Metro 2033 is getting adapted into a movie, it looks like.

The game features a bleak, post-apocalyptic Moscow. The game itself, though, isn't technically getting the adaptation. The book it was based on—also called Metro 2033—is.

The Hollywood Reporter reports that the movie will be produced by MArk Johnson, who worked on Galaxy Quest and the Chronicles of Narnia films. The film will be written by F. Scott Frazier, who doesn't have that many writing credits to his name just yet.

The sequel to Metro 2033 the game, Metro: Last Light, is due in 2013. No word if the film and games will attempt to tie in to each other, but I'm going to just go ahead and assume and hope not.

MGM, 'Narnia' Producer Pick Up Rights to Russian Sci-Fi Novel 'Metro 2033' (Exclusive) [The Hollywood Reporter]

For a generation of gamers, the words "Metro" and "Moscow" will conjure images of an oppressive, bleak place, a last refuge for humanity against the forces of mutants, darkness and whatever the hell else had been conjured up when we blew up the planet.

Which, I think, is a bit of a shame. Because in the real world, it's one of the coolest things on the planet.

While most city's public transport systems can be described as utilitarian at best (or shockingly decrepit if you're being honest), for some reason the Soviet Union decided in the 20th century that, while its people lived in some of the ugliest urban centres in human history, they'd be riding the subway in something straight out of a fairy tale.

The Moscow Metro, usually just called the Metro (hence the game's name), first opened in 1935 with a single line. It's now the world's second-biggest public transport system after Tokyo's frightening complex subway network, with 185 stations covering nearly 200 miles of track.

Much of it is a work of art. Beginning with Stalin, Russian leaders used the Metro as a drawing board for their vision of the future of the Soviet Union, as a statement piece. The key stations are barely train stations at all; with vast marble surfaces, intricate artwork and even enormous chandeliers, they look more like the ballroom of a castle than somewhere you use to get to work.

In Metro 2033, and its upcoming sequel Metro: Last Light, Metro stations are home to small settlements of human survivors, those lucky few who survived first a nuclear apocalypse and then years of starvation, sickness and relentless attack by all kinds of weird bad guys. Why? Because, as you saw in this amazing live-action clip released earlier in the year, when the bombs started falling, Metro stations were used as shelters.

Metro wasn't exactly the world's greatest shooter, but it won itself a legion of fans because of its atmosphere, which was laid on so thick you sometimes felt suffocated. Aiding that feeling was the depiction of the Metro itself. In many ways the fate of the world is reflected in the state of the Metro; once a thing of both beauty and function, it's now in ruins, kept alive by the thinnest threads of crumbling technology.

God, it's all so depressing, isn't it? Let's wash out that taste of despair with some amazing photos of the Metro as it actually stands today: a monument to people who thought it would be a great idea to make train stations look awesome.

Oh, and one last thing. If you think the regular Metro is cool, check out the fabled "Metro 2", a very believable rumour/myth/whatever that a second, deeper underground rail network exists in Moscow, just for use in case of a nuclear attack.

The photos below were taken by SebastianBerlin, -=Nikita=-, Vokabre, Jeremie R, b80399, jaime.silva, AJ Brustein and soleterranean

James Chadderton's take on Manchester in ruins hints at the apocalypse without bothering to identify its nature.

His artwork, amalgams of computer graphics, painting and photo, show the effect, but not the cause. It's a deliberate ploy to pull viewers into the scenes of devastation and then allow their imaginations to fill in the back-story.

You can check out Chaderton's work over on his Facebook artist page, or if you live in Manchester, at Incognito Gallery in the city's Northern Quarter. Incognito Gallery is at 5 Stevenson Square, Northern Quarter, City. M1 1DN. 0161 228 7999. The gallery has prints of the art ranging from £350 frames works all the way down to £2 postcards. The gallery is open Monday-Saturday 10am-5.30pm, Sunday noon-4pm.

If you go tell em Kotaku sent you, just to confuse everyone.

Special thanks to intern Chris for hunting down all of these before shots. And to the following photographers for their pictures: Exchange Center Ferris Wheel, Manchester Town Hall, Urbis, Palace Theatre, and The Print Works.

Manchester Apocalypse: Death Of Our City [Manchester Confidential]

A cottonopolis post-apocalypse: Artist displays images of Manchester skyline in a nightmarish future [The Manchester Evening News]

In pictures: Manchester after an apocalypse [BBC]

Music: Apocalyptic Zombie Credits by Cameron Mizell

Next year's Metro Last Light will drop you back into the underground post-apocalyptic tunnels of Russia's metro system.

The developers say they want to take last year's flawed masterpiece, Metro 2033, and make next year's title simply a masterpiece.

This video walks you through some of what I wrote about while checking out the game at E3.

They call it their flawed masterpiece.

Released last year, 4A Games' Metro 2033 gave gamers a chance to experience a different sort of apocalypse, one untainted by Western views and culture. Metro 2033 was an apocalypse shaped by old world fears, and Russian ethos.

Based on the novel of the same name by Russian author Dmitry Glukhovsky and developed by a team in the Ukraine, Metro 2033 was a very different sort of game. In the first-person shooter you adventured and fought to survive in the warring factions that blossom in Moscow's metro system. The survival-horror tinged title made things more interesting by making your ammo also serve as your currency.

But, as THQ, the game's publisher, told a room full of journalists earlier this month, the game was not without its problems. The publisher described it as a cult hit with bugs. The sequel to the game, Metro: Last Light, hopes to correct all of the issues with the previous title.

The team worked on fixing the artificial intelligence of the game this time around, worked on weapon balancing, and strove to make the combat feel more exciting and tactical, we were told.

The segment of gameplay we were shown, they warned us, was stitched together from different parts of the still pre-alpha game.

The demonstration opened on a grand cathedral in ruin. A camera pans across the crumbling remains toward a strange noise, the sound of some sort of rat-like creature eating a corpse.

"Much has changed since the dark ones were scorched from the earth," a narrator says. "The air is not pure enough to breath, but sometimes we glimpse the sun or a bit of blue sky. But sadly we ourselves have not changed. War rages throughout the Metro."

In Last Light, the station-cities of the Metro are fighting for control of a "doomsday device" locked away in the military vaults of D6.

The camera moves on from the cathedral, slowly drifting across a Moscow in ruin, past a downtown area packed with abandoned cars, creatures skittering among the rusted hulks of automobiles. Finally the pan stops on two men opening a manhole, climbing down into a metro station. The screen goes black as the manhole closes above them.

Now it appears the game is being controlled by a gamer. The man he controls, Artyom, switches on night vision goggles. He's standing in a tunnel entrance, facing a thick layer of cobwebs. He reaches over and unscrews a light bulb, hiding as a large metal door at the other end of the tunnel slowly swings open.

Two men speaking another language, perhaps Russian, walk out to look around. They separate and Artyom creeps up behind one of them and decapitates him. He swivels and shoots the other guard with a strange, hand-built gun, a Geiger counter strapped to its side.

The player moves into the door, creeping along the edge of light case by a nearby cook fire. He shoots the pot over the fire, using its liquid to douse the flames. He shoots a nearby bulb, casting the area he's in, in darkness.

He works his way through the area, killing another guard as he makes his way to a command center decorated with the word "Reich." The player gets into a gun battle, taking out enemies with a found chaingun. The Reich, it turns out, are a group of neo Nazis.

The player and another character, both on the same side, make their way into a large hall filled with men, women and children, all doing the Nazi salute to an orater at the end of the hall. When they're spotted the other character fires his gun into the air, sending people scrambling in every direction, and then the two of you run through to a rail car in another section of the Metro.

The two of you crawl into the rail car, a small armored affair, and start rolling down the tracks. A gun battle erupts in the tunnels as your buddy handles the car and your fire at pursuing rail cars. Finally, you catch up to an armored train and jump on board, taking out enemies as you hunt for a prisoner. That wraps up our look at the game in action.

Metro: Last Light looks sufficiently gritty and somber, though what we saw of it lacked any sort of sense of horror or suspense.

The team say they're working to bring mulitplayer to the game this time around, something they tried to do with the original Metro 2033, but weren't able to finalize.

They also said they're tinkering with the concept of using ammo for currency. They want to preserve the notion of scavenging for resources, they say, but don't want to make ammo so hard to come by and so valuable you aren't able to get into the occasional firefight.

They are working on their core systems to figure out what works best, they say, it's still a work in progress.

Look for more details about the PC, Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 as it approaches its 2012 release.

Best Video Games Of The Year lists are good for fomenting argument. But maybe they can also give an overlooked game another chance for attention. Here's one man sticking up for Metro 2033, and sticking up for it... interestingly.

Amid the Red Dead Redemption talk and Call of Duty conversation over at Slate.com's Gaming Club (I used to be a member, sob), here is writer Tom Bissell giving love to a game I ignored all year:

What I love about Metro 2033 is that it takes the power fantasy tropes of the first-person shooter and effectively Russianizes them. In Western shooters, typically, you progress through the game, unlocking deadlier and more accurate weapons and cooler and ever-more-neato technology. Metro 2033 says, To hell with all that. Your sniper rifle is pneumatic. You actually have to pump the thing up manually before firing it. Your bullets suck. Really good bullets are the gameworld's only currency; they're literally what you use to buy stuff. This means that, when you switch to the good bullets to fight, you're losing money. Ammunition's expensive in real life, of course, and this was the first shooter I've seen that tries to explore that fact. Also, you've got a miner's light on your helmet for use in the gameworld's underground Metros (where most of the action takes place), but the battery sucks, and it's constantly running out of juice, and, yet again, you have to manually pump a hand-held generator to brighten up the light again. This is a shooter imagined by the heirs of a resource-scarce culture, and as such it's a culturally revelatory experience. Metro blew me away.

I notice he's not saying the game is fun. Let us nevertheless all at least think about playing this game again, or, perhaps, for the first time.

The Gaming Club [Slate.com]

A pair of models show off the sexier side to Metro 2033 at the World Exhibition Centre in Moscow during Game World 2010 earlier this month, as seen at English Russia.

Gameface is a photographic celebration of the people who make, play and love video games.

Optimus Prime leads the charge as Amazon.com charges the day with deals on Singularity, Metro 2033, Red Dead Redemption, Assassin's Creed II, and more.

Transformers: War for Cybertron for the PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360 is a steal today on Amazon.com at $42.98, the Deal of the Day punctuating a series of timed Lightning Deals running all day long.

The first of the Lightning Deals has already been revealed as Singularity for the Xbox 360, a game I was particularly fond of, unconventional multiplayer modes aside. At $39.99, it's definitely worth giving the game a try, as long as copies are still available once this story goes live.

The rest of today's deals are, as usual, presented as a series of clues.

9:00AM Pacific: "Go West, young man." Red Dead Redemption, hopefully.
11:00AM: "Journey to a land of legendary combat." Tournament of Legends?
12:00PM: "Street Fighter IV button mashing" Some sort of fighting stick controller?
15:00PM: "The first modern day spy role-playing game." That would be Alpha Protocol.
16:00PM: "Hone your stealth skills." Splinter Cell: Conviction?
18:00PM: "Life 23 years from now." Metro 2033.
21:00PM: "Explore the deadly, shadowed world of an Assassin." Barbie's Horse Adventures, or Assassin's Creed II.

Hope that helps you folks save a little dough!

Amazon Gold Box [Amazon.com - thanks visceralrealist!]

Where does THQ go from the post-apocalyptic future of Russian shooter Metro 2033? More specifically, when? Exactly one year later and into the third dimension, resulting in Metro 2034.

THQ VP Danny Bilson says that the 4A Games-developed first-person shooter is already on deck for a sequel, not much of a surprise considering the game's warm reception and THQ's plans to iterate on everything that's making them money (de Blob, UFC, etc.)

The good news for 3D TV owners is that Metro 2034 will be coming in 3D, which Bilson calls a "low risk" investment and a chance to tout the game as running in all three Ds. He tells CVG that "Those games are unbelievably reasonable, they're built in Kiev."

The official Metro 2033 Twitter is ready to go even further in its sequel confirmation, boldly naming the next next game as Metro 2035. I think we're going to need some subtitles on these.

Metro 2034 coming, in 3D [CVG]