No Yellow Ant Here

I remember those carefree days of sitting in front of the TV with a Super Nintendo Entertainment System controller clutched in my hand, directing an army of black ants, lead by their symbolic leader, the yellow ant, to beat back the soldiers of a red ant colony before moving in to defeat their queen and conquer their territory. SimAnt was an amazing game for somebody as interested in ants (and other insects) as I was at the time. There have been only one or two additional attempts at an ant colony simulator that have actually made it into mainstream notice, but they were either too buggy (no pun intended) or fell out of public view before they caught on.

Now we come to Ant Nation, a game you can download on the Nintendo Wii. I watched early previews for this with high hopes that I would soon be reliving those glorious days as the yellow ant. I purchased the necessary Nintendo points, downloaded the game, played for five minutes, then promptly turned off my system and went to play something else on my computer. The experience was something akin to being told you had to attend a funeral, have a route canal, and put down your dog...all on your birthday. Maybe that's a little harsh, but it was a bad experience, befitting a harsh description.

The game gives you very little to start with. There's no real tutorial, but the first ten missions or so, out of a total of 100, are meant to familiarize you with certain tools and aspects of control. However, the game doesn' really explain what it means when it tells you to use certain tools or take certain actions. It took me so long to figure out that "Level Up An Ant" meant "hold the little guy down and poke him until he got angry" that I seriously considered the game to be broken and my money to be wasted. I was probably right about the latter.

I decided to give the game a second chance and played it while I was installing another, more entertaining, game on my computer. When I use a game as filler for the installation of another, it usually speaks volumes about how much I like that game.

During the game you spend most of your time buying cookies and candy with gold that you collect for completing missions and dropping them on the ground so that you can build up your army. Then you watch in abject horror as said army is wiped out by a single stronger enemy, like a Japanese beetle or a weaval of some kind. This wouldn't be a problem if there was an easy way to build your army up again, but you spend an exorbitant amount of your starting gold on building up your initial army. Once you're down to four ants, it becomes hard to kill even the random lady bugs, which are supposed to be the weakest enemies in the game. This necessitates a restart, which is a horrible way to extend gameplay length.

Outside of building up your army, you have to move your ants around and give them commands with a set of tools that are somewhat strange. The pipette is straightforward enough; you hold a button to suck up your ants and press another to release them all. However, in order to get the ants out of their colony (which you'll see as a small 2-dimensional mini map) you have to do some odd massaging thing and hope that they don't all cascade back down the hole once you've stopped. The pipette is pretty much the only way to move the ants around that I've seen, but again, I haven't been through the whole game. Once my army was wiped out for the third time, I decided the game wasn't worth much more of my time and my other game had finished installing.

If you want to play an ant colony simulator, and have fun, you'd be much better off finding an old SNES, a copy of SimAnt, and leading the yellow ant to victory.