Pandemic 2

Gameplay
In Pandemic 2, you play as a disease under the class of Virus, Bacteria, or Parasite, each with its own set of pros and cons. You spend most of the game looking at a simplistic world map, divided up into larger portions of 6 continents (no Antarctica). As you watch the map, you see international transportation taking place while "Evolution Points" are added to your bank. The object of the game is to carefully give your disease the right symptoms, resistances, and other means of transmission so that you are able to infect (then kill) every person in the world, while the world attempts to quarantine and/or cure your disease.

Instructions
You start out by choosing either the 'Relaxed' or 'Realistic' game style, where 'Relaxed' has fewer upgrades and generally takes less time than 'Realistic'. Then you select your disease class, name the disease, and your disease infects its first few people in a randomly selected country/region. Controls are mouse-clicking only.

In-game, there are 3 screens, the World Map, the World Information, and the Evolution (Disease):

World Map
An overview of the world. On the left is a panel of "Breaking News", which gives you news updates on countries related to the ease (or difficulty) of infecting that country. "Breaking News" tends to happen all at once, with no scroll box to view older posts. Fortunately, you can click on any country to see every relevant statistic about it. Countries are color-coded (green to red) to indicate how much havoc your disease is wreaking on that nation. Also, each country has little symbols in black boxes placed on it.

Symbols

 * Cross- Hospital. While open, a hospital provides research towards a vaccine of your disease. It will close if too many people are infected in the region.
 * Water Drop- Water supply. The white drop turns red when the water is infected, meaning that this source is infecting any who drink from it until it is closed down completely, which leads to worse health. Infecting one of these requires the upgrades Moisture Resistance II and Waterborne Transmission.
 * Airplane- Airport. Sends airplanse containing people to other nations quickly, facilitating the spread of the disease to other countries. An airplane can only land in another open airport elsewhere. As your disease becomes more widespread and visible, airports are shut down by governments to stop infection.
 * Anchor- Shipyard. Sends boats to other nations with people and rodents aboard, spreading the disease. These come into play mainly in infecting Madagascar, an island with only a shipyard as a means of transportation.

World Information
A page of statistics including the status of the disease in each region, the number of hospitals working towards vaccinating your disease, and the number of living, infected, and dead people. Pretty much self-explanatory, "Forsaken Regions" are regions where you killed every last person.

Evolution
Has buttons for each of the upgrades of symptoms, resistances, and transitions, as well as the information about inherent traits. Clicking any of these buttons offers a price (in EP) to buy or sell the symptom/resistance/transmission, as well as a short but informative description of its effects on the 3 bars at the bottom. These bars speak for themselves, Lethality = likelihood of killing, Infectivity = likelihood of spreading, Visibility = likelihood of causing panic. Also obvious are the meanings of Average Infections & Deaths Per Day. Note that you must also purchase each row of symptoms, "Tiers", before having access to the symptoms. Note also that some symptoms are detrimental, and all symptoms do COST EP to get rid of.

Scoring/Badges
At the end of the game, whether everyone died or the disease was prevented from spreading any farther, you recieve a numerical score which is completely unexplained. Naturally, none of the badges have to do with this number.

Darwin Award Badge (easy - 5 points)
Earn 50 Evolution Points in Realistic Mode

Apocalyptic Optimist Badge (medium - 15 points)
Infect 2/3 of the world's population in Realistic Mode. (part of the Best of 2008 Quest)

Ultimate Relaxation Badge (hard - 30 points)
Kill off the entire human population in Relaxed Mode.

President Madagascar Assassin Badge (impossible - 60 points)
Obliterate the entire human race in fewer than 100 days in Realistic Mode.

Culture: President Madagascar
It did not take long after this game's release for people to realize that Madagascar only has to shut down its shipyard and the Impossible (or Hard) badge is lost for that playthrough. By the time the badges were made, this image and later corruptions were all over the comments page (back when images and .gifs could be posted). Citing this meme of sorts in later games such as the recently-badged Rebuild, makes people feel like a part of history and they get plenty of + on their comment.