Sim Ant. A game based upon a kid playing with bugs on the sidewalk,but without the Magnifying Glass to fry them! Darn?
This DOS driven game begins with 2 ant colonies trying to dominate a section of a backyard for their own colony. Your character is a simple Yellow Ant, the Worker, who also has the ability to change into a Warrior Ant, or the Queen, should the need arise to do so. Your primary job is to bring back food to your (2D) Ant Hive, to keep your (Black) queen alive long enough to overpopulate your hive.If the Yellow Ant dies,he begins anew by hatching out of an egg. You either win or lose the first game (there are 3 game modes in Sim Ant) by outright destroying the Red Queen [the opposition] with a show of force, starve the Red Queen by hogging all the food source for your Black Hive, or more rarely, get lucky enough to have a natural disaster eliminate Red Hive for you. In Sim Ant the natural disasters are Flooding of a hive with rain water,or a giant-from the ant view-Spider who is perpetually hungry, feeding off both red and black ants indiscriminately. If you are daring, you can kill The Spider with enough Warrior Ants to do the job- and the Spider becomes a small food source this way.but Spiders do get replaced again.Your food source is always and only little green balls in a pile which your ants can carry back home, or feed themselves with immediately.This pile is made by people(The Shoe) in the yard dropping ice cream, or your ants killing something like a caterpillar,spider or ant lion.By the way- your ant's life is short and on a timer! Much like a health bar from any other game, this meter gets lower as time passes, but refills when food is eaten. Also available modes of death,though not hive destroying are a lawnmower which sucks up big numbers of ants,Ant Lion pits(don't fall in!) ant to ant combat and The Shoe. It is a backyard with people walking through it afterall.
The second game mode is based on not only dominating One rectangular section of the yard, but all 32 of them, up to and including the Human House sections! EEEEK! You capture one section of yard as a base,same as first game, fly a new queen out from it to populate adjacent sections.The sections your Black ants take over are colored black, the enemies are red. Sections in contention are grey.You do NOT have to fight 32 seperate battles however! Not every section has ants in it already.The most interesing mode is the free play or Experimental Mode, this is where you learn and use all the known scientifically proven tidbits about" Formicade formicade" That's the Latin science name for an ant. Which I learned by the way from playing in this mode. Here is where it shines for an educational game. In depth details about pheremones to communicate, an adjustable Caste system per hive I.E. What percent ants should be workers, how many soldier ants to keep, how many new queens to hatch.Biology and Social behavior in an ant hive, and a very large encyclopedia / glossary about all things ant.
Overall if you are just a die hard high action or excitement gamer, you will want to skip this one. Graphics are really simple, at times they even slow up.and the whole premise is just too Boring for your liking. If you are a parent worried about what your kids play on a PC, then this is deinitely for you to pick up! As my dad told me when I was a kid "If you're going to waste all this time playing with bugs, why not learn something about them?" Wish I had this game back then, that sidewalk was hot...