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Nice and easy for the kids

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 18 / 20
Date: September 07, 2006
Author: Amazon User

I got this for my 4 year old son who is a fish and aquarium fanatic. Our apartment is too small for a real fishtank so I got this for my laptop computer and is a great way for me and my son to spend some time together.

I let him choose what kind of tank he wants, what kind of plants, rocks, decorations, etc. and place them where he wants in the "tank". It makes him happy to choose what he wants and then see it appear on the screen. Allows him to be creative and to sense accomplishment through cause and effect.

Then he goes to the fish "encyclopedia" where he chooses what kind of fish he likes, I tell him the fish's name, and then we go into the fish store and he scrolls through the various fish until he finds the same fish that matches the one he found in the "book". We "buy" the fish and then click on "My Aquarium" which puts the fish into the aquarium he designed and he gets to see his fish "swim" around. You can select a classic clownfish and tang which my son thinks are Nemo and Dory. You can then select a fish and click a "Follow" button which zooms in on the fish and follows it around your aquarium. My son repeats this over and over again until there are 1-2 dozen fish in the tank. A neat little trick is that you can "feed" the fish where you shake some food and watch the fish swim over and eat it. You don't get to see the different kinds of fish interact with each other (like the various animals in Zoo Tycoon) and the various fish aren't scaled properly in the tank (for example, a triggerfish is about the same size as a clown fish), but it does the trick for a child. There's not much else to this game. But it keeps my son mesmerized and it's a nice alternative to spend some quality time with him. Now he wakes me up at 6:30 AM and asks if we can play the fish game.

Graphics are nice and music gets annoying after awhile (you can turn it off thankfully) but it does the job.

I love my aquarium

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 5 / 5
Date: June 19, 2007
Author: Amazon User

It's a simple game. Create your fishtank and buy your fish. Feed them, they will survive. You can research your fish with the encyclopedia. I've had a good time with the game. Each fish has it's own personality. I've had no trouble saving my games as a previous review stated. If you take care of your fish, they will grow and breed. All in all, for the price, it's worth it. And much easier than owning my own aquarium! It's a relaxing simple thing in a sometimes too complex world. DEFINITELY TURN THE MUSIC UP!

My Sim Aquarium

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 5 / 15
Date: November 03, 2006
Author: Amazon User

THE GAME DOES NOT SAVE RIGHT OR WELL. IT IS NOT WORTH THE MONEY I PAID FOR IT. IF I HAD IT TO DO OVER AGAIN I WOULD NOT BUY IT.

Unchallenging, slow paced game.

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 2 / 3
Date: December 25, 2007
Author: Amazon User

Nice enough looking fish and water habitats, but the game is unchallenging and therefore probably not all that interesting to most adult players. There are also no instructions (from what I could tell). You kind of have to figure it out yourself, which isn't hard, but I still would have liked clearer objectives to the game. I also couldn't figure out how to make the aquarium my screensaver, as it says you can on the box.

I much prefer "Fish Tycoon" (Activision), where you have to earn the money to buy supplies, and you can sell fish you breed and discover new species.

Okay, but a few problems

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: June 16, 2008
Author: Amazon User

This is an easy, mindless game that can be a lot of fun. It does, however, have a few problems.
1) No instructions. It's easy to figure most things out, but it took me nearly an hour to figure out how to take decorations out of the aquarium once I put them in. And then once I figured it out, I forgot again because it wasn't very intuitive.
2) You have to feed your fish every single day or they die. I know that you should feed real fish daily, but if you forget, they'll live. These don't. If you go one day without feeding them, you'll get treated to a tank full of floating fishies when you get back.
3) You can use your aquarium as a screensaver, but if you do, you can't take care of your fish. They're just there to be a screensaver. To actually feed and care for your fish, you have to play the game out of screensaver mode.
4) It takes forever to get all of your fish to eat. Real fish do not just swim around and ignore food if they're about to starve.

But despite these flaws, it's fun. It's educational for a kid, and since the fish die at the slightest hint of neglect, it's a good teaching tool for a child that swears he or she is ready for a puppy. And the screensaver is pretty cool, even though it takes all the gameplay out of the game.

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