Via MetaFilter I came across the game Pandemic 2. I’m not sure I really recommend it per se, but the concept is rather interesting: you control a new disease and its evolution, and attempt to wipe out humanity.

Clearly, the perversity of the goal is a big part of the game’s appeal. Part of the realism of the game comes from the fact that you can’t control a lot of things directly, such as where your disease spreads to. Unfortunately, this can get extremely frustrating when, for example, you have no control over whether or not Madagascar gets infected before its government closes the borders…

Another problem with it is that there are times, even when your disease is flourishing, when you have to just sit and wait to accumulate more evolution points to spend—they clearly need to tweak the model for how you progress when you’ve infected huge numbers of the world’s population.

(Note: the only time my disease wiped out humanity so far, it started in Madagascar.)

Worth a look, but I think the game really points towards how a theoretical better version could be a lot more fun.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 20th, 2008 at 23:50 20 Jul 2008 and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

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