Plant Tycoon and Fish Tycoon bring the excitement of pets to your Palm or Pocket PC handheld. Created by LDW Software, who also offer a line of casino games and the adorable Little Palm Pet, both games are easy to learn, entertaining, and can be utterly addictive. If you're the type of gamer who loves car racing or "shoot-em-up" games, the Tycoon games may not be for you. If, on the other hand, you thrive on games like The Sims or Rollercoaster Tycoon, you may find Fish Tycoon and Plant Tycoon to be just what you've been looking for!

The basics
Both games are played in similar ways, so we'll go through how the games work first, then explore the specific details of each game.

Unlike many games, these run in real time. In other words, time elapses between when you, say, plant a seed, and when you see an actual plant. At the fastest speed setting, it takes about two hours from seed to full-grown plant and one hour from fish breeding to full-grown fish. Knowing this has not stopped me from checking every five or ten minutes at times--anything yet? No? How about now? GROW!

Ahem. As I was saying...It does add interest to the game to have things happening when you're not actually looking at the program; when you next click on the game, you see whatever changes have occurred. Naturally, if you leave your fish too long without food, or your plants too long without water, you'll return to upside-down fish or dried-out plants. Dead! It's rather frightening how upsetting this is after you've been playing for a while. (Just keep telling yourself, "It's only a game...") Fortunately, both games have a "pause" feature, so you can leave your little friends unattended without risking disaster. Figure A shows Fish Tycoon paused, in its "screensaver mode".

FIGURE A

Fish Tycoon, paused, makes a gorgeous screensaver. Click picture for a larger image.

In both games, you begin with the bare-bones essentials, and a few plant seeds or fish eggs. When I first played Plant Tycoon, I planted all my seeds, waited for them to grow, crossed them with each other, planted those seeds, and...found myself with a lovely collection of dead plants. Hmmm. It turns out that the basic soil and water are insufficient to support some of the fancier plants. The same thing happened when I first played Fish Tycoon. You'd think I'd have learned, wouldn't you?