.FLYINGHEAD WE GOT GAME!
.TITLE How to be a Plant and Fish Tycoon
.AUTHOR Heather Wardell
.SUMMARY If, like author Heather Wardell, you thrive on games like The Sims or Rollercoaster Tycoon, you may find Fish Tycoon and Plant Tycoon to be just what you’ve been looking for. Plant Tycoon and Fish Tycoon bring the excitement of pets to your Palm or Pocket PC handheld. Created by LDW Software, both games are easy to learn, entertaining, and can be utterly addictive.
.DEPT
Did you ever have a Tamagotchi or other virtual pet? Did you ever wish you had one? Virtual pets can be great–lots of fun, portable, and no hairballs on the rug.
Plant Tycoon and Fish Tycoon bring the excitement of pets to your Palm or Pocket PC handheld. Created by LDW Software, who also offer a line of casino games and the adorable Little Palm Pet, both games are easy to learn, entertaining, and can be utterly addictive. If you’re the type of gamer who loves car racing or "shoot-em-up" games, the Tycoon games may not be for you. If, on the other hand, you thrive on games like The Sims or Rollercoaster Tycoon, you may find Fish Tycoon and Plant Tycoon to be just what you’ve been looking for!
.H1 The basics
Both games are played in similar ways, so we’ll go through how the games work first, then explore the specific details of each game.
Unlike many games, these run in real time. In other words, time elapses between when you, say, plant a seed, and when you see an actual plant. At the fastest speed setting, it takes about two hours from seed to full-grown plant and one hour from fish breeding to full-grown fish. Knowing this has not stopped me from checking every five or ten minutes at times–anything yet? No? How about now? GROW!
Ahem. As I was saying…It does add interest to the game to have things happening when you’re not actually looking at the program; when you next click on the game, you see whatever changes have occurred. Naturally, if you leave your fish too long without food, or your plants too long without water, you’ll return to upside-down fish or dried-out plants. Dead! It’s rather frightening how upsetting this is after you’ve been playing for a while. (Just keep telling yourself, "It’s only a game…") Fortunately, both games have a "pause" feature, so you can leave your little friends unattended without risking disaster. Figure A shows Fish Tycoon paused, in its "screensaver mode".
.FIGPAIR A Fish Tycoon, paused, makes a gorgeous screensaver.
.BREAK_EMAIL Tap right here to become a Plant and Fish Tycoon.
In both games, you begin with the bare-bones essentials, and a few plant seeds or fish eggs. When I first played Plant Tycoon, I planted all my seeds, waited for them to grow, crossed them with each other, planted those seeds, and…found myself with a lovely collection of dead plants. Hmmm. It turns out that the basic soil and water are insufficient to support some of the fancier plants. The same thing happened when I first played Fish Tycoon. You’d think I’d have learned, wouldn’t you?
After trying out a number of methods, it seems that the best way to start out is to breed and sell the basic plants or fish over and over again until you have enough money to buy the highest caliber of supplies. This does make for a rather dull start to the game, unfortunately. I would love to see a "bank loan" feature added to these games; borrow $10,000 to get started, and then pay it back with interest as time goes on.
You can buy a number of things in both games to increase your sales of plants (fancy fountains for your sale nursery) and fish (ornaments for your sale tank). I haven’t found that these items make my buyers pay more for my plants and fish, but they do make more buyers show up at the sale. This means that the plants and fish sell more quickly. Since plants and fish only sell when you’re actually in the sale screen, this is very good.
With no sales aids, it can take up to five minutes to sell a full crop. Figure B shows a screenshot from LDW’s Web site of a Plant Tycoon nursery, full of people and sold plants.
.FIGPAIR b Adding sales aids makes your plants and fish sell more quickly.
The object of both games is to find the magic plants or fish. You do this by crossing two plants or fish with one other. (Not a plant with a fish, though…although that would be a neat experiment!) When the baby grows up, you can see what you’ve created. You can then cross these new creatures with each other, and so on. The magic fish and plants offer various benefits; such things as increased health and higher prices. (Don’t worry, I won’t be telling you how to find them–no spoilers here!)
What happens when you find them all? Well, the game tells you that you have succeeded, and then…you’re right back into the game. A true simulation, really–the world goes on even though you’ve found all of the magic items. Whether you choose to continue or start over is up to you. I like to keep going and try to make something specific (a purple plant or a yellow fish with green fins).
There are three different levels of difficulty to the games, so you could start over at a harder level. I’ve done this, and the only thing that seems to be different is that it takes a lot longer for things to happen. I always play at the easy level now.
When you start a new game, you’re given the option of getting help at each stage. I suggest this for at least your first few games, as it does a great job of explaining what to do.
.H1 Fishy, fishy
In Fish Tycoon, you breed fish to create new and different fish breeds. There are more than twenty fins and twenty body types available, which combine to make over four hundred different kinds of fish. Interestingly, you can breed fish A to fish B, and then turn right around and breed fish B to fish A. I’m not quite sure this is scientifically valid, but they do make a cool kissing noise when you breed them, so I think it’s OK. The sounds can be turned off, which is probably a good idea for checking on your fish at work!
Some of the fish you can create are truly beautiful, while some are merely average looking. They all behave with incredible realism, however. They swim around each other, swim toward the food when you feed them, and even swim behind plants and through a stone arch in the sale tank. Gorgeous!
Once a fish reaches adulthood, you can see which two fish are its parents. You can also set the selling price for all fish of this particular type. Figure C shows this Species screen, which is also good for a nice close view of a particular fish.
.FIGPAIR C The Oriental Fire-Arrow and its parents.
The baby fish appear shortly after breeding. They start out as generic little silvery fish, but soon begin to look a bit like their adult selves. You can’t check them out in the Species screen until they reach adulthood. Figure D shows a group of my fish and their brand new offspring.
.FIGPAIR D New babies all look the same.
Each tank holds a maximum of twenty fish. You start the game with one breeding tank and one sale tank. You can buy a second tank when you have the money, and I strongly recommend it. Even then, you’ll find yourself restricted by available tank space. While I often find it frustrating to be limited to a maximum of sixty fish, it does add an additional degree of realism to the game.
All is not paradise in your fish tanks, sadly. Fish can get ich (white spots on the skin and pronounced like "sick") or fungus. There are medications available for these conditions, which often cost more than the fish is worth. You need to decide whether you are willing to throw away a fish or whether you should pay to treat its disease. I only treat a fish if its selling price is higher than the cost of the medication.
In Fish Tycoon, you don’t get the improved water conditions or food as soon as you buy them. Instead, the game simulates a research cycle, and you eventually get a message that you’ve finished your research and have the better water or food available. I actually quite like this, even though it means I have to wait for my improvements, because it makes the game seem more realistic. Figure E shows the supply screen for Fish Tycoon.
.FIGPAIR E Clicking on any item in the supply screen gives a bit of detail about it.
I’ve completed my research into environment and food, but am still working on my advertising research.
There’s a trophy case screen, which shows you all of the magic fish you’ve discovered, as well as the statistics on how long you’ve been playing, how many fish you’ve found, how many times you’ve fed them, and so on. I’d love to be able to click on a magic fish and re-read the announcement the game gives when you first find the magic fish–I have a tendency to click "OK" too quickly and then want to see the details again.
.H1 Grow, baby, grow!
Plant Tycoon was created before Fish Tycoon, and it shows. While still an excellent game, it has some rough spots that aren’t present in Fish Tycoon.
To start with, it takes twice as long to grow a plant to "adulthood" as it does to get an adult fish. If you’re the patient type, this may not be an issue. I find it aggravating.
Once the plants grow up, you pollinate them with the pollen from other plants (or from themselves). After a while, they produce seeds. You take the seeds off the plants and store them in your seed box (which can hold up to forty-two seeds). And you can grow fifteen plants at a time. Figure F shows a group of my plants, grown to adulthood and freshly pollinated.
.FIGPAIR F A wide variety of colors and kinds of plants can occur.
Plants can’t get diseases, but they can get (and do get, with annoying regularity) insect infestations. Bug spray costs $40, but I’ve found that you can often sell a plant even though it’s a bug hotel, so I don’t always bother to spray.
When you find a magic plant, it’s removed from your growing area and potted (in a gold pot!) in your sale nursery. I like to keep at least one seed from a magic plant, so I can recreate it if I want to (they’re usually worth a lot if you sell them!), but the plant is removed as soon as it reaches adulthood, which makes this difficult. My strategy in Plant Tycoon is to always keep two seeds from every plant. I then plant only one of the seeds. If nothing particularly exciting comes out of that pollination, I discard the other seed. If a magic plant does grow, I can then plant the second seed, self-pollinate the plant, and produce as many magic plants as I want. Once a given magic plant is in the nursery, future specimens of the same magic plant are not removed.
One of my biggest issues with Plant Tycoon is the pause mode. It’s impossible to tell from the growing area screen whether or not the game is paused, and you can still plant and sell even if the game is paused. This has resulted, more times that I care to admit, in my selling off a group of plants, planting new seeds, waiting a few hours, and coming back to…seeds in pots, and no plants. Fish Tycoon’s screensaver pause mode prevents this.
.H1 Making good games even better
The first thing that would really improve both games is a "speed up" function. If I have only ten minutes to play with my fish or plants, I’d like to be able to breed them, and then speed up the game to see the results. The only way that you can currently speed up the game is to change your handheld’s system clock, and this can wreak havoc on your ability to get to appointments on time. If you move the clock forward and then change it back, both games respond by killing all of your creations. Go ahead, ask me how I know.
I’ve already mentioned the slow start that both games require, but it deserves a closer look. Yes, it’s probably much more realistic than being able to jump into the most demanding plants and fish right away. However, it can be very frustrating. It seems to take about a week of steady play to be able to afford all of the upgrades, which is quite a long time of looking at the same basic plants and fish.
This might not be such a big concern, were it not for the way the games store their data. All information on your current game is stored in the Unsaved Preferences database on your Palm. As the name implies, this database is not saved during a regular HotSync. If your Palm loses its data and needs to be restored, this database won’t be restored–so neither will your games. I had $40,000 in Fish Tycoon the last time this happened to me. I was not a happy camper.
Backup applications can back up this database, but apparently Palm recommends that you not do this, stating it can cause problems during the restore operation. I have currently set my backup program to backup the database, because I can’t bear to lose $40,000 again. Risky, though, when Palm specifically recommends against it.
I spoke to Arthur Humphrey, CEO of LDW Software, about this issue. It turns out that Palm used to encourage developers to use the Unsaved Preferences file to store the status of video games, so LDW did. Their more recent games don’t use this file.
I asked how we should back up our games. The best way to do this is to first pause the game, then use a backup program that will allow you to enable saving the Unsaved Preferences file. If you don’t pause the game first, when you restore the backup, the game will bring your plants and fish to whatever age and condition they’d be in if you had left the game unattended for that amount of time. The odds are that your plants and fish will be dead. This process will work well for a planned restore (to a new handheld, perhaps), but won’t help with a sudden memory loss. Granted, the loss of a game isn’t really the end of the world, but it does feel like it!
I rate Fish Tycoon a 4, and Plant Tycoon a 3. Fish Tycoon deserves the higher rating because of its clear pause mode, stunning graphics, and more realistic research modes. Both games, for the right gamer, will provide endless hours of entertainment.
.H1 Plant Tycoon
.RATING 3
.H1 Fish Tycoon
.RATING 4
.BEGIN_SIDEBAR
.H1 Product availability and resources
For more information on Plant and Fish Tycoon, visit http://www.ldw.com.
.END_SIDEBAR
.BIO
