The Settlers

The Settlers is a video game series. The first game in the series is The Settlers (1993). There are eight games in the series, including remakes. All the games were developed by the German studio Blue Byte Software, and were published by either Blue Byte or Ubisoft, the company that later acquired Blue Byte. The tablet version of the game is developed by Gameloft.

Games

References

See also

External links

The Settlers (video game)

The Settlers (known as Serf City: Life is Feudal in the United States, original German title Die Siedler) is a slow-paced real-time strategy video game developed and published by Blue Byte Software, released in 1993 for Commodore Amiga and in 1994 for MS-DOS, ported by Massive Development. The player is tasked with building a medieval settlement populated by an army of workers, each of whom perform their own individual task. The player competes against computer controlled opponents or another human player for supremacy of the land and resources.

Gameplay

Overview

The game offers a set of six tutorial games and a set of thirty predefined missions against computer controlled opponents of increasing difficulty. Alternatively, the player may opt to play a single open-ended game, for which the landscape is either randomly generated, or based on a seed number given by the player. The player can then freely choose up to three computer opponents of their choice. Additionally, a split-screen mode allows two human players to either team up together, or play against each other and up to two computer opponents. Finally, the player may instead allow up to four computer opponents to play against each other and spectate freely on their progress. There are ten computer characters, who vary from being peaceable and placid to being aggressive and warlike. Workers wear coloured shirts to identify their allegiance.

The Settlers (novel)

The Settlers (Swedish: Nybyggarna) is a novel by Vilhelm Moberg from 1956. It is the third and the longest part of the series The Emigrants.

Plot

The book tells about the group's new life in America where most of them now have started to feel at home. It also follows Robert and Arvid's journey on the California Trail.

Film, TV or theatrical adaptions

References

The Martian Chronicles

The Martian Chronicles is a 1950 science fiction short story collection by Ray Bradbury that chronicles the colonization of Mars by humans fleeing from a troubled and eventually atomically devastated Earth, and the conflict between aboriginal Martians and the new colonists. The book lies somewhere in between a short story collection and an episodic novel, containing stories Bradbury originally published in the late 1940s in science fiction magazines. The stories were loosely woven together with a series of short, interstitial vignettes for publication.

Structure

Bradbury has credited Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio and John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath as influences on the structure of the book. He has called it a "half-cousin to a novel" and "a book of stories pretending to be a novel". As such, it is similar in structure to Bradbury's short story collection, The Illustrated Man, which also uses a thin frame story to link various unrelated short stories.

Like Isaac Asimov's Foundation series, The Martian Chronicles follows a "future history" structure. The stories, complete in themselves, come together as episodes in a larger sequential narrative framework. The overall structure is in three parts, punctuated by two catastrophes: the near-extinction of the Martians and the parallel near-extinction of the human race.

The Martian Chronicles (miniseries)

The Martian Chronicles is a television miniseries based on Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles and dealing with the exploration of Mars and the inhabitants there. The series starred Rock Hudson, Darren McGavin, Bernadette Peters, Roddy McDowall, Barry Morse, and Maria Schell. It was aired on NBC in January 1980 in three episodes with a total running time of just over four hours (nearly five hours on the DVD version).

Bradbury found the miniseries "just boring".

The script (by Richard Matheson) differs significantly from Bradbury's original novel from the 1940s; see episode summary below.

Episode 1 Summary : "The Expeditions"

The first episode starts at the scene of Viking 1 unmanned probe landing on the surface of the planet Mars in July 1976. A narrator is explaining what is happening and explains that the purpose of the probe is to determine whether or not Mars is inhabited. As the narrator is speaking, the viewer becomes aware that there are two viewpoints at NASA amongst the scientists who launched the probe: One group obviously believes Mars is uninhabited, the other is open to the possibility of indigenous life on the planet. Each has their convincing arguments, but ultimately the probe indicates that Mars does not harbour life. At the close of the scene the camera pans back to show a larger view of the probe's landing area, with what appears to be indigenous Martian settlements in the surrounding terrain, with the narrator noting that, "If the probe had landed just a few miles further on, things might have been different." Afterwards the opening credits roll.