Below I've pasted the introduction from the game, just to give a bit of the flavour of the lunacy contained within. And also to give you an idea of whether or not the writing "style" is going to piss you off so hard you'll want to throw it out the window and punch me in the face...
In 2037 something happened to Milton Keynes.
Something bad. What, exactly, happened? Well, really, who cares? It's Milton
fucking Keynes. The point is that something bad has happened and now the city
is a lawless wasteland roamed by packs of feral monsters and subhuman rabble
eking out an existence through cannibalism, murder and worse pretty much
the same as ever but even more so.
The government carefully considered their
position, torn between providing immediate aid to those affected and acting to
"cauterise" the problem before it spilled over to somewhere people
actually fucking cared about. In the end they flipped a coin and so went with
the "Nuke It From Orbit" approach. Typically the nuke failed to
detonate and simply slammed into the centre of the city. Now it sits there in a
crater of its own making, like a ticking time-bomb only without the ticking and
with a lot more radioactive leakage. Ho hum.
After the failure of the first nuke (and
carpet-bombing with viral weapons that went largely unremarked by news outlets
due to something involving a popular celebrity and a greasy marmoset.
Allegedly.) a second nuke was considered but by this point the UN was up in
arms about the British government's actions (very few UN ambassadors actually
having visited Milton Keynes) and so after a lot of grumbling the Prime
Minister agreed to dip into the UK's vast concrete reserves (formerly known as
Basingstoke) and threw up a wall around the entire city, condemning all of
those still inside the city to a life of constant warfare and
soul-shattering depravity remain in Milton Keynes. With no chance of
parole.
[CUE JOHN CARPENTER
SYNTH SCORE]
So, where does that leave us. Well, we
certainly aren't going to condemn you to playing one of the poor bastards
trapped inside so no fear of that. But you need a reason to go inside otherwise
this is going to be a very short game. Perhaps it's like the novel Roadside Picnic by Boris and Arkady
Strugatsky (latterly filmed as Stalker
by Andrei Tarkovsky and also turned into a couple of mediocre FPS games that
had some good bits and the right atmosphere which was quickly lost as soon as
you got hold of some decent armour and weapons and no longer had to rely on a
rusty shotgun to defend your carefully hoarded supply of bread crusts and
vodka).
Anyway, let’s go with the Roadside Stalker
thing. So, there are Things inside Milton Keynes. Things which a great many
people covet (see, I told you it was satirical fiction). These Things were
possibly left by aliens, or the secret illegal government bioweapons labs that
caused half the problems in the first place.
[EDIT: I've just been informed in no uncertain
terms by a very nice man from the Ministry of Bastards that those secret
illegal government bioweapons labs definitely do not exist and should never be
mentioned again. Ever. So from here on in we'll just call them "Merlin
Workshops"]
Or perhaps it's all the rental properties that
have been converted into Vietnamese Skunk Factories that you're after. Maybe
that's it. Those custom strains have become even more potent and mind-bending
since the wall went up and command quite a high street price. Or so a bloke in
the pub told me.
Also, for some reason, government planes keep
crashing within the city leading to ex-special forces op (aren't they all)
turned convicted criminals with names suspiciously similar to "Cobra
Pleather" being sent in to retrieve the ministers (or their secret
documents or whatever) or die trying.
Not to mention all the roving war reporters and
suchlike sent in by merciless heads of programming at satellite news channels
being dumped in there with a skeleton camera crew and left to fend for
themselves in the hope they get some decent battle footage and maybe a human
interest piece before a sewer-dwelling cannibal feasts on their spleen and uses
their John Thomas as a sink plunger.
Oh, and also the Basingrad Collective are up in
arms about having all their concrete looted and so keep sending in
"retrieval teams" to steal it back so they can build more
roundabouts.
So, there are some spurious good reasons
for a few disparate groups to send in small but heavily armed teams of lunatics
to blow the shit out of various things and engage in running gun battles
through the city streets. And that's what we all came here for after all.
[AUTHOR'S NOTE: After
having been contacted by a "Freelance Peacekeeping Agent" employed by
the Milton Keynes Tourist Board I have been encouraged to point out that this
game is a work of fiction and that Milton Keynes is a delightful conurbation
set within the lush Thames Valley and does not in any way resemble the urban hellhole
described herein. It has a booming trade and business sector, a cultural
quarter that is the envy of the entire country, a modern and progressive police
force (satire) and boasts many a comely maiden, all of whom are blessed with
the usual number of eyes and/or limbs. Milton Keynes is twinned with Priyapt in
the charming Kiev Oblast and has entered into a suicide pact with Ulan Bator.]*
*Hopefully this is enough to ensure that the
man from the tourist board doesn't return and do that thing with the two house
bricks that he described in agonising detail and then demonstrated using a pair
of seedless grapes as "teaching aids".
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