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Pandemic: It’s The End of the World as we know it…
Written by Kieron Gillen on September 1, 2008 at 11:23 pm.
And I feel quite sick, actually. And blood is spurting uncontrollably from my anus. Man! I’m not sure how I missed Pandemic 2, considering there’s been a thread on Qt3 about it for over a month. I think I thought it was some tedious discussion about the future of the Battlezone-veterans after the EA buy-out, so treated it as if it was under quarantine. But it’s not. It’s actually the most apocalyptic game of sinister annihilatory numbers since Defcon .
In short: Design a plague. Let it loose. Destroy the human race. Hell yeah!
It’s a simple strategy game with an unfortunate amount of waiting - it’s a game where you really could do with a faster speed-up option - with a really novel subject which elevates it entirely. Starting in a random country, you spend points to evolve useful traits in your parasite. As you infect more people, you gain more points to spend. Repeat until everyone’s lying dying a heap of bodies. What you purchase in what order is the core strategy. If you go for - say - the heavy duty vomiting and diarrhea symptoms early on, you’re going to be great at infecting and may even start to weaken the population for eventual mass death, but governments are going to notice sharpish and start sealing the borders to avoid sick-and-slick-poo getting all over their nice streets. The art is managing to infect everywhere before the borders seal - the problem there being that being too obviously infectious, no matter how harmless, will cause similar paranoia. Oh, options, options. Sure, you can get five billion easy enough, but getting that last tricky billion is the tricky one.
And don’t start me on Madagascar. Bastards. I hope they all die of a horrible disea.. oh, never mind.
Bar the thrill of novelty and unusual strategy, it’s also, in its number-based way, one of the most chilling games I’ve played all year. When I started, Sum0’s comment in this week’s Sunday Papers thread came to mind: “I was playing it again recently for a bit of nostalgia, smushing Russia into radioactive dust, and I was thinking: “Lucky this is only a video game, it wouldn’t happen in real-life.” And an instant later, I thought: “Hang on. This is exactly what the two most powerful countries on Earth were planning for throughout most of the last 60 years.” In that one moment, it suddenly seemed so ridiculous. Of course I know global nuclear war would be unpleasant - I’ve learned that from TV and Dr Strangelove - but it was only through the unique medium of actually playing through nuclear war that I realised how insidiously dangerous the Cold War was.”
That’s a lot like Pandemic, except acting as fuel for the general sense of paranoia around Bird Flu or whatever. By watching the numbers of “alive” in a country start to plummet violently I found it easy - in fact, unavoidable - to lose myself in worryingly detailed images of what it’d be like living in the world implied by those digits. When you hit the terminal state and there’s four-thousand people - all infected - in an area as large as China, with the “Dead” total in the millions upon millions, vast panorama of dead and bloated corpses fill my mind, with the faces of those last, scared, desperate people all too easily imaginable. And then I’m off into a world of considering their fates, their desperate balancing of complete despair (think of how many are dead!) and futile hope (But we’re still alive - maybe we’re going to be the lucky ones). Except, no. You know the numbers, and there’s no arguing with them.
Yeah, I’m a bit morbid. You would be too. I’ve killed about twenty-five billion people today.
So yes: oddly emotive for just numbers, descending. Highly recommended. Just not in real life, yeah, you crazy genetic engineers out there.
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61Comment on this story — Share/save/Digg this story
Tags: Actually I feel a cold coming on, free, indie, Pandemic 2, webgame
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Flubb says:
Took out N and S America, North Africa and India on my first go, I quite like this :>
September 2nd, 2008 at 12:12 am
cHeal says:
That’ really good. Just had a quick game there because I’m about to go to bed.
Actually when Spore was anounced my first thought was whether I’d be able evolve a virus type organism rather than anything remotely human. Just seems move interesting. We already have the Civ games for humanoid technology trees and that kind of game, somebody really should make a game where you evolve but don’t built civilisations or anything and the point of the game is to evolve as best you can to your surroundings.
I’d try and become and Alien, acid for blood, the whole lot.
September 2nd, 2008 at 12:19 am
Nameykins says:
Oh you people will have fun trying to crack Madagasgar.
September 2nd, 2008 at 12:34 am
Disco Fever says:
I’ve said this once, and I’ll say it again: GODDAMNED MADAGASCAR.
September 2nd, 2008 at 12:47 am
Manu says:
Damn it, I’m too late to be the first to say …
YOU’LL NEVER GET MADAGASCAR !
Other than that, a fun game, even if way too slow.
September 2nd, 2008 at 12:55 am
Finn says:
New Game - named my bacteria - window pops up warning I should watch the bloody tutorial - nothing more happens. What am I doing wrong?
September 2nd, 2008 at 12:56 am
Ging says:
I was aiming for the badges they have for this over on kongregate and two of them require killing the entire population…
The sheer number of restarts it required to get madagascar actually drove me crazy - I have blackouts, I wake up and I can’t remember anything, but I know it’s because of this as I find that I’ve scribbled “madagascar sucks” on my walls…
Finn: Nothing, the start progress is pretty slow, check where you’ve started (it’ll say “* has been infected” or something to that effect on the left hand news ticker) - take a look at the disease info, which’ll tell you what your starting symptoms are.
Whack up the time multiplier and peek in the world section every so often to check on overall progress. Go back into the disease section to buy new traits and symptoms with your evolution points.
Kill the world.
September 2nd, 2008 at 12:58 am
Gloria says:
First game I start: Disease originates IN Madagascar.
September 2nd, 2008 at 1:01 am
Ploppy, son of Ploppy, the Jailer says:
Finn, do you see the little x at the top right of the pop-up window? Yes, you do now don’t you. Enjoy your new PC.
September 2nd, 2008 at 1:48 am
Satsuz says:
Indiegames.com’s blog put up a post with some (poorly drawn) MSPaint-style comics about the odd and infuriating quirks in this game. The laughing made me feel better after the frustration, so I share this with you.
http://www.indiegames.com/blog/2008/07/madagascar.html
Make sure you click the links in the post to see the last two.
September 2nd, 2008 at 2:28 am
Sucram says:
I start off an a subtle virus, slowly building my genetic strength, the odd cough not worrying anyone. Day by day my influence grows, but still the governments don’t suspect my plan. I start to spread across the world, small numbers in each nation, until the hospitals start to wonder what’s happening.
Then I become ‘Super Ultra Infection Killer Virus’, from which there is no escape, the weak humans have no chance to stop me, no chance to survive. I kill them all and..
Oh.
September 2nd, 2008 at 2:57 am
Ging says:
You basically don’t - if the vaccination stops you from being able to infect anyone new, than the game is as good as over. Jack up your lethality and just live with the thought that the people you have infected all fell over spewing blood from every orifice in the space of about 3 hours.
September 2nd, 2008 at 3:38 am
malkav11 says:
Yeah. It’s a neat little game, but the quirks and balance issues mean that I played pretty much until my first total human extinction and then quit. Because a lot of it’s down to chance, and the sandboxy elements are really pretty much camouflage - there’re only a couple of very closely related strategies that are actually viable for killing *everyone*, and even they don’t work a lot of the time.
September 2nd, 2008 at 3:59 am
phanteh says:
It may be frustrating… But it’s saved my mind on this most boring of night shifts.
Thanks!
September 2nd, 2008 at 5:01 am
Acosta says:
I remember being in Genove some weeks ago trying to explain this game to Tom Francis and some EA execs, and at that moment I felt quite wrong trying to explain why it was so fun creating a virus to wipe humankind at the most painful way possible. Maybe a trajectory of wiping out cities, empires, galaxies and what not makes you morbid like that.
Yes, very nice little game. Too bad it doesn’t has a stronger set of rules (sometimes it looksrandom) and more options, I’m comfortable with the pace but I feel it lacks more activities and more weight on your decisions. I like to think there is bigger potential on this concept.
September 2nd, 2008 at 5:16 am
Jae Armstrong says:
Played this game a while back and was fairly unimpressed. There’s only the one viable strategy, and the amount of luck required to break into good ol’ Mada’ vastly overshadows whatever skill might be involved in the process.
And the waiting. The tedium.
September 2nd, 2008 at 6:14 am
nihohit says:
Have you played Go Beryllium? It’s another game of pseudo-realistic proportions. And, it’s more fun than learning quantom physics!
September 2nd, 2008 at 6:33 am
Rakysh says:
Good game, but last time I played this, there was a “go faster” button. Which was, incidentally, MONTHS ago. Srsly. It’s been out for a while.
I think actually, the strategy is balancing your visibility with your infectiveness/death rate. Either going for the quick kill, or slowly infecting everyone.
September 2nd, 2008 at 6:50 am
Joinn says:
Killed everone except for madagascar (and one ship?!?!?), strange how it seems immune to EVERY possible vector
September 2nd, 2008 at 7:07 am
malkav11 says:
There are two “go faster” settings. The game is tediously slow at the highest. A full game can take 20 minutes or more, most of them spent sitting and waiting for build points to roll in.
September 2nd, 2008 at 7:58 am
Alex says:
This game is awesome. On my first go, I managed to wipe out China, the US, Africa and most of Europe and Asia (bloody Indonesia…) with ‘teh ghey’.
September 2nd, 2008 at 8:05 am
sinister agent says:
That was fun. I infected the entire world except madagascar within about 100 days, with not a single death (bless New Zealand Australia for being shockingly lax in allowing three million people to become infected before doing anything at all, while India and Europe declared martial law almost instantly). I suppose strictly speaking not killing any hosts should mean the disease is more succesful, but that’s no fun. After a few months it becomes clear that Madagascar’s invincible once they close their port, so screw it. Evolve a couple of lethal traits and BAM - two hundred million deaths in a couple of hours. Chilling.
I quite liked it when all the ports closed and a handful of infected ships were left to sail endlessly around the Indian ocean until they mysteriously disappeared, too.
September 2nd, 2008 at 9:05 am
Steve says:
Sweet….
2000 days to develop the cure since there is only one functioning hospital left… and the entire population (including bloody Madagascar) is already infected with my insanity causing brain parasite “Kieron Gillen”….
oops…
scratch that..
last hospital has gone.
September 2nd, 2008 at 9:40 am
rei says:
Pretty fun, although I don’t seem to be able to get past 5,5 billion deaths.
Also, considering how often the game spews out the words “marshal” and “law”, they should probably make sure they actually go together in some meaningful way.
September 2nd, 2008 at 10:28 am
Ginger Yellow says:
It’s really, really flawed, but strangely addictive nonetheless. Shades of Defcon in the tone and presentation. I’d love to see them develop the idea to make it a bit less random and a bit more responsive.
September 2nd, 2008 at 11:11 am
Dreaded Walrus says:
“insanity causing brain parasite “Kieron Gillen””
Amazing.
September 2nd, 2008 at 11:40 am
Alex says:
I didn’t find it very chilling at all. Defcon affected me a lot more, but I am a child of the ’80s, I guess.. that said, watching Threads made an infinitely greater impression on me than playing Defcon.
September 2nd, 2008 at 12:41 pm
monkeymonster says:
Hmm, started in Madagascar with a parasite and took me a year to remove all vestiges of the human race. Never has it been so weird to see “no sign of life in western europe” and think yay!
September 2nd, 2008 at 1:27 pm
Björn says:
I can’t believe no one has mentioned Greenland’s zombie/robot run hospital (and airport, etc). You can kill everything there and the hospital will still go on running.
By the way, I hate how something without any ill effects or symptoms can cause countries to completely shut down everything.
September 2nd, 2008 at 2:22 pm
Sum0 says:
Dear Kieron, I remember reading you when you were the new guy at PC Gamer. And now you’re quoting me. I’m very strangely honoured.
Having said that, I enjoyed the first game when I stumbled across it, so I’ll be giving this a go.
September 2nd, 2008 at 2:23 pm
brog says:
Too much waiting; the fast speed is nowhere near fast enough when you’ve infected everyone in the world (except Madagascar, of course) and are waiting for those costly evolution points for symptoms that kill.
It’s a bit strange how people know to close their borders when I have no symptoms. Anyone know what triggers this?
September 2nd, 2008 at 2:29 pm
Kieron Gillen says:
It’s that you’re spreading *too* quickly, I believe. Even if you’ve got no symptoms, you may want to start relatively slow until you’ve managed to get into all countries before amping up.
KG
September 2nd, 2008 at 2:36 pm
Goose says:
A game that lets you be one of the bad guys from Regenesis?
SOLD!
September 2nd, 2008 at 2:52 pm
Heliocentric says:
The Headcrab parasite, oddly went un-noticed for a long time.
September 2nd, 2008 at 2:55 pm
brog says:
Well, I infected Madagascar.
Pity Peru and Argentina escaped.
Stupid luck.
September 2nd, 2008 at 3:13 pm
Ian says:
I enjoyed this a few months ago until somebody told me an easy way to break it and destroy the world in a way that took the fun out of it.
Still a great game, mind.
September 2nd, 2008 at 3:36 pm
rei says:
“your disease has managed to exterminate humans off the face of the earth”
Phew, I can stop now. I find it disconcertingly compelling to try and wipe out humanity.
September 2nd, 2008 at 5:44 pm
ngc248 says:
So… now we know .. in case of a pandemic .. get a one way ticket to madagascar
September 2nd, 2008 at 6:19 pm
sinister agent says:
So… now we know .. in case of a pandemic .. get a one way ticket to madagascar
If you want a merciful death as they shoot your plane out of the sky, yes.
September 2nd, 2008 at 7:09 pm
Fat Zombie says:
Well, surely the ports will be closed?
Anyway. I haven’t tried this yet, but it sounds strangely fun. Luckily for you folks, I’m going into Physics for my degree, not Biochemistry.
*builds nuke*
September 2nd, 2008 at 7:11 pm
Locust says:
All population wiped out in 322 days… maybe I should have been a geneticist.
September 2nd, 2008 at 7:41 pm
Fat Zombie says:
Finished a game, unfortunately not killing off all human life. This is rather fun. (More so than Defcon, maybe even)
September 2nd, 2008 at 9:00 pm
brog says:
I’m back at it, trying again to break Madagascar.
And failing.. why doesn’t my horde of zombies (symptoms: Insanity, Necrosis) just walk there on the ocean floor?
September 2nd, 2008 at 9:38 pm
cyrenic says:
I took great pleasure in watching the last few survivors in Madagascar tick away. Probably too much.
September 2nd, 2008 at 9:42 pm
Razerious says:
Muahaha! I wiped out the human race
September 2nd, 2008 at 10:36 pm
Andrew says:
On my first game, I killed the entire world apart from Madagascar and Australia with a deadly strain of bacteria.
Second game I decided to play it cool and went around infecting as much of the globe as possible before going for deadly symptoms. This didn’t work as borders were closed with about 8 regions still clean, due to the preponderance of infected people in other regions (although they weren’t suffering much from said infection). Then the vaccine got developed. 
September 3rd, 2008 at 11:15 am
Thomas Lawrence says:
It’s straightforward to get Madagascar, provided you don’t mind lots of waiting.
Countries close borders and shut down airports etc. for (seemingly) three reasons:
* lots of deaths
* a close neighbour has a certain level of infections
* the world in general has a certain level of infections
Therefore, the trick is to have a symptomless disease with low visibility and (oddly) low infectivity. You want low infectivity because your objective is to get a small founder population in EVERY country, and to avoid having a lrage infected population in any one country. If your disease is too infectious, the first few countries will get large populations of infected, and even with an “invisible” and symptomless diseases, governments panic if too large a population has the disease (although god knows how they find out that they do).
Then, just wait, until your disease has spread to every nation on the globe. I succeeded at getting to this stage merely by amping up drug resistance and level 2 resistance to everything else and nothing else, but I’m not sure even that was necessary (I was just afraid a vaccine would be developed before I got all the countries.)
Once every country has a small founder population (I think even one guy would do, but maybe wait for about thirty people or so), then amp up the infectivity, adding airborne transmission, sneezing and so forth. Your disease will quickly infect everyone on the globe, choking and closing down hospitals in short order. Every single government will close everything, but it’ll only slow you down if you’re alreayd in every country. Then, finally, when everyone is infected, add lethal symptoms.
Then, cackle maniacally.
it’s not fast, but it works.
September 3rd, 2008 at 4:55 pm
Ian says:
What scares me most about this game is when you see the ticker on your first nearly-dead country is getting very low indeed.
I saw that Greenland was at about 400 people and sat watching the number crawl it’s way down. It suddenly struck me how morbid this was.
Then I kept watching anyway.
September 3rd, 2008 at 5:29 pm
Soundofvictory says:
I tried the slow and steady tactic which involved a very low infectivity with hopes of snaring that damned African island nation. However, Madagascar still got wise too soon and closed its shipyards and airports.
I <3 this game.
September 4th, 2008 at 12:58 am
Nick Halme says:
Great little game, but it hides way too much of what makes it work. It’s hard to know what’s having a positive effect on your virus/bacteria/parasite, and it kind of blows its load all at once when you either infect the whole world or you get quarantined, and that’s about as far as you can go.
September 4th, 2008 at 1:19 am
Stromko says:
Madagascar is definitely the fatal flaw, followed by the other ocean-locked nations, because there’s about a 95% chance it gets shut down before you have any hope of infecting it, no matter what tactic you use. Other island nations are each about 50% likely to shut down, and each country has maybe a 5% chance of shutting down and becoming impossible to infect.
And that’s if you’re as subtle and careful as possible.
September 4th, 2008 at 4:16 am
Stromko says:
Bah, I give up on this game. What it sorely lacks is a minimum number of ships/planes that must go to each country over a set amount of time. I’ve sat here watching Madagascar for 30 game-days, while my parasite was virulent all over the globe (Insects, Rodent, and Airborne infection), and not a single ship went to Madagascar, even though about 10 -15 ships LEFT Madagascar’s ports. Then, inevitably, it shut down. That’s the longest I’ve seen Madagascar go without shutting down in about 50 games.
Also putting ‘Madagascar’ in your name does not cause you to start in Madagascar. Where you start is completely random, I tried restarting about 30 times and never once started in Madagascar, even though it happened to be where I started in my 1st and 3rd games (whenI had no idea how to infect the other islands properly).
It’s unrealistic in lots of ways, sure, a lot of ways that help you, but the fact that locked borders, locked ports, locked airports are 100% effective is just broken as its implemented now. It’s kind of necessary to have this magical wall of protection so that you must use strategy rather than just brute numbers .. but it’s still very badly balanced for what it is. For heaven’s sakes, I’m looking at MEXICO.. its borders are closed therefore the rest of the American continent being heavily infected is irrelevant, so I guess deportations from the U.S. and rampant illegal immigration from South America just magically went away under the rule of the amazingly efficient Mexican government.
Some more event effects would help. Hurricanes and droughts should carry a high chance of drawing international aid and food shipments. It’d still be luck but it’d help narrow the gap of impossibility.
September 4th, 2008 at 4:53 am
Muzman says:
How does the score work? I got 57-and some thousand (Greenland, Madagascar and Indonesia(!) remaining) and thought that wouldn’t be much but it was pretty high. Which is odd ’cause I thought lower would be better.
Anyway, the trick seems to be to get everywhere quietly first and then evolve into something very nasty all at once (which shouldn’t work quite so well since mutations like that won’t change the whole population).
Madagascar’s imperviousness seems a little high. I would think there’s a lot of fishing activity between it and the continent. Australia being tough to crack makes sense to me at least. The whole country is basically geared to seal itself off from the world at a moments notice. I don’t know how much real worldy factors go into this though, and there is always room for stupidity and obliviousness making things interesting.
It was indeed very creepy clicking through the countries and seeing the infected number being exactly the same as the ‘alive’ figure. Then it says ‘A vaccine has been created. Your disease cannot infect new people’… uh hooray! The numbers keep dropping. tick tick tick
September 4th, 2008 at 5:29 am
Kirrus says:
I must not play this at work. I must not play this at work. Please can I play this at work?! 
September 4th, 2008 at 6:41 pm
malkav11 says:
The big issue with Madagascar is that it has neither borders nor airports, just a single ship port that sees little traffic. It’s therefore very difficult to vector infection into or out of it. (I started on Madagascar once, and lost worse than normal because it took so achingly long to get *out* of Madagascar that people caught wise before very many countries had infected within their borders.)
I think in general the problem with the game is it doesn’t go deep enough with the simulation. Sealing the country off is 100% effective in stopping infection from entering the country. And it has to be 100% effective because there doesn’t seem to be any possibility of *curing* your disease, only getting a (100% effective, global) vaccine that prevents new infections, and taking various measures to slow your infection rate. But of course those are completely useless because when everyone that’s infected stays infected, slowing it down just prolongs the inevitable. And there’s no modelling of things like secondary infections or people dying off simply because your disease has taken out the infrastructure that made life possible for them. So if 1 person out of six billion is successfully vaccinated and doesn’t die when your disease moves to the vomiting blood stage, you lose. Even though that person would have severely limited life expectancy themselves.
September 4th, 2008 at 7:57 pm
sinister agent says:
I watched a ship sail ot madagascar from an infected south africa, and whooped. I got the buggers, and everywhere else, with my harmless, ultra slow-burning parasite. And then Peru and Argentina closed their borders without a single infection. Damn them.
September 4th, 2008 at 9:35 pm
Heliocentric says:
For kiddy game reviews try here
Probably the best gamer parenting site, my advice? Play the demo yourself, if you think its shit? It is.
October 11th, 2008 at 2:46 pm
Heliocentric says:
TITS! This is why they shouldnt remove the edit function.
October 11th, 2008 at 2:46 pm
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