FIGURE F


A wide variety of colors and kinds of plants can occur. Roll over picture for a larger image.

Plants can't get diseases, but they can get (and do get, with annoying regularity) insect infestations. Bug spray costs $40, but I've found that you can often sell a plant even though it's a bug hotel, so I don't always bother to spray.

When you find a magic plant, it's removed from your growing area and potted (in a gold pot!) in your sale nursery. I like to keep at least one seed from a magic plant, so I can recreate it if I want to (they're usually worth a lot if you sell them!), but the plant is removed as soon as it reaches adulthood, which makes this difficult. My strategy in Plant Tycoon is to always keep two seeds from every plant. I then plant only one of the seeds. If nothing particularly exciting comes out of that pollination, I discard the other seed. If a magic plant does grow, I can then plant the second seed, self-pollinate the plant, and produce as many magic plants as I want. Once a given magic plant is in the nursery, future specimens of the same magic plant are not removed.

One of my biggest issues with Plant Tycoon is the pause mode. It's impossible to tell from the growing area screen whether or not the game is paused, and you can still plant and sell even if the game is paused. This has resulted, more times that I care to admit, in my selling off a group of plants, planting new seeds, waiting a few hours, and coming back to...seeds in pots, and no plants. Fish Tycoon's screensaver pause mode prevents this.

Making good games even better
The first thing that would really improve both games is a "speed up" function. If I have only ten minutes to play with my fish or plants, I'd like to be able to breed them, and then speed up the game to see the results. The only way that you can currently speed up the game is to change your handheld's system clock, and this can wreak havoc on your ability to get to appointments on time. If you move the clock forward and then change it back, both games respond by killing all of your creations. Go ahead, ask me how I know.

I've already mentioned the slow start that both games require, but it deserves a closer look. Yes, it's probably much more realistic than being able to jump into the most demanding plants and fish right away. However, it can be very frustrating. It seems to take about a week of steady play to be able to afford all of the upgrades, which is quite a long time of looking at the same basic plants and fish.

This might not be such a big concern, were it not for the way the games store their data. All information on your current game is stored in the Unsaved Preferences database on your Palm. As the name implies, this database is not saved during a regular HotSync. If your Palm loses its data and needs to be restored, this database won't be restored--so neither will your games. I had $40,000 in Fish Tycoon the last time this happened to me. I was not a happy camper.

Backup applications can back up this database, but apparently Palm recommends that you not do this, stating it can cause problems during the restore operation. I have currently set my backup program to backup the database, because I can't bear to lose $40,000 again. Risky, though, when Palm specifically recommends against it.