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REVIEWS

DEVELOPER : MSN Gaming Zone PUBLISHER : MSN Gaming Zone Requirements: 486, 16 MB of RAM, 30 MB of HD Recommend: Pen. 90MHz, 32 MB of RAM

The thing that kept coming to me as I played Microsoft's ANTS was a flashback to Psygnosis' hit of the late 80's: Lemmings. If you blew the dust off your old copy of Lemmings and reinstalled it now, it would feel a lot like ANTS. You have a game with engaging little characters, fighting to survive in one way or another, while the clock ticks down to the end. Unfortunately, you would also have 1988-era graphics with bitmapped sprites and VGA resolution - which look pretty dated at the end of 1998, when everything from fighting games to railroad simulations are 3d-rendered. (The minimum system requirements state SuperVGA, but I didn't see anything that required more than 256-color depth and it was certainly grainy enough to be 320x200 resolution.)

Microsoft bills this on their MSN Gaming Zone as a strategy title, which I feel is a mistake. The strategy label is sometimes daunting to newcomers in the online gaming field, and I feel it is exactly these players to whom ANTS will mostly appeal.

When you start the game in the Zone (after some brief downloads as MS inserts all the proper plugins into your computer) you have to choose which "lounge" you wish to visit, and then select a game to play in. Alternately, you can select an open game, and host your own session, allowing you to configure the options for that game. Once the host decides to commence the game, the executable actually runs on your computer. Initially, you are greeted by the startup splashscreen, followed by another splashscreen which outlines gameplay and units. The game starts you as a nest of a handful of ants, whose goal in life is to scurry around the gamefield and bring back to your nest morsels of food, each worth 15-30 points. Unfortunately, there are one or more OTHER colonies of ants also competing for these same articles of food. When time runs out, highest point score wins.

In addition to the other colonies, you are hindered by a collection of terrains - mudflats, water, grass, paperclips, nuts and bolts, etc - all the challenges that face real ants every day. In most games there are also powerups that help you - goggles that allow your ant to swim, a mask that allows your ant to steal from other ant nests, bandoliers that turn your ant into a buff little ant-rambo for beating up pesky enemy ants, and so forth. Of course, your opponents also have such powerups, and managing your flow of ants carrying food with the ants with powerups on special tasks is one of the key tactics of the game.

As you soon realize, your ants can die after being repeatedly beaten up, blown up, drowned or burnt. Their condition is displayed by the color of the selection box around them - green for healthy, yellow for hurt, red for almost dead. If injured, a short trip into the nest will restore them fully. If you can't save them, the system allows you to hatch a new ant for 200 points - usually a crippling pointloss in multiplayer.

I found all of the basic features of a RTS here - group select units, scale map in the upper corner for map navigation, automatic repeat of certain orders - and the game played quite smoothly. In-game chat features and team-forming are also here, to add a cooperative slant to the free-for-all. Everything is very intutitive - click on a unit, give it a location to move to. If the ant has a powerup, you get another button that allows you to order it to execute the special feature of that item. (The fire helmet powerup is particularly cute - the ant goes to the designated location, pulls out magnifying glass, and starts a little fire in that spot.) Like any RTS it becomes a bit of a clickfest - chasing various units around to try to catch them and give them orders is always a challenge, as they move pretty quickly and the screen view is small.

Small children will like this game a lot - there is really no requirement to be literate to play, and the cartoonish art style will no doubt appeal to them as well. The on screen violence (where one ant is hitting another or blowing up) is also very cartoony - I expect few parents will have trouble letting their kids see this. It is clearly a good alternative for parents whose children want to play online, but the current crop is too brutal for their taste. There are no complicated build orders, nor technology trees to confuse. It's simply action.

All in all, whether you enjoy ANTS depends very much on your expectations. If you are a hard core strategy gamer or an intense RTS-online buff looking for something deeply engaging, you will not find it here. If you are looking for an educational simulation of ant life, a far higher recommendation goes to SimANT, by Maxis ($1.99 right now). But if you are new to computers, have young children, or are simply looking for a way to disengage your brain for a few minutes ANTS is an amusing and ultimately entertaining title. And besides, you can't beat the price. ANTS is a free download (3 megs) and play is free on the Zone.

Reviewed by Steve Lieb