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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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
I must not play this at work. I must not play this at work. Please can I play this at work?! ;)
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.
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.
For kiddy game reviews try here
http://www.whattheyplay.com/
Probably the best gamer parenting site, my advice? Play the demo yourself, if you think its shit? It is.
TITS! This is why they shouldnt remove the edit function.
SWIIIINEEE FLUUU! :)
Last week i finally managed to kill everybody. and i didn’t even start from Madagascar!