Lose your sanity (and time) with The Wasted Land

 The Wasted LandRed Wasp Designs’ The Wasted Land takes Call of Cthulhu to the iPad and iPhone, transforming RPG horror into a turn-based squad game that seeks to prevent a German mythos cult from unleashing an army of undead during World War I.

The game unfolds in the No Man’s Land between the Allied and German fronts during The Great War. A team of British soldiers, led by the mystic scholar Brightmeer discover that someone is re-animating the dead. It’s a classic Call of Cthulhu storyline, ripped form the pages of H.P. Lovecraft’s own “Herbert West: Reanimator”, with classic CoC rules.

Initial Thoughts on the iPad

I’ve had some time to play around with my friends’ Apple iPads since it was released. My initial impression? It’s gorgeous … but limited. Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing will depend on what you want it for.

Apple built the iPad as a consumption device, and it excels at that role. While some dismiss the iPad as little more than an oversized iPad touch, this misses its primary appeal: it’s huge, glossy screen. Yes, I can look at PDFs and comic books on an iPod touch, but what I see is a tiny fraction of what appears on the iPad. On a tablet, comic books loaded using the Marvel app display full-screen and are easily readable. You can zoom in if you like, but it’s not essential.

The same goes for PDFs — while there are several different ways to get PDFs onto your iPad, once they’re loaded they’re far easier to read than on a phone or a smaller device, like the Kindle or Nook. It surprises me that the iPad doesn’t do this natively – PDF support has always been strong in OS X – but perhaps the Adobe Flash spat is carrying over to this as well.

Web sites look great … unless they’re dependent on Flash, but honestly I dislike Flash sites and I already knew it would do that. My favorite sites tend to be blogs and text-heavy sites, and all displayed beautifully on the iPad. I see it as a great platform for casual reading with one caveat: weight.