Chan's Personal Blog

This one is for all the casual gamers out there that enjoy flash games. Myron pointed me to a game called Pandemic 2. The objective of the game is to basically wipe out humanity through a pandemic. You get to custom tailor your disease. The game is pretty simple, yet it requires some interesting strategy. The disease has three main attributes that need to be balanced: lethality, visibility, and infectivity.

To eliminate humanity, you obviously need a disease that's going to be lethal. However, if you kill people too quickly, it's not going to help increase the number of people who are infected. If you're too infectious or visible (ie your disease has obvious symptoms), then humanity is going to react by developing a vaccine and eliminate your disease all together. Interesting balancing act.

Anyway, it took me about five tries before I destroyed all humans. The first three tries, I thought Madagascar was impossible for my disease to reach because it's fairly isolated, but there is a way to get there. In event of global pandemic, I'm fleeing to Madagascar.

P.S. Make sure you run through the tutorial real quick.

How do you fight a war elephant? Why pose such a question? Am I using the war elephant as a deep metaphor for problems in our complicated lives? Nope, this has to do with a video game I picked up this last weekend, Rome: Total War. It's a strategy game where you fight historical battles during Roman times. It's so realistic that the History Channel actually used the game to illustrate how famous historical battles were fought and won. I absolutely love the game as it's both very enjoyable to play, and you get to learn about history. Bonus points: The game works on even older computers, which I have.

In either case, so I'm playing as a Roman faction, and I'm doing war with the Carthaginian armies in North Africa. I finally arrived at their capital city, and I'm about to wipe them out. When I finally attack the city, an unexpected foe stands before me and my prize. The Carthaginians are marching war elephants towards my army.

I quickly tried to recall a situation where someone had to fight a war elephant. I suddenly thought, oh yeah, Lord of the Rings: The Return of The King. In that movie, the humans take out war elephants by charging their calvary at it. I'll do the same thing, brilliant!

So I rally all of my calvary to the front lines, and order them to attack the elephants. They start charging, but when they get near the elephants, the horses start freaking out, and refuse to move forward. This is not what I had expected; apparently horses are afraid of elephants, go figure. The elephants then proceed to charge forward, stomping and goring my calvary. Wow, that was a spectacularly failed attack. It worked in the movies! After many more pointless deaths due to elephants, I withdrew my forces, and had to rethink a strategy.

This is an example of what went down, it was horrible: