Insaniquarium

Overall score:

www.popcap.com

Insaniquarium is, as the name suggests, kind of insane. And it takes place in an aquarium. You, the player, are the owner and defender of this aquarium, and it’s your job to make sure the fish are fed, the eggs are found, and the occasional alien is destroyed. The game takes a simple idea and gives it a bunch of wacky twists, and that’s when the game gets interesting.

The basic layout of Insaniquarium is simple—you have an aquarium with a couple of guppies, who occasionally get hungry (as animals are wont to do). You feed them by clicking on the screen, which causes a chunk of guppie food to appear and waft slowly to the floor of the tank; if it is not eaten, it will disappear, and you can’t put out any more food until it’s gone. As the guppies eat they get bigger, and will begin to produce money in fairly small denominations—the money, like the food, sinks to the bottom and disappears, so you have to click on it quickly to claim it. When you save up enough money an array of shopping options becomes available to you, and that’s when the game gets interesting.

The end goal is to buy three pieces of an egg, each of which is pretty expensive. In order to get that kind of money, two guppies aren’t going to do it for you. You can invest in more guppies if you like, but if your tank gets too full you’ll need to buy the ability to pop out more than one food pellet at a time. You can also upgrade to more nutritious pellets so the fish don’t get hungry as often, which makes them much easier to maintain. If you really want to rake in the cash, however, you’ll want to save up and buy a carnivore or two—larger, prettier fish that eat little guppies instead of pellets. They’re much more expensive to feed but they drop a diamond instead of a coin, so the return is worth the price. The shifting economy of your fish tank is compelling enough, trying to keep your fish alive and well fed while catching the money they drop, but all of sudden the alien alarm will sound and that’s when the game gets interesting.

When an alien appears your mouse stops dropping food and becomes a gun. You use it to both damage and herd the alien, because if it gets close enough to your fish it will kill them. It takes several clicks to kill even the weakest alien, so you might want to fork out some cash and buy an upgraded laser to kill it more quickly. There’s nothing more frustrating than watching your two new carnivores die at the hands of an alien invader, forcing you to start over basically from scratch. If you can kill the aliens and save your fish, however, you’ll eventually save up enough money to buy all three pieces of the egg, at which point you advance to the next level. And that’s when the game gets interesting.

Each egg you construct hatches into a pet, who sits or swims or crawls around your tank and helps you out in subtle ways; this means that every time you advance a level you get a new pet. There’s an oyster who gives you pearls every now and then, each worth a tidy sum, and there’s a snail who helps you catch the coins the fish drop. There’s a mommy guppy who pops out baby guppies on a regular basis, which saves you the trouble of buying new ones, and there’s a swordfish who helps you attack the aliens. You can only have a certain number of pets, however, so after a while you need to pick which of the available pets you want to use in the next level—that’s when the game gets interesting.

The game certainly has it’s flaws—the fish are very stupid, for example, and sometimes swim straight into the aliens no matter how skilled you are at shooting them. It’s also hard to tell when a fish needs to be fed—they turn pale, alerting you to their hunger, but by the time they do they’re close enough to death that you often can’t do anything about it. Most of the time you’ll just drop food into the tank with reckless abandon and hope the fish can get to it in time. The game is also pretty cavalier about tossing around new ideas—it’s fun to discover what’s going on, but the first time you see an unexplained addition you’re bound to be a little lost. And lastly, like most Popcap games, it's not available for Macs. On the other hand, the game has some strong points in its favor. You can replay a level as often as you like, and the game automatically saves itself so you can come back to the site later and pick up in the same level where you left off; it’s nice that the game is fairly long, but it’s even nicer that you don’t have to play it all in one sitting. At present the web version only includes two tanks, but the "deluxe" (i.e., not free) version has three tanks; when you complete a certain number of levels you make it to the next tank, which follows the same basic rules but uses different aliens, different fish, and an all-new economy. That’s when the game gets interesting.

Written by Fellfrosch on September 26th, 2002