Spread Your Virus

There’s coughs and sneezes, bird flu, blockbuster movies about microscopic bugs saving the earth from Martian invasion, heck there’s even viral marketing so why not a game about getting infected? Well, that’s exactly the plan behind one of the quirkiest PSP games in development. Called Infected, on one hand it plays like your typical shooting game, with excellent controls using the shoulders buttons to move from left to right and the PSP’s stick to rotate your character and guns.

Set around the Christmas period - so there’s loads of bad santas running around - a nasty virus has been released, which in the usual scheme of things, is turning everyone into blood-eating zombies. As a rookie cop, it’s your job to wipe out the infected. Interestingly however, your blood acts as an violent anti-body to the zombies, so using a viral gun which fires bullets coated with your blood means you can explode the zombies. You also get a selection of more traditional weapons such as guns, rocket launcher and chain saw, which you use to weaken the infected people before you zap them with your blood. And when they explode, if you position it right, you can set up combos where the zombies cause chain reaction explosions.

But there’s a cool secret too, and it’s contained within Infected’s wi-fi multiplayer element. When you win a game - and there’s free-for-all and team deathmatch modes - your in-game avatar is transferred over to the losers’ PSPs and infects their copy of the game. This means your avatar will turn up in the losers’ single player games. And even better, whenever the players that lost to you win in the multiplayer mode, your avatar is then passed on to the new losers as well. Developer Planet Moon is also planning to set up a website that lets you track the spread of your particular strain of disease throughout the connected world of Infected players.

Infected is due for release this autumn.