vault who goes outside into the wasteland for the first time and has to learn to survive. Everything is hostile, from the Super Mutants to the plants, and you've got to keep an eye on that radiation counter. Fallout is one of the most atmospheric games I've ever played. If you get chance, I definitely recommend you pick up Fallout: New Vegas, which I consider to be the best in the series. Minutes will become hours, and hours will become days as you sink time into this post-apocalypse series. I've always been fascinated by Nuclear War stories, maybe because we came so close to it happening in reality and stories based on that frighten me more than any horror tale.