I've just pushed a big update--autosaves! The game will save on the half-hour, and saves are deleted upon death, not upon load. Gender is saved properly, too.
Yes, Saiga-12s are magazine-loaded. Until now, the game has been hard-coded to make any shotgun load by the cartridge. I will change this shortly.
From the start, I've coded cataclysm with tile support in mind, and hopefully only a couple small files will have to be replaced to create a tiles version. I'll look into libraries for that kind of thing, and try to produce a proof-of-concept without art.
For those interested in a "realistic" mode, with only "classic" zombies:
This is a very very easy change to make. Open up mongroupdef.cpp, and go to line 18, where it says "mcat_zombie". This is where the list of all monsters considered to be "zombies" is defined. You can delete any monster you want from a list, and it won't spawn any more.
While I could release a patch for this (and encourage one of you to), I won't; partly because I have better stuff to do, and partly because I want to encourage you guys to open up the source. A lot of it was written with editability in mind, even for those with no experience with programming whatsoever. There's even step-by-step instructions for adding new items and monsters, found in "code_doc/EDITING". I'll expand this file to explain other things, too.
Also, I find the game to be much more interesting with more kinds of zombies--spitters force you to re-route a little, skeletons make ranged fighters have to melee a little, etc.