If you’re a fan of Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, you’ve probably already seen “The World’s End.”  It’s a movie about a guy and his friends wanting to relive their glory days by completing the Golden Mile, a pub crawl that entails drinking a pint of beer in each of the 12 pubs in their town, a feat they failed to accomplish in their teens.

Pegg plays Gary King, a man who peaked in high school and can’t seem to move on from his glory days, who tricked his buddies into coming back to town to complete the Golden Mile.

Little did King and his buddies know that the people in the town have been replaced by robots.  As the movie progresses, King was faced with the harsh reality of how worthless his life was when his best bud Andy, played by Frost, tells him upfront of what a failure he is.  King goes on to sulk in the loo where he confronts a teenager when he refused to pay attention to King’s ramblings about life.  Things get heated and soon became physical.  King accidentally decapitated the teenager and discovered that he is a robot – though the bots refused to be called as such, as the term refer to slaves. And slaves they are not.

Instead of leaving town, King and his buddies continued with the Golden Mile so as not to let the bots know that they know the town’s secret.  The World’s End is the last pub on the Golden Mile, where King and two of his buds face the invaders.  In the end, the robots got so infuriated by King’s reasoning that they just left and took all the technology with them, leaving humanity back in the dark ages.

Pegg and Frost have tackled Zombies and insane old people in the past, but the robot spin was something new for these comedic actors.  It’s only one of the latest in a string of sci-fi flicks bombarding Hollywood this year.

But what if there’s a real robot invasion?  Are we prepared to take them on?  

Let’s be real here, there’s not really a place where you can go and try out your luck in taking down a robot, because building a fully-functioning robot is expensive and I doubt that someone would build a robot just for you to obliterate.  Your best bet in robot-slaying is with the use of your smartphone and some gaming apps.

3 game apps to prepare you for The World’s End

Tiny Robots

Greedy aliens invaded the Earth to take the seeds of life.  Are you just gonna sit there and allow them to pillage the planet?  The game is quite easy, you just tilt the device to control the tanks to shoot those damn aliens.  Remember, the goal is to protect the seeds, so watch out!

Stop the Robots

In this game, the robots are in attack mode and they won’t stop for anything.  So you better hire the right people with the right skills to drive those metal warriors back to the city ruins where their factory is.  You can create multiple profiles and set them up the way you want to.  Arm your citizens with the right abilities and use some spells to empower your team.  This app is available for both iOS and Android.

Crushin’ Robots

New York seem to be the favorite invasion spot of aliens and now, even robots are on the warpath to destroy the city.  Use various weapons such as a nail gun, propane tanks, cinderblocks, dynamites and even wrecking balls to crush the metal heads.  Make sure you use the right weapon as there are various types of robots with different difficulties of being killed.  Choose weapons wisely.

Though these apps won’t really help you train for a robot invasion in real life, at least they would keep you entertained for hours, with or without an invasion.

Real robots of destruction

On a more serious note, though we’re unlikely to see throngs of robots invading the city like in the movie iRobot, the threat of killer robots is very real.  In this age when everything is being automated and connected to the Internet, the possibility of weapons going rogue is high, which means hackers can simply start a war at any given time.  It’s quite disturbing to know that weapons can be programmed to take actions in certain events without human input, or with the wrong human input.

This has been recognized as a huge problem and The Human Rights Watch already launched a campaign, Stop Killer Robots, to make people aware of the hazards or having autonomous killing machines and the need for these weapons to be decommissioned.

Some may argue that these serve as the first line of defense, but as stated, such weapons can be turned against us, putting millions of innocent lives in danger.