The game The Great Flu, available online at www.thegreatflu.com.

This week we take a look at the online game The Great Flu, which is available at www.thegreatflu.com.

Developed not by game designers but by a team of Dutch virologists, it’s an interesting pastime, though I have found a better group of games out there.

More of my take in a minute. First, a guest opinion — that of Palm Beach Post researcher Niels Heimerinks, who let us know about the game in the first place, after the jump.

You’re the head of the Global Pandemic Control Center. A pandemic is imminent and you are in charge of managing this threat. Fight the outbreak of an infectious bug. Prevent the spread and eventually find a cure for this virus that has the potential to infect and kill millions.

Ab Osterhaus, Holland’s main virologist and head of Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam says “The game is based on the need to increase public awareness to the threat posed by a pandemic and the measures in place to contain it,” according to BBC News.

At the start you’re being asked to select a virus, which will determine the difficulty of the game. There’s big world map that you can move around with your mouse. The map is divided into 20 regions.

Click the map and an information box will appear giving you the vital stats for that region. You can subsequently apply actions or assign research teams to these regions.

Your action options are represented by icons displayed in a bar on the left side of the screen. Simply drag the action and drop it into the region of your choice. A progress bar will indicate the impact of the action on the region. When events take place or there’s important news, they’ll be listed in the right side of the screen. Click the headline in order to read the full message.

A counter keeps track of the time that’s passed, the number of people infected and the number of fatalities. Your initial budget is 2 billion Euros. Money you can spend on actions such as distributing face masks, improving healthcare, closing down schools, stockpile vaccines, etc.

It’s not an easy game to play but it’s the most fun I’ve had fighting a computer virus.

For me, if there’s anything wrong with The Great Flu is that it feels more like edu- and less like -tainment. I feel more informed (read: terrified) after playing it, but I managed the Kai Virus with a mere 1.5 billion Euros spent (although the Kai Virus is the easiest of the five viruses The Great Flu throws at you).

Not that The Great Flu isn’t an interesting game, but it feels like something assembled by Dutch virologists — the controls are a bit clunky and the it’s tough to know where and when to click. A bit more to my liking are the Pandemic games released by DarkRealmStudios on Kongregate.com.

Pandemic: American Swine allows you to take more drastic measures than The Great Flu.

Pandemic: American Swine starts in June 11, 2010 with an outbreak of Swine Flu (sorry, H1N1) somewhere in the United States. It’s up to the player to manage panic by spinning the news, using the military to enforce curfews and handing out masks and promoting research.

Unlike The Great Flu, Pandemic: American Swine lets the player take extreme measures like censoring the news, deporting infected individuals and even dropping nukes on cities too infected to save.
This might sound dark, but the first two games had you play as a virus with the goal of decimating the whole human race making this entry refreshingly optimistic.