Images: 'News games' play off today's headlines

Swinefighter, by Jude Gomilla and Immad Akhund, is a Flash game that tasks players with "destroying" swine flu viruses.

The game, which was released about a week ago, is the latest example of a growing genre called "news games"--titles that are created quickly after significant news events and spread virally around the world on social media sites like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter.

Swinefighter was created by Gomilla and Akhund in one night after the swine flu outbreak.

Many of the games stretch the limits of taste and are often considered controversial, but they attract huge audiences as well.

In Double Bird Strike, by Dominic Tocci, players play the pilot of an airliner that has had its engines knocked out by birds. The goal is to land the plane safely in a river.

The game was obviously meant to leverage the attention that came when US Airways flight 1549 was taken down by birds and landed safely in the Hudson River.

Many news games, while attracting millions of players, have no advertising, since the designers don't want to be seen as profiting from tragedy.

When former President George W. Bush was attacked in Iraq by an irate journalist wielding shoes, it inspired at least seven different games based on the event.

Perhaps the most popular of those was Sock and Awe, by Alex Tew, which tasked players with hitting Bush fictional shoes. Tew eventually put the game up for sale on eBay, and a company called Fubra bought it for just less than $8,000. But Fubra contends that it made its money back in 48 hours by putting ads in the game.

Bail Out Brown is another game from Sock and Awe creator Fubra. The game is similar to Sock and Awe, except that instead of trying to hit Bush with shoes, players must try to hit British prime minister Gordon Brown with wads of money.

The game is based on common British discontent with the financial bailouts in that country.

In Britney Wigged Out, another game from Double Bird Strike creator Dominic Tocci, players must try to place a wig on the head of a constantly moving Britney Spears-like figure.

The title, which was Tocci's first news game, was based on Spears' much-publicized shearing of her blond locks.

In the game Made Off, players try to manage their own Ponzi scheme.

The game, which has yet to be released, is from Cellufun. It is meant to leverage the news of Bernard Madoff's forthcoming sentencing for bilking investors out of tens of billions of dollars.