Format: Flash
Developer: Oil Productions and Playerthree
http://www.miniclip.com/games/sneeze/en/

As a man in my early thirties, there’s nothing I enjoy quite so much these days as lying in bed at three in the morning and thinking about all the horrible diseases I could catch. I could get swine flu, sure, but that’s fairly standard at present, and, besides, I think I came back from E3 with it and proceeded to write some wonky previews while under its influence. No, I’m thinking of the big guns: ebola, which leads to massive organ failure and – ooh! – hypovolemic shock, smallpox, which, if you’re really lucky, can make all your skin fall off, and – my personal preoccupation – the West Nile virus, a disease with so many horrible symptoms, you literally don’t know if you’re coming or going until, well, until suddenly you’re really going.

The greatest thing of all is that I now realise I can pick up some of my very favourite maladies anywhere. Some of the fruitiest viral and bacterial menaces in the world like to ride about on people as if the human race were just a fleet of big, hairy buses: they travel from one hand to the next, from nudge to innocent nudge and they’re probably spending this weekend becoming resistant to most forms of medication. I didn’t learn all this from one of those over-egged government scare ads, although, granted, I’m a sucker for them, having lived most of my life juggling simultaneous fears of lung cancer, salt overdoses, and electrocution while retrieving my Frisbee from nearby power lines. No, I learnt all this from a game.

Sneeze has been around for some time (much like the West Nile virus!), but such are its grim delights that it’s always worth another airing. Created for Channel 4 and The Wellcome Trust by Playerthree and Oil Productions, this modest Flash title wants to teach you about viruses and how they spread in the queasiest of all possible manners: by turning you into a human hot zone before sending you out into a crowd of strangers, tasked with taking down as many as possible with the chain reaction started by a single snork.

There are lots of facts about the great sneezes of history and the career of the swine flu virus folded into the mix, but Channel 4’s game is so delightfully disgusting – just leave the sound running at the end of a round for a few minutes and you’ll see what I mean – that it quickly covers its thin educational veneer under a thick caking of mucous, as you move from one urban panic zone to the next, waiting for just the right moment before sending your horrible, probably murderous, germs out into the world.

If Every Extend Extra had been designed by Howard Hughes, the results would probably be something like this: a game that hinges on the pleasures of unpredictable chaining and frantic experimentation, given an icky kick by the lurid green trails of ejecta thrown out by your victims. Beyond all that, it seems, to me at least, to be a bit like Robotron, too, with its top-down perspective, varying NPC types, and tightly confined spaces.

The truth is, though, like one of those sailors who has come down with calenture, a mental illness which convinces long haul mariners that the sea is actually land and they should climb over the edge of the boat and have a bit of a run around (according to Will Self, at any rate), I’ve reached that stage of my life when everything reminds me of Robotron in some way, shape, or form. All of which means I’m probably coming down with something nasty: early-onset dementia, fungal mind-rot, or brain herpes. Or maybe it’s just the West Nile virus.