Tuesday, March 25, 2008

PC Game Review Magic Seeds





Grow watermelons, cabbage, pumpkins, lemons, corn, sausage, bread. What?! Yes, I said sausage and bread. After all, the game is called Magic Seeds. At least, you don’t have to worry about consuming any fully loaded carb food — the food doesn’t pop out of the computer screen for tasting.



Magic Seeds does not copy Alice Greenfingers or Plant Tycoon. Rather it crosses the two games. Players plant, grow and sell seeds as in Alice Greenfingers and they cross seeds to grow more expensive plants like in Plant Tycoon.



Fortunately, the game doesn’t involve dealing with equipment or digging. Simply click the flower so Jane puts her gardening skills to work in planting and cultivating. While Jane may not mess with equipment and actual digging, the tasks turn into a dance of digging and weeding with a break for selling plants to get needed funds for buying bigger ‘n better gardening supplies, or adding on to Jane’s growing home.



Plant Tycoon has a massive list of plants to cross and create. Not so in Magic Seeds that only uses eight plants to grow ten for a simpler breeding experience. Players aim to build Jane’s house, but it takes a long time to do it as the price of the house climbs faster than gas prices.



Adding on to the house costs almost $10K by the time you reach the halfway point in the game (three days of playing the game) and you’ve discovered everything else. Ten grand comes fast some games, but not in this one. I never finished building the house as it got old to work on raising money and shooing away mice and scaring off the crows.



Chaining — or rather clicking ahead to complete tasks — works… sometimes. Jane doesn’t always do what you want her to do or doesn’t do it. When she makes a wrong move in picking up plants, there’s no way to know what they are unless you put them down on an unused flowerbed.



Not only does the game move slow even with speedy shoes and fast growing fertilizer, the dialog has grammar errors including in the explanation of Normal and Arcade modes. Arcade mode involves fulfilling the store’s orders.



Two plants appear as the plant of the day making them pricier due to unavailability of their seeds. The price for some plants goes up by ten times. This feature offers the thinking players with a chance to put some strategies to work. However, how long a day lasts is unknown. A report pops up at the end of the day showing your gardening accomplishments and trophies earned.



Magic Seeds could stand some more cultivating to flesh it out. Nonetheless, it entertains for a few hours especially in completing the crossing chart so you know what seeds make what.






2:00 PM

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