MobileTechReview.com Game Review: Fish Tycoon for Palm

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Fish Tycoon by LDW Software, $14.95
Reviewed May 2004 by Bill Ingram

After a successful run with Plant Tycoon, LDW came back with another Tycoon sim game called Fish Tycoon. This time around, the graphics got more interesting because it’s more fun watching fish swimming than watching plants grow. The game play remains mainly the same, but it’s equally addictive. You can play the game to make loads of money by raising and selling fish, or you can follow the storyline and build up your empire to find and breed 7 Magic Fish.

As with most Tycoon games, Fish Tycoon provides you with a small amount of starting cash and a few basic items and expects you to build up a profitable empire. In this case, your basic starting items are an aquarium and a half dozen fish eggs and your goal is to find the seven lost Magic Fish of Isola.

The first thing you should do is drop the eggs into the aquarium by clicking on them and dragging them into the tank. After a few minutes, the eggs will hatch into baby fish. These fry will be hungry, so you should drag some fish food into the tank. After an hour or so, these fish will be all grown up and ready for breeding.

“An hour!?,” I hear you say, “Who wants to watch baby fish swim around for an hour?” Not to worry, this game runs in real time. This means that, once your fish have hatched and you’ve fed them, you can exit the program and check your email or go play solitaire. You can even shut your PDA off and do some real work in the real world. Your fish will happily grow older whether you are watching them or not. They will be waiting for you when you decide to run the program again.

Just like a real fish in a real fish tank.

But, if you ignore your new fish for too long, they will get sick and die. You’ll need to run the program a couple of times each day and feed your fish. Luckily, there is a “pause” setting that will stop time for the fish so that they won’t starve and die if you know that you won’t be able to feed them regularly (such as during the eight hours that you are asleep each night). There’s nothing worse than waking up, checking on your fish, and finding them all floating belly up.

And, trust me, you will be checking on your fish the moment you wake up each day. It won’t be long until you find yourself genuinely concerned about the health of your fish and will remember to keep them fed.

Anyway, now your fish have grown into adults, you’re ready to breed your fish together to create new types of fish. To breed two fish together, select one and drag it into the small isolation tank. Then, select another fish and drag it onto the first one in the isolation tank. A message will appear that tells you that the first fish is pregnant. You can release it back into the tank. In about half an hour, you’ll see new baby fish in the tank. Be sure to feed them. In another hour or so, these new baby fish will be all grown up as well.

But, what do you do with all these new fish? Well, you can breed them again or you can drag them to the sales tank and try to get your customers to buy them. If you can sell them, this will give you more money that you can then use to invest in tank improvements.

Some of the tank improvements will improve the health of your fish and others will attract more customers so that you can sell your fish easier and for higher prices. One improvement will create better fish food so that the fish can go much longer between feedings.

Improving the health of your fish is an important aspect of the game. When you breed two common fish together, you will most likely get an uncommon fish. Uncommon fish need a better level of technology to survive for very long. Typically, an uncommon fish will not live for more than five hours of real time with just the basic technology that you are given at the start of the game. For now, the best thing you can do is sell off these uncommon fish before they die and invest the profit in a better tank environment.

Uncommon fish that are bred together will often produce a rare fish. Rare fish will die almost immediately with just the basic technology. They’ll need several levels of environment improvement before they can remain healthy.

And, you will want to be able to breed rarer fish because they are the key to finding all of the lost Magic Fish and finishing the game. Each Magic Fish is a unique combination of a fish body and a set of fish fins.

There are more than 20 different fish bodies and 20 fish fins in the game. This makes possible over 400 different combinations of fish body and fin. Seven of these combinations represent the Magic Fish.

screen shot

When two fish are bred together, the resulting baby fish is predictable. If the first parent has body “A”, and the second has body “D”, the result will be a baby fish with body “G”. This works the same way for the fin type of the new baby. By observing what fish results from breeding which other fish together, the owner can create a matrix of combinations. This matrix can then be used in future breedings to accurately predict what kind of fish will result when any two fish are bred together.

When you find the right combination that creates a Magic Fish, you are notified of that fact and the fish is then immortalized on your trophy-room wall. Each Magic Fish that you discover will give you some magical benefit while it is in your tank. For example, one Magic Fish will actually feed the other fish in the same tank. This fish is so useful, in fact, that you might want to breed a copy of this fish for each tank that you own.

An alternate way of finding the magic Fish is with the mysterious liquid that you can buy in the supply shop. When squeezed into a tank, the liquid will immediately mutate some of the fish. They will instantly change their fins or body to a different type. If you’re lucky, the new fish will be one of the Magic Fish that you are seeking.

When you find all seven Magic Fish, you win!

The graphics in this game are beautiful. Each fish tank has a real photo of a fish tank as the background. The fish themselves are high resolution and look almost like real fish. Of course, the random combining of fish fins with fish bodies can make for some very silly looking fish (like a tiny guppy with a huge shark fin on its back). The game also includes a screensaver mode where you can simply put the PDA in its cradle and the fish will happily swim around for hours.

Overall, this is a very relaxing and fun game. It’s not a heart-pumping shoot-em-up or racing game – there are dozens of those already for the PDA. Fish Tycoon combines all the relaxing qualities of a real fish tank with the intellectual strategies that an ichthyologist would use every day. The game currently supports hi res OS 5 devices, and hi res plus version is coming very soon.

Hints and Tips

The two things that can ruin a perfectly good round of Fish Tycoon are the death of your fish and the accidental sale of your fish.

One way to keep your fish from dying is to feed them regularly. Another way is to spend your cash to upgrade your tank environment as quickly as possible.

To make money in the game, you need to find a fish or two that you can sell for about $40 and then breed and sell dozens of copies of that fish. Note that the prettier a fish is, the more you can sell it for. So, dull brown or black fish can’t be sold for much, but, bright gold or purple fish can be sold for a lot.

But, be careful when selling fish. Any fish that is swimming around in the sales tank can potentially be sold. If you don’t want your starter fish or your Magic Fish to be accidentally sold, be sure to increase your asking price for those fish by $1,000 or so.

And always keep $160 in your bank account. That is the cost to buy a fresh scoop of random fish eggs. If you accidentally kill off or sell off all of your fish, you can use that $160 to buy a new batch of eggs. This allows you to rebuild your empire without having to start the game over and purchase all of your tank improvements again.

Ratings (scale of 1 to 5):

Graphics		It’s like looking at real fish in a real tank. The shoppers in your fish store aren't quite so real and move around the shop like billiard balls.
Sound		The game doesn’t make too many sounds. When a fish is born or when a Magic Fish is found, short sound files play. Some PDAs, especially some Sony Clies, can’t play the sound files and remain silent.
Fun Meter		You often feel like a mad scientist, trying to breed the perfect creature. As you take notes, you can’t help but think about what would happen if you had combined two other types of fish instead. You jot down some notes and try again.
Addictivity		These are your fish. You created them and you own them. They depend on you for their care and well-being. When you are not managing them directly, you are often wondering whether it’s time to feed them and whether they’ve given birth yet. This game is as addicting as those silly Tamagotchi toys from a few years ago.

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