[Game Reviews] The Pandemic Games

Pandemic 2 from Crazy Monkey Games and Dark Realm Games

I’m a sucker for a game with a good concept, and the rush of protecting the world from micro-organisms is a great way to introduce your inner geeky scientist with your inner super hero. In fact, I’ve happily killed an hour here and there with the board game Pandemic, where you play as a CDC scientist trying to save the world from an onslaught of diseases!

But every now and then, I get crabby and want to destroy human civilization instead of protect it. What’s more, I want to do it in such a way that no one will see it coming until it’s too late… with a minimum of personal discomfort, of course. And that’s why I love games like Crazy Monkey Games / Dark Realm Games’s free flash-based games Pandemic, Pandemic EoM and Pandemic 2, where you get to create your own infectious creation and send it off into the world to do some damage.

Pandemic 2 is really the best of the three, so I’ll discuss it for a moment. You start off by naming your virus, bacteria, or parasite, and begin in a randomly selected part of the world. Your job is to get the virus out and infecting the rest of the world before everyone catches on. Then, your job is to evolve the virus and kill as many people as possible before a vaccine is created. You accomplish both of these goals by upgrading your virus periodically with “evolution points,” which you earn as your virus does its damage and time goes by.

There are two ways to play the game, really: to try to get a high score (which seems to be related to how many people you can kill in how short a time) or to try to annihilate all traces of human life. Since you’re likely to have trouble figuring out how to accomplish either goal, here are some tips:

• High score: Pick virus, make your starting symptom “fever,” and quickly ratchet up your transmission stats so you can start infecting the world quickly. Focus on upgrading your drug resistance, and don’t really worry about the others so much. Instead, upgrade your killing power quickly to Tier VI and pick up a nasty fatal condition like heart failure or kidney failure. Your goal is to kill as quickly as you can. Don’t worry about how many you kill; just how quickly you kill everyone you infect.
• Annihilation: Pick parasite, sell your starting symptom, and then upgrade to “drug resistance II” and “rodent transmission.” Then, walk away for a half hour or so, and come back. Don’t do anything until all the islands (particularly Greenland and Madagascar) are infected. Then, ratchet up the four transmission methods, moisture resistance II (to activate “waterborne”) a fatal condition (like heart failure) and wait. If everything works out, you’ll overwhelm the hospitals, shutting them down before they can develop a vaccine, and you’ll kill every single person on Earth. Well done.

I really like this game — it’s a fun little simulation to have running in the background when I’m doing something more important, and it gives me an opportunity to cackle evilly when things go my way.

I do have some criticisms, though:

1) Transmission between regions only occurs through human means (borders, planes, boats, etc). This is not realistic at all, since birds, fish, foodstuffs, and other methods can spread disease. As such, it’s very irritating that island nations like Madagascar and Greenland can shut down their boats and be immune to disease. Unless they’re reverting to a primitive state, they’re still going to be somewhat vulnerable.

2) Vaccines take effect immediately across the world. They should spread from the region of discovery like a virus, coming to the Third World last.

3) The scoring system doesn’t make any sense. Why should you get fewer points for killing off humanity than you would from just killing off Europe?

Ah well… hopefully, these issues will be addressed in Pandemic 3. And I’m not going to gripe too much about a game that is free, fun, and flash-based.

Play Pandemic 2 on CrazyMonkeyGames

[Game Reviews] Upgrade Complete!

Upgrade Complete by Armor Games

In the realm of video gaming, it’s easy to get obsessed with the idea of “upgrading”. In fact, many great games are built around the concept of “play just a little further, and you can make your guys that much better and cooler…”. A lot of times, these upgrade experiences aren’t that exciting, especially when you’re working towards upgrades like “alternate costume colors” or “bad guys wearing funny hats” or the dreaded “extended credit sequence”.

So, I suppose it was inevitable that someone would go out and make a game where upgrading is the actual focus. Armor Games’s Upgrade Complete! is a free, flash-based game that’s all about upgrading to your heart’s content. The game starts off by telling you you need to upgrade so you can have a pre-loader. Then, you have to upgrade to get menu buttons, a logo, copyright information, a menu background, a progress bar, and so forth.

The actual game itself is a simple little Galaga-style shooter where you move your shift left or right and blast everything on screen. You start out with one gun, no sound effects and some Atari 2600-style graphics. But, of course, all of these things can be upgraded! You can put your money into improving your ship’s gun, but you can also add other weapons and useful components (you can have 12 modules in all) to make the game a little easier. There are 20 waves of enemy ships to blow up, but you never are actually penalized for losing. In fact, replaying levels over and over until you can earn enough money to upgrade your ship is a pretty sound strategy.

It only takes about 15 minutes to get your ship up to the point that it’s maxed out, and one of the achievements you can earn essentially says, “Oh yeah, there’s a game, isn’t there?” and rewards you for actually bothering to finish wave 20. Chances are good you’ll still be upgrading even after finishing that last wave — after all, you’ll still want to upgrade the graphics, the music, the logo, the copyright information, and the game’s ending.

Upgrade Complete!, along with another Armor Games titles called Achievement Unlocked (where you find yourself unlocking ridiculous achievements at a rapid pace), represent something you don’t see often in gaming — social criticism of game culture. It’s fun to be able to play some simple little games that mock both gamers and developers for being too focused on the mechanics of gaming and not enough on the gameplay itself. What’s more, since they’re flash-based, you don’t need any special hardware to give them a try.

Play Upgrade Complete! v. 1.5 on Newgrounds

Play Achievement Unlocked on Newgrounds