First run, on easy mode. I finished the game quite quickly, not realising that I had in fact lost, because my bacteria (which I named Bacties) killed everyone it had infected before it spread wide enough. I decided to play the second round on normal, and this time I manage to infect a lot more people, but a cure was devised and I lost the game. Enraged, I tried again a third time. Finally I had managed to infect the whole world, but cure development was at 90% and I had no way of stopping it. Fourth time lucky, right?
I had no idea it would be so addictive.
Then I get to a point where "Bacties" infected every single country except for Greenland, who sealed off their borders and ports. I watched the rest of the population die, but Greenland remained unaffected. Because I was a noob I rage quit the game, only to find myself replaying a 5th time 20min later. I renamed my bacteria "f.Grnland" (limited characters). I finally managed to infect all the population, and cure development was stagnant at 60%--- and the app froze. I assume it's because I overheated my phone on my previous runs. I reboot the app, only to find that the save point was before I had infected the world. I thought I could do it again, and I successfully reached Greenland--- but it was the second to last country to be infected. Philippines remained healthy with 0 infected and 0 deaths. Like Greenland previously, it had isolated itself from the rest of the world and my bacteria could not reach it.
For some reason I had the patience to wait another 5 minutes until finally it was infected through a random event. I guess there is a trick to just... keep waiting. Anyway, I won my first game ever, and I watched with a strange satisfaction as the population numbers plummeted, and statistics showed that my bacteria wiped out 60 million people per day.
Then me, being me, turned my mind onto other matters. Is this what God feels, when He watches over the Earth? Does He share the same twisted pleasure I feel? My thoughts turn gloomier as I imagine the outcome of my game carried into the real world. I had chosen to start my disease in Egypt, a country which had many contacts with others, and it bordered many poorer African countries with poorer health care. The hot climate ensured the prosperity of my disease. Then it spread like wildfire and ripped through the African nations like HIV does today. Soon it went global, and I watched news within the game, announcing that some country or other has fallen into anarchy, another has culled all livestock, and another has approved of human experimentation to find a cure. And I wondered- if this game were real, what would it bring out within us?
I browsed over upgrades to the symptoms of my disease: sneezing, coughing, rashes, paranoia, coma, internal bleeding, total organ failure, etc. To think, first you experience symptoms of the common cold (which is bad enough already), then the rashes, cysts, insomnia. Nothing fatal, yet highly irritable. Until it gets worse. Insomnia evolves into paranoia which evolves into insanity. Nausea evolves into vomiting and diarrhea. Until your body starts breaking down and you die after much suffering.
Yet that can't be the worst. The worst is to be the last healthy person on the planet, having spent the last 2 or 3 years watching everyone around you suffer an incurable disease. You know that someday you will catch it too, and judging by the news extinction of the human race is inevitable. Yet... you live healthily among these infected people, not quite knowing the day which you will also start displaying symptoms of the sickness.
Ah I think too much over a game. I should enjoy my twisted pleasures while I can. Nowhere else can I kill the human race over and over again without being condemned.
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