Any RPG fan from the 1980s could tell you the most important thing to do after a catastrophic world-wide disaster: get hold of a car, and stick a bunch of guns and spikes on it. I think I first learnt this from Freeway Fighter, the 13th Fighting Fantasy gamebook; seeing the gleaming red car on the front prompted several weeks of pocket money saving until I could afford it. Other gamebooks followed like Fuel’s Gold from the Car Wars universe, and Joe Dever’s Freeway Warrior series, not so much vehicular combat, more character-oriented; they felt very grown up at the time.

The usual teen gaming path in Britain went from Fighting Fantasy books to White Dwarf magazine, and, not long after I’d started to pick up the odd issue, Games Workshop launched their own vehicle combat game, Dark Future. It looked great, sleek Sanctioned Op cars, spiky gang buggies, Gatling guns for everybody, but it was a bit pricey, especially with Warhammer 40,000, Adeptus Titanicus, Space Hulk and the like around as well; I never did play it at the time.

Things went a bit quiet on the spiky-cars-with-guns front for a while; I vaguely recall seeing the box of the PC game Interstate ’76, but never picked it up. MMO-wise there was Auto Assault, which I had rather a soft spot for; I think it might have been the first MMO I beta tested, and the vehicle combat was rather fun, though not fun enough to keep up a subscription after a couple of months. It closed down with little ceremony in 2007.

Perhaps not unconnected with the success of Mad Max: Fury Road, post-apocalyptic cars look to be back in fashion with two announcements this week. Gaijin Entertainment, developers of War Thunder, are going to be publishing Crossout, a post-apocalyptic vehicle action game promising extensive customisation. Details are sketchy at the moment, but it could be rather fun, one to keep an eye on.

Dark Future is also getting a reboot in the form of Dark Future: Blood Red States, a turn-based strategy game. From a bit of Googling around, it seems that Kim Newman wrote a series of Dark Future books as Jack Yeovil back in the 80s, blending various genre elements into an alternate history where Prime Minister Ian Paisley is replaced by Jeffrey Archer; a lot of the references would probably have gone over my head at the time, but as a fan of Newman’s Anno Dracula series I’m rather keen to pick them up now, they sound magnificently bonkers.

There’s a General Election here in the UK tomorrow, and after decades dominated by two-party politics it seems as if the political landscape is fragmenting. For the benefit of anyone familiar with MMOs but confused by this situation, who doesn’t have access to Wikipedia, or the internet (apart from, because of some plot, this site), or books, or newspapers, or a telephone, or a vaguely knowledgeable friend, or a sufficient number of typewriter-equipped monkeys, we present the KiaSA Guide To UK Political Parties:

The Conservatives are in favour of hard working raiders getting just rewards, with strict performance checks and a full and detailed DKP system to appropriately grant loot to those who put the work in. They’re appalled by low-effort epic items handed out to all and sundry just for logging in or other trivial tasks. Some people think that’s a bit rich when many of them have inherited super-extra-deluxe Platinum With Strontium Edging Founder’s Packs, granting them exclusive gear, massive bonuses to XP, in-game currency and the like.

Labour used to have a natural constituency when 40-man raids required large guilds, collective bargaining power being a key factor in securing fair participation and loot for all, distributed via Loot Council, though the system was rather cumbersome. With heavy raiding being broken up and more small-group and individual content they had to reinvent themselves, initially with some success, but some are still angry about an ill-considered foray onto a PvP server under previous leadership. Very keen on Healers.

The Liberal Democrats try and invest individuals with the power to make their own decisions of whether to raid, roleplay, engage in PvP, run small instances or just solo, but they’re a bit ineffectual and don’t have enough members to properly form groups. Promised to abolish consumable requirements for new raiders, but started hanging around with the Conservatives to fill raid groups and abandoned the idea.

UKIP were perfectly happy back in the good old days when everyone got into raids, unless you were a Warlock, but that was fine because everyone hates Warlocks and you could say that in those days, not like now, and you could leave your guild bank unlocked and nobody would nick anything, back before the dungeon finder started including players from other servers, and they came over here and rolled on our loot and tanked in instances so that local tanks on the local server couldn’t get a place, not that there were enough local tanks because nobody wanted to tank but that’s not the point. Many are hardcore PvPers who demand full, unfettered always-on PvP with no namby-pamby interference or wishy-washy safe areas, until someone kills them, at which point they demand Kent police investigate.

The SNP really want to be playing a different MMO, but were narrowly outvoted, so they’re grudgingly tagging along, mumbling about how much better the other game would be and lobbying the devs to make the rules more like it. Plaid Cymru are much the same, with more daffodils. The Greens aren’t at all keen on all the nasty fighting that goes on, and would rather everyone focuses on crafting as long as the resources are gathered from renewable sources, which fortunately turns out to be everything in an MMO.

There is one politician with no MMO analogue, though, Independent candidate for Salisbury Arthur Uther Pendragon. I mean, some bloke in robes waving a sword around? That’s just silly.