Features

I wish biology teachers had Plant Tycoon based on real plants to help students learn about genetics and trait inheritance. The game is all about breeding and cross-pollinating plants to create expensive and rare plants as well as the six magic plants. This one is more an interactive experience in pumping up your green thumb than it is a game.

The game looks familiar to Virtual Villagers players because it comes from the same developers, Last Day of Work (yet they keep working!), and these plants hail from the exotic island of Isola. Virtual Villagers takes place on Isola and the graphics style and dialog boxes are the same. You’ll also recognize many customer faces in the nursery as they look like the people of Isola wearing modern clothes.

Also like its ancestors, Plant Tycoon is a real-time game where the plants continue growing even after closing the game. Players have the option to pause time and change the speed of time to slow, normal or fast. So if you’re off to bed or work for the day, either pause the game or switch to slow mode to ensure your plants don’t check out.

The game isn’t without its pests — figuratively and literally. The literal part involves catching butterflies and insects with a net. This is an optional game within the game. Virtual Villagers fans will recall the adventures they had trying to catch every rock, bug, and shell to complete the collection.

The nursery where you sell the plants is the biggest pest — figuratively. If you exit the nursery to change a price or anything else and go back in, the customers start over. If you had hordes of people inside the nursery, they’ll be gone and you’ll have to sit and wait for them to show up again. I wish there was a way to change prices while in the nursery and that the nursery would keep running even if I’m not in that screen. When it comes time to sell the plants to make room for new ones, I open the nursery and go do something else to past time.

Shop at the store for supplies, which includes three levels of soil, water, clippers, nets, and seed collection box. You must buy a level one item before a level two, a level two item before level three. The level of supplies affects your ability to grow exotic and rare plants as well as in catching the little buggers.

Oh, how this game can go on for days and weeks! I tried to keep track of the plants and seeds on paper. That didn’t work. It was too complicated since there were too many similar seeds and plants. Then I tried using the amazing spreadsheet that contains the breeding charts, but there were too many combinations and I couldn’t make up my mind which to do.

If I had more time on my hands, I’d study these guides to better understand the breeding formula. It makes sense when I break down the chart to a small 5×5 grid, but to apply that to every single combination with over 500 plant possibilities… forget it! That’s what makes this game unique (other than Fish Tycoon from the same developer) is that it makes you think. You can only store so many seeds that it’s tough to decide which to keep as it takes no time to fill up the seed box.

For busy and impatient folks, Last Day of Work posted great guides, charts, and spoilers in its forum. Clicking the link takes you to the forum list where no spoilers appear. You can see the post titles so you can decide what to look at. Be prepared to have patience when starting the game. It takes time to grow plants and build up the funds for bigger purchases.

I love creating new plants and seeing what would show up after cross-pollinating two plants. It would be nice to have a feature that keeps track of all the plants I’ve made. I tried doing that myself, but it was a monstrous task. The game does have stats indicating the number of species you discover, plants sold, bugs caught along with your rank for each.

I also enjoy clipping the dead parts of the plants and seeing the plant change to reflect the clipping. Those with brown thumbs like mine can play Plant Tycoon without worrying about killing plants. Gregor Mendel, “father of modern genetics,” would be proud.

System Requirements: Windows

• Windows ME/98/2000/XP/Vista
• 700 MHz or faster processor
• 96 MB RAM
• DirectX 7.0 MB or later