AMHERST, Mass. (AP) – Grant Cerulo says he isn’t trying to incite any riots or violence at the University of Massachusetts, even if the hero of the video game he created is a bomb-throwing, bare-knuckled UMass student on a mission to bloody up as many campus police officers as he can.

Inspired by clashes between students and campus police during the last two years as the Boston Red Sox approached the World Series, Cerulo’s game turns historical fact into ultraviolent, cartoonish fiction. Players control the moves of a character who must either fight off throngs of club-wielding police or risk being beaten by them.

The action in “Riot UMass” is set against a caricature of the university’s Southwest residential area, where about 100 students were arrested last month during racuous celebrations from the time the Red Sox entered the American League Championship Series until they won the World Series.

There were no major injuries reported in those incidents, and the vandalism was less than it had been the previous year, when students rioted while Boston was in the ALCS.

“I’m not trying to tell people to go out and get drunk and riot,” Cerulo said. “The game is just for fun.”

Administrators at the 24,000-student campus aren’t taking the game so lightly.

“We find it regrettable and discouraging that a student had designed a game that involves making university police officers targets,” said UMass spokesman Ed Blaguszewski. “It doesn’t reflect well on the relationship we’d like to build between students, police and the community as a whole.”

The game is accessed through the university’s Internet site, which allows students to post their own Web pages. And Cerulo is within his First Amendment rights to have the game hosted there, Blaguszewski said.

“We don’t have the authority to remove the game or censor it,” Blaguszewski said. “That doesn’t mean we endorse it or support its distribution – we clearly don’t. But based on the legal advice we received, it’s not within our domain to remove the game.”

Cerulo said no students, administrators or faculty members have asked him to remove the game.

Cerulo is an 18-year-old from Ashland who is studying music at the Amherst campus and plays the trumpet in the school’s marching band.

He said he designed the game out of boredom and posted it Oct. 20.

“I was sitting around talking to my roommate, and said “I have the best idea,’ and I just started making it,” Cerulo said. “My roommate liked it, the people and the dorm liked it, and I just kept going with it.”

Players of “Riot UMass” rack up points each time the student character – who is wearing a Red Sox cap – manages to bring down a campus police officer. Depending on the level he reaches, the character can use his bare hands, Molotov cocktails, a nail-spiked club or guns against the police.

Picking up beer bottles “fuels” the character’s stamina, allowing him to endure more blows from police who attack him and other students with guns and nightsticks.

Bonus rounds give the character a few seconds to decimate a police car and allow him to get extra points by catching a student falling from a dormitory.

“It’s violent and there’s blood flying all over the place,” Cerulo said. “It’s controversial in a lot of ways. But I really do appreciate what the cops do here. It’s not that serious of a message I’m trying to send out. It’s just a silly thing.”

Campus police chief Barbara O’Connor said the game is indicative of a lack of respect some students have for her force.

“There are students who have a sense of entitlement to this type of behavior,” O’Connor said. “And it’s disturbing that a student created this video game that encourages this kind of behavior against police.”

Seamus Brennan, speaker of the undergraduate Student Senate, said most students he’s spoken to say the game is a passing novelty.

“It’s like a big, cheap laugh,” Brennan said. “You play it once and go “ha, ha, ha,’ and that’s it. It loses its appeal pretty quickly.”