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| Let's Take Over The Front Yard!; FAN's Community Brings You: SimAnt | |
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| Topic Started: Aug 16 2009, 11:41 PM (225 Views) | |
| Jeff | Aug 16 2009, 11:41 PM Post #1 |
Lord of Pie & BBWs
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Welcome one and all to Four Against Nature's very first community Let's Play venture. I'm the organizer of this deal, but by no means the main attraction. I'm here to merely open up the doors to this wonderful undertaking which, might I add, is open to all who wish to play! Merely IM or e-mail me with your intent to play and consider yourself signed up! Now, what is it we're playing today? I'll show you! Brought to you by Ma-"We were cool until EA bought us"-xis and Nintendo~!  SimAnt! As the title just might tip you off to, this game is about (surprise) ants! You take control of your own little ant farm and eat everything that stands in your way until nothing remains in your way. Now, every story worth telling has some narrative to it, right? Here's ours:  Now, some of you might be wondering "mating flight"? Well, as it turns out, certain ants DO have wings. If you ever woke up one early summer morning and seen a swarm of what look like small, black flies, it's entirely possible you were looking right at a swarm of flying ants!  Ants of every caste but one are all female and, with the exception of the queen, sterile. Soldiers and workers are the most common castes and are bred all year long and make up the vast inner workings of most colonies.  These freeloading  I refuse to make a middle school-level joke here.   That's right, kids, just one time and you too could end up with thousands and thousands of offspring! THE ONLY SAFE SEX IS ABSTINENCE. You may have thought that joke was beneath me. But it's not.  The Super Nintendo version, the version we'll be playing through the course of this LP, was released circa 1993, two years after the PC counterpart. It was one of the few games that can be played with either a controller of the SNES Mouse adapter and was one of Will Wright's earliest gaming breakthroughs. To make up for the lack of the PC's experimental mode, the SNES had an eight-level scenario mode which, quite frankly, has one of the most memorable SNES soundtracks of the time. Regardless of version, the more you know about ants, the easier this game becomes. Fellow LP-ers of this game are in luck as I spent my early teenage years researching insects of all shapes and sizes, starting with social insects such as bees, wasps, termites and, yes, ants. So, I shall be your ant-cyclopedia for the duration of this LP. This would make a great docum-ant-ary. Now you might be wondering, "Is this LP going to be loaded with horrible ant-related puns?" You bet your sweet mandibles it will! Now, the game is afoot! All six of them. And by that I mean, we'll be playing the Full Game mode which has two simple objectives.' 1) Drive the humans out of the house by taking over as much land as possible and 2) Destroy the rival red ant colony Think you're up for it? Then sign up!  Our story begins with humble origins. Our new queen lands in a small outpost on the outside of a big, clumsy, bipedal mammal's territory where a small nest of red ants have already dug in. This is problematic. Both the mammal and the ants need to go, but first, we need a bearing on our surroundings. For other people playing along, hitting the "X" button will bring the camera to your ant, while "Y" button will bring it to your menu options. More on those later as we need them. "A" is for confirm and "B" to cancel or bring up your ant-menu. Holding the shoulder buttons (L or R) will allow you to slide the camera along smoothly to assess your surroundings, seeing as the overhead map is useless in this version of the game. Don't sweat it, you're not missing much as it wasn't terrible useful when it was visible, either. Let's look around.  Ahh. We're in luck. A food source (the green dots) is a short walk away from where we started and the red ants haven't noticed yet. This is fortunate. But fools rush in where ant-gels fear to tread. Let's have a look-see.  There's a caterpillar nearby. Looks damn tasty, don't he? We'll need roughly around 10-15 ants to take him down to bite-sized crumbs, but we'll do that soon enough.  Ahh. And here we have a scout from the rival nest. This is a worker ant. You can tell because of its diminutive frame. Now, don't be fooled here. Workers are the lifeblood of any nest and tend to outnumber just about any other caste by a significant margin - and for good reason. They don't require much food to keep going, can tend to the young ants, dig out the nest, forage for food and fight to protect the nest all fairly well. And since I'm a new queen, I'm not in any position to go all 300 all over this guy. Let's just keep our distance and hope he doesn't notice us.  Here we have a pill bug. A rolly-polly, whatever you want to call them. Generally speaking, these guys don't really mess with the ants and the ants don't really mess with them. They're just sort of there. Now, I was really worried about a spider being in the area, and at the start of a game, that can make or break your nest's well being. However, there wasn't one in sight, so I was prepared to make the first nest and hopefully get some help.  We're going underground! Now, generally speaking, you're fairly safe underground unless those bastard neighbors, the red ants, decide to attack you, but they usually refrain from doing so unless they hold a pretty signific-ANT number advantage over you. Now, you can dig too deep down and if it rains, end up drowning, but that rarely happens should you be conscious and holding the controller at the same time.  Hm. Not very accommodating, is it? Let's dig out some leg room. After all, we got six of them to make room for. Worth noting is that you, the yellow ant, will dig infinitely faster than your computer-controlled allies, who are forced to carry the dirt to the surface and deposit it before digging further, whereas you can just power-drill your way through. This has other advantages later, but where's the sense in spoiling everything here?  There we go. With some room to breathe, we're prepared to abandon our role as the new queen and actually work for our food. I open the menu and select my last remaining option - lay eggs. At this point, the queen doubles in size, sheds her wings and takes over producing eggs, as she will for the rest of her life. In ancient times, ant colonies could have multiple queens, but this is rarely, if ever, seen in modern times. As a result, she is the single-most important element of the nest and must be cared for. Luckily, this is easy to do.  Excell-ant!! The first ant of the colony, a worker, has been born! Let's get to the surface and grab some of that food quickly to get things rolling.  Now, before we go any further, we have some menus to discuss. Later on, micromanagement becomes far less pivotal, but early on, it's important to have your priorities straight. Let's set our ants' behavior patterns first.  We have no ants currently, beyond the queen and our yellow hero, so no jobs have been assigned yet. I opt to take control manually. Later players can decide if they want the game to control that, or if they want to, depending on what they require.  Simple is best and right now, our nest has too few ants to really worry over things like tunnel space. We'll iron that out later.  Next is caste, which controls what type of ants are born into the colony.  Right off the bat, it's set to all workers. This is fine and dandy, but I can't just not put my two cents into the works.  When a nest is just starting, breeders are worthless. They can't fight for beans, they don't dig, nurse or forage, so we're not even going to worry about them. Their sole purpose is the mating flight to spread throughout the yard and that's hardly priority one right now. Soldiers are bigger ants, with larger heads and are far more battle-worthy, but they take more food and can't nurse the young. That's fine, we only need a few to supplement the forces.  Well, now that I have some backup, I can use my menu and call forth help and dismiss troops as I see fit. Lead them to food, battle, or away from impending doom, these controls are essential to our survival.  I call forth everyone I can get to assault the caterpillar but, sadly, we don't have quite the ant-power to take it down. I notice that, at this point, my ant's looking a little peckish so I ask a neighboring ant for a bit of his lunch.  That lovely noise you just heard, if you were playing, was the other ant bringing up food from its second stomach (called the crop) to share with us. Ants have two stomachs - its primary stomach is for digestion and the secondary stomach is for storage and sharing with more needy ants in the colony. And while I'm discussing food, it's import-ant to notice some of the icons, namely the 2nd from the top. This allows you to see the otherwise invisible scent trails the ants lay down. Ants are a very scent-based bunch, recognizing nest mates, their nest, and trails to food via chemical signals left by their peers. This is useful in the off-chance you get lost, or to see what random hole belongs to who. As you collect food, you automatically leave a scent trail behind - allowing your computer-controlled allies to find the food you returned from. Occasionally, it will rain and wash these trails away. This is not a big deal, you can make them again.  Ahh. There he is. I was wondering when he'd turn up. This, ladies and gentlemen, is the North American wolf spider. A small, furry arachnid that typically does not spin a web, but opts to chase after its pray itself. It has a narrow range of vision and a bottomless belly. Now that doesn't mean the big, dumb beast can't be beneficial because if it shows up in the red ant territory, so much the better. If he sees you, your ant will have a spaz attack and the spider's legs will move much faster and more erratically. When this happens, find a hole and dive in or risk getting your organs liquefied and forcibly removed in what can only be described as a rather graphic depiction of the big meat grinder we call the food web.  Another thing to bear in mind is that, while underground, the opening holes' positions underground do not reflect their above-ground locations. That is to say, open up a lot of holes underground and you'll get a smattering of opening on the surface. This can be useful if you're attacked, or if you want to find a way around a defensive line. I open a few new ones, but none of them end up too far from the first. Hmm...  Some time passes and I make a meal out of a passing caterpillar. I wouldn't have done this, really, if I didn't have to as my objective this time around is to build numbers and starve the red ants out, but unfortunately, the current blob of green dots happened to randomly spawn under a ravenous arachnid and I wasn't feeling quite gutsy enough to run headfirst into jaws bigger than my body length. In fact it made me feel ANT-sy.  However, the spider was eventually chased off (I wanted to kill it, but it ran off the screen, rendering it a non-factor for a short time) and got to the new batch of green dots. Worth mentioning is the red nest's near-suicidal desire to protect the food patches, regardless of the ant's caste. A way to widdle down their numbers is to bring a large number near a patch being guarded (which they treat as the "main" food source until it gets depleted and a new one pops up) and kill them one-by-one before running off with the lion's share. Or antlion's share, whatever.  Unfortunately, death is also an inevitable part of this game. There's no shame in it, as combat in the SNES version if markedly more difficult than that of the PC. Where as the former relied solely on statistics, the SNES version of SimAnt makes each encounter a button-mashing minigame with percentages only playing a relatively small roll as a result. Unfortunately, this ends up becoming far more effort than it's worth when you suddenly get swarmed by angry, red ants and it's probably for your sanity's sake to not engage them directly, but to lead your allies to take care of them for you.  Upon dying, you return to the nest to be born anew and you get the chance to pick your caste. Depending on situation, worker or soldier are the only way to go. There's no benefit to being a breeder except to make yourself look stupid. I can only equate playing this game as a breeder with someone heavily intoxicated attempting to negotiate a heavily armed madman from killing everyone in the room. It's messy, it's easily avoided and it can create a lot of pain and sorrow for all involved should it be left to pass.  Now, one thing I forgot to mention earlier is that when the spider gets its fangs into a little black-or-red-colored treat, it goes through a rather violent animation of the ant becoming spider chow. During this time the spider is harmless, you can even walk directly under its jaws and not be in any danger, assuming you have the common sense to move prior to it finishing the main course. While eating, if you have 30 or more ants in tow, you can assault and probably fell the arachnid for a sizable lump of green dots. It's worth trying, if you don't mind losing an ant or two.  Another PS note would be that if you do find yourself in a dangerous situation, climbing on top of small, beige-colored pebbles will, for a little while, put you out of harms way. These pebbles serve an alternative purpose of acting as a barrier to the nest should it find itself under attack. Ants pushing against these might break through them, which can be problematic, but not the end of the world.  Finally, viewing the house lets you view the field of battle in its entirety. Yep, we got a long way to go and no guarantees of our victory. If we end up in a situation that's basically unwinnable, we'll just draw up a treaty and consider it another LP in the can, but I think we have a group of skilled gamers who can beat down a lousy human and some pesky red ants. So, join us, won't you, on this most epic journey across the front yard and into the living room and kitchen.  And just one last little protip is that people playing this game should avoid using the throttle button as it usually ends up with YOU being the one who gets throttled. Lawn mowers, spiders and starvation are just the tip of the iceberg in this case. If you think you got the guts to be squished, incinerated, burnt, sucked out or disemboweled, then line up and sign up. You won't be disappointed. This is Jeff and this is FAN's Community Let's Play Sim Ant. Official Sign-Up List: 1) Jeff 2) Sean 3) Rem 4) Immortal_Knight 5) Edited by Jeff, Aug 17 2009, 05:10 PM.
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Come visit me and my thought processes at my website: http://www.publishedauthors.net/tdotdw/news.html "In the cold light, justice and morality always look corny and you can't wave the flag and look cool. But like it or not, society needs its heroes." - John Hart; actor who played The Lone Ranger. | |
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| Root | Aug 17 2009, 10:43 AM Post #2 |
The Speaker for the Dead
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As we should have come to expect of him, NO joke nor pun, is below Jeff. None. Sigh...this is going to a most interesting LP. |
Does being the only sane one make me the insane one, in a sort of way? Though my eyes could see, I was still a blind man; Though my mind could think, I still was a madman... "Yes there are two paths you can go by, but in the long run...there's still time to change the road you're on" | |
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| Rem | Aug 17 2009, 12:49 PM Post #3 |
Why yes, I do like snickerdoodles.
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Question! Can you switch second place to Sean, so I can get used to the controls of the game? It's been forever since I last played. D: |
 Have you ever wondered what color air is? | |
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| Immortal_Knight | Aug 17 2009, 05:13 PM Post #4 |
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Newbie Rank 5
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I shall also play...but probably won't update so much? >_< |
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| Jeff | Aug 18 2009, 05:33 PM Post #5 |
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Lord of Pie & BBWs
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Welcome back to part 2 of my introductory post. Jeff here with more epicness than you can hold under a magnifying glass! Now with sufficient forces, I made the hunter the hunted. ... By accident. Ironically, this happened when I was a great distance from my nest (for an ant) and summoned a horde to aid me when they basically trampled over the spider and killed him for me. But I'm not complaining, as that means there's one less massive arachnid predator on my abdomen.  Moments later, with sufficient forces amassed for what is essentially going to end up a slaughter, my ants lay siege to the red ant's territory, whipping those Commie bastards out of their lairs and up to face us ant-to-ant! However, since the brilliant general rarely has much more than a saber to his name, I opt to wait in the middle of my troops and give orders from a safe distance, as to not wear out my "D" and "F" keys. Once the initial rush has gone underway, we sneak into the enemy base.  When we enter the reds' hideouts, our troops become somewhat hesit-ant to enter. This can become problematic if I get my yellow hide swarmed and handed to me, as dying disbands the troops who will simply opt to ignore me and go home until I resummon them and drag them back again. I dig out a foxhole and continue to announce to them "Hey, idiots, I'm down here" until they come down and help thin the numbers out. Once I had a clearing, I made my move.  And crushed the queen myself! Ha-ha! Regicide! With my victory well in hand, my troops and I squashed out the red menace before returning with the food the reds had stored and reporting to her highness, the black queen. With this news well in hand, I decide it's time to begin the process of the mating flight.  The rule of thumb is as such: If there are reds - you'll want workers and soldiers. Breeders are useless. If there are no reds - you'll want workers and breeders. Soldiers serve no purpose then. You want workers 24/7. There's no reason there shouldn't be at least SOME workers being produced. However, how you play is entirely up to you and if you feel that a legion of soldiers is necessary to cap the commies, then, damn it, do what you must!  Worth noting is the game's level of unpredictability. One moment, you're minding your own business, hiding from a lawn mower, the next it rains five times in rapid succession and you can't climb out of the water anymore. The human's behavior is erratic, sometimes mowing his lawn once only to decide it's cut too short and mows it again immediately afterward. Nature is erratic in that even though there are no seasonal shifts, rain and sun are rapidly fighting each other for atmospheric dominance.  And, put simply, these factors combined can lead to a drowned/starved yellow ant. When the water comes up, the ants go out, but with a lawn mower overhead it's sometimes difficult to make split-second decisions when both have the same result. Do what you think is best.   Finally, once enough breeders are primed and ready, you'll get a message that I stupidly scrolled through due to hunting a spider that the mating flight has begun. If someone would cap that along the way, that'd be great. The flight takes time, so allow it to take its course. You can't control where the happy couples go (y'know, before the males DIE) because that was a PC-exclusive feature. The good news is that if you don't hit anything, they'll spread around. The bad news is, I forgot it was PC-Exclusive and jumped to the new nest without assessing this. Sorry.  Bare in mind that time runs faster for nests you're not a part of, so sometimes if you need to speed along, leaving the square isn't always a bad idea.  Well, with a new portion of the yard ready to be tackled and a long ways to go, I end my position as ruling yellow ant and allow the next in line (Sean) to take up the reigns. Just for simplification, I'll tack my name onto the end of the current rotation, unless someone new signs up, whereupon I, and the others who may have gone, take a step back to allow the new guys to rule first. Good luck! Our future is in your hands! 1) Sean 2) Rem 3) Immortal_Knight 4) Jeff 5) ??? |
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Come visit me and my thought processes at my website: http://www.publishedauthors.net/tdotdw/news.html "In the cold light, justice and morality always look corny and you can't wave the flag and look cool. But like it or not, society needs its heroes." - John Hart; actor who played The Lone Ranger. | |
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| Sean | Aug 19 2009, 04:07 PM Post #6 |
The ⑥of Four Against Nature
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Journal of Ant Commander Sean: Entry 01. Commander Jeff just passed the reigns over to me. I'm a wee bit nervous, considering I'm a new commander. He seems to have faith in me, however...I guess I can just do what I can and hope for the best. Let's see how things are doing...  ..Oh dear god, Jeff! Y-you left me with these...parasites! They're already more than double our territory! ...Whew...calm down, Sean...You've played strategy before. You know how to deal with overwhelming odds...let's check the field.  Hmm...Golfing...probably a hobby of the human male, something he does in a vain attempt to escape his wife. Humans seem keen on making such obligations such as "marriage" and then decide that it wasn't such a good idea to do that...fickle bastards. I'm doing the planet a favor by running them out of here!  Ah! My diligent workers....they're carrying food back to the nest...good.  Ah, yes...these humans are quite incapable of tending after their messes. There's always plenty of food lying around. ....The ants here seem to snatch it away rather quickly though, the gluttons.. ...no, perhaps not. They're sustaining themselves just fine. That's good...I don't have to worry about their sustenance...I can worry about the battling...or I would if there was anything here to fight except maybe a spider...  ...Oh, yes...spiders.....every spider I've met is a complete bastard. But these spiders intimidate me not...not after some of the spiders I've encountered in the past....   No, after them, I fear not what I encounter in this yard....  I don't have any of the ants digging. Digging is a simple enough task for me to carry out...I'll leave the rest of the ants to their glorious food hunt...  ahh! Excellent news! our boundaries are expanding! That is news I am most eager to hear.....Hopefully that'll compensate for what the Red Ants are doing....  Sometimes I try to assist the ants with foraging for food. This tends to be less than stellar, as the food tends to be a long ways from the nest, and I wind up exhausting myself in doing so....guh...  Ahh...my ants are loyal to me, at least...they offer me some food so that I may continue my journey back to the nest with. .. ...food. ...This seems somewhat counterintuitive. Perhaps I should leave the foraging to them.  I...forget what the point of this image was....wait, I think it was raining! Yes...rain..and I'm a ways from the nest. I'd best hurry back to the nest before I'm drowned.  Ahh, back to base and now I can... wait, what's wrong with our numbers?! ...Wait, that sound....Blast! The lawnmower was going! at least forty ants were cut down in that! ...Wait, what about the other nests?!  No...those nests are just starting out! If the lawnmower cuts their numbers down now the mating flight could be all for naught! I must go right away to help! (Editor's Note: I went to the top leftmost available square, just for reference) I managed to get to one of the other nests in time and have them retreat away from the lawnmower...for now. Those bastard humans cut this lawn way too often. It's like they know.....  Hmm...the ants might be overemphasizing foraging. Food is nice, but the nest is in no danger of starvation. If we have numbers, we can forage much more easily. I'll begin changing that just a tad....  A-again with the blasted rain?! Perhaps it was foolish to pick NOW to reduce our foraging budget....  Oh, for goodness sakes! Before I made the proper edits, the group was making Soldiers! There is no war to fight right now! We need to work on establishing our nests before worrying about destroying others! We need to build, THEN conquer! Switch to working and breeding, damn you! ....sigh, my time is nearing its end....I'll have to pass things over to Commander Rem soon. Let me see how things are progressing...  ..O-oh dear god! They're like a virus! Is it really a good idea to pass this off to a new commander at a time like THIS? ...Commander Jeff said to do commanding rotations to keep everyone well rested, I suppose there's nothing I can do. ...Good luck, Commander Rem. --Journal of Commander Sean, Entry concluded. 1) Sean 2) Rem <-- (Up Next) 3) Immortal_Knight 4) Jeff 5) ??? Edited by Sean, Aug 19 2009, 04:20 PM.
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| Jeff | Aug 19 2009, 04:13 PM Post #7 |
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Lord of Pie & BBWs
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Well done, officer Sean, you made a tremendous impact on our territory holdings. I know you were itching for a fight but circumstances happen, y'know. Good job. Rest well until your next shift. Rem, we're counting on you! |
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Come visit me and my thought processes at my website: http://www.publishedauthors.net/tdotdw/news.html "In the cold light, justice and morality always look corny and you can't wave the flag and look cool. But like it or not, society needs its heroes." - John Hart; actor who played The Lone Ranger. | |
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| Rem | Aug 26 2009, 01:58 PM Post #8 |
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Why yes, I do like snickerdoodles.
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OH SNAP I'M A RETARD WHO DIDN'T CHECK MY EMAIL. Gogogo update! *poofs* |
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Have you ever wondered what color air is? | |
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4:32 AM Nov 27
