With heads still rolling from this year's tainted exports scandal and the downfall of Shanghai's ex-party-leader Chen Liangyu (he of bribe-taking and sexual-favoring-seeking fame) reaching completion, China's public enemy du jour appears to be corrupt government officials.

We hate 'em so much, we're inventing fictive versions in cyberspace just so we can blow their 1337 brainzorz outz!!1!

EastSouthWestNorth reports that online game Incorruptible Warrior «清廉战士», a game originally designed for about 500 users, logged 100,000 downloads from Sina.com alone in its first few days of existence, before shutting down temporarily to revise server strategies for the unexpected crush of users:

What is so interesting about this game? After all, the executable file is only 78M, the pictures are crude, the scenes are spare, the copyright is suspect (because it borrows a great deal of material from other games), the lone server is unstable and the financial sponsor is the Communist Party Disciplinary Committee of the Haishu district in Ningbo city.

The reason for the public interest is that the hero of the game is a "honest and upright official" whose assignment is to weed out corrupt officials, along with their children and mistresses. Here 'weed out' does not 'putting in jail' -- it means using weapons, wizardry and torture to kill them. There are 165 characters taken from history. On your side are the famous clean officials such as Hai Rui and Lord Bao. On the opposite side are the famous corrupt officials such as Zhao Gao, Huo Shen and others who exhibit different degrees of power (=corruption) as indicated by the gauge levels over their heads. When you kill a corrupt official, you gain experience points. For example, killing the eunuch official Wei Zhongxian gains you 100 experience points. As you accumulate points, you increase your powers for "Combatting corruption," "Moral character" and "Degree of being corruption free" instead of "life," "magic" and "strength" in other kinds of games. Your ultimate goal is to reach , where "the birds sing, the flowers give out fragrance, the people are full of love and harmony, the nation is prospering and the world is calm and peaceful."

Monsters bear labels indicating "son of corrupt official" or "daughter of corrupt official," and require violent deaths. "Mistresses of corrupt officials" are bikini-clad bastions of T&A (apparently corrupt officials maintain harems of half-naked warrior-hotties). Looks like the "Communist Party Disciplinary Committee" of Ningbo has yet to meet the video game censors over at the Ministry of Culture...

ESWN also points out that the game borrows copiously from other games' copyrighted material. Pwned!

ESWN: Incorruptible Warrior (second item)

Picture via ESWN