For those who speak French, there was an excellent game I played all my childhood: forestia, a computer game from 1998 where you go to discover the forest. You have to take pictures of the animals, collect plants to make a herbarium, and solve the mystery of the forest… Fascinating ! (walkthrough of the game (in French) on YouTube)
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Okay, just remembered one. This is complicated. So, near the end of the 2019/20 school year, I was doing online classes. My science teacher (the same one, by the way, who introduced me to iNat) assigned the class to play a game called Legends of Learning. The main game was fairly boring; I don’t recommend it. But it has a whole bunch of minigames, sorted by category - math, science, etc. Probably hundreds of them. I started playing a few of those, because they were more fun than the main game. My favorite was called Bid For Life. It was really well designed.
You play as 5 animals (one at a time, of course) - I think it was a caribou, a salmon, a bowerbird, some kind of frog, and a duck. As each animal, you’re trying to maximize your reproductive success using whichever strategy that animal has. For example, the salmon is swimming upstream avoiding getting eaten by bears, the bowerbird collects colored objects to decorate his bower, and the duck is leading her ducklings to water while keeping as many as possible from getting eaten along the way. The graphics were surprisingly good, and I found it quite fun.
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If anyone is still looking to play Alba (which I highly recommend), it’s going to be free in the Epic Games Store from November 10 to 17.
Those graphics are super cute! Too bad I only have a Mac…
I remember really wanting SimLife when it came out (I was around 12 or 13) because of its amazing cover and totally thought I could easily just mash up animals to make cool new ones. That was definitely not the case, it was way too complicated for me and had poor graphics - not at all like that sweet cover! I was so disappointed.
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aw yes, simlife. i was obsessed with it for a time as it’s some level of ecology/evolution simulator but like you say it was fraught with problems. It was buggy as heck and froze and crashed often. It had a Thanos-lik emechanism to stop there from being too many animals (since it slows down the game) but since it would eliminate them at random from all species not just the most abundant, any predator would go extinct because they had lower population and couldn’t sustain that. So predators couldn’t exist. Plants that were dispersed by fruit or pollinated by insects couldn’t survive because the algorithm was so simple they always got out competed. All plants became the same life form (i forget if grass or tree). Animals all evolved to be able to fly and eat everything because the energetic penalties for that stuff were too low. It had an auto speciate type thing which was neat cuz it created new organisms of different colors, but it didn’t really work. I tried to get plants to sort by habitat like different ones in high mountains but one plant always took over. Basically, ecology is super complex and a super simplistic simulator leads to super simplistic results. It was fun to try. I still like to play with evolution simulators and ive found some other random ones online that are a bit better, but still actual evolution simulation detailed enough to have a user interface remains elusive. I want to play a game where the opponents evolve to match you, but given the state of simulation technology they’d just evolved into 7000 pound filter feeders that somehow fly and shoot venom. haha.
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