Crosses the Line Twice: It's a game where you try and wipe out the entire human race by making your own deadly disease. It's so ridiculous that you can't help but find it amusing to an extent.
Madagascar and Peru, the only two areas in the game with only one way to infect them.
Western Europe was the original Pandemic's Madagascar. It had no airports or water sources. If you didn't hit it quickly, it would become the last bastion of civilization. Even worse, starting in Central Europe doesn't even assure you'll get it.
Even Better Sequel: Although it's by no means bad, the original game pales in comparison to the second.
Game-Breaker: Mimicking the flu symptoms minus everything dangerous means that your disease will spread everywhere, including to Madagascar early on, giving you plenty of points to spend on fun things like heart failure. Giving your disease moisture I and heat I also helps a lot with infecting Madagascar.
Hilarious in Hindsight: Madagascar really did SHUT DOWN EVERYTHING after the "zombie incident" in Florida where a man got high on bath salts and tried to eat a homeless man's face.
Memetic Badass: Thanks to this game, Madagascar will always be remembered as the sole area in the world that no epidemic can touch.
Imagine a disease like the ones you craft here occurring in real life. Sweet dreams! Seeing the world going to shit in the game and imagining that happening in Real Life also counts.
The gameplay music for Pandemic 2. It just sounds... dirty. You can just feel the disease you're playing slowly tearing the world apart because of the music. note The music is actually a sample from the main riff of "Ring Road" from legendary electronic band, Underworld.
Paranoia Fuel: Just reading some of the symptoms can make you start to believe you may have contracted your own (fictional) disease.
That One Achievement: The Kongregate version of 2 has a badge for killing everyone in Realistic Mode in 100 days. While it is considered the easiest Impossible badge on the website, it is still incredibly difficult due to the game's countless Luck based missions. You could have a near perfect run, only to have it all come down crashing because one country closes everything before you can infect it.
The Woobie: Even some of the most sadistic disease-makers can feel sorry for the one ship that hopelessly sails around the world, looking for a non-existent open port.
Broken Base: Which edition has the better artwork? Some prefer the more realistic and painterly style of the first edition, while others like the higher budget TV show-esque artwork of the second. The fact that On The Brink was the only expansion to be done in the style of the first, and all future expansions are done exclusively in the second has broken the base further.
Fan Nickname: The pairing of the Dispatcher and the Medic is known as the "Jesus Walk."note The Dispatcher has a special ability to move another player's pawn on the Dispatcher's turn as an action. The Medic can instantly treat diseases of any cured disease without spending an action, which means it can be done on another players turn. This leads the Dispatcher to walk the medic from place to place, eradicating cubes as he goes.
Most Wonderful Sound: Winning the iOS adaptation transforms the classic map into a globe's normal blue-green colors, with soft, victorious music playing.
Popular Game Variant: The player roles are supposed to be randomly distributed, but a large number of players prefer to let people choose their roles, or otherwise create a draft system that gives players a greater degree of control over what role they end up with. This is especially common if expansions, are used, as those add roles and makes it less likely that you'll get a synergistic combination.
Scrappy Mechanic: The roles are supposed to be randomly allocated, but this is a controversial rule given that some roles are more valued than others. This isn't so bad in the base game where there are only 7 roles and you are going get at least one or two you can build a strategy around, but as the expansions increase the number of roles to 20+, players are more likely to end up with a team that struggles to synergise well. Many Popular Game Variants allow the players to select their roles directly, or at least give them a greater degree of control over what role they are assigned. Some official Pandemic offshoots, such as Cthulhu, implement such mechanics.
Shocking Moments: Legacy's first twist is that one of the diseases is incurable, and the game only gets crazier from there.
after it started cropping up in prisons.