Bacteria Salad
Bacteria Salad is the latest entry in the Arcade Wire series from Persuasive Games. Another attempt at "persuasion, instruction, and activism," Bacteria Salad is a light, humorous depiction of the complexity of the agricultural business.
Begin by clicking behind a supermarket shelf to create a farm. Farms produce crops, which grow the food that ends up on the supermarket shelves. Customers will automatically walk to and from the supermarket, looking for the vegetable in the thought bubble above their head. A happy customer is money in the bank, so you'll want to make sure you can supply enough food to keep up with demand by operating multiple farms. However, overreaching can have serious consequences. More crops makes it more difficult to root out food befouled by the animals, agroterrorists, and rain that continually appear.
Keep an eye on the supermarket shelves for tainted food, which looks like good food covered with small brown lines. To prevent it from reappearing you'll have to dig up your crops until you find the source of the trouble. Your game is over when three customers get food poisoning, so don't be afraid to ban sales of any suspicious looking vegetables with the buttons on the upper-left.
Analysis: Much like its predecessors Oil God and Airport Security, Bacteria Salad offers the player the opportunity to enact controversial or sensational real-world situations. Do you maximize production in order to satisfy demand and increase profits, or do you stay small and closely supervise your crops, ensuring the highest quality and healthiest product? Personally, I leaned towards the latter; I had a very difficult time distinguishing good food from bad, as they look very similar. Even worse, the shoppers can completely obscure the shelves, making it impossible to get a clear view of your produce at times. While not without flaws, the art, audio and theme of Bacteria Salad are all appealing.
For the organic food message, I like following much, much better:
http://www.storewars.org/
I can't seem to figure out how to distinguish tainted fields from healthy ones at all.
Oh, nevermind, I misunderstood. You can only recognize tainted end products, and then have to dig up the relevant fields to find the culprit.
I, too, cannot differentiate tainted spinach from normal spinach. It's easy to tell the tomatoes apart (good tomatoes are yellow, bad tomatoes are red), but...
okay... somebody's got to say it... since no one else has said it yet, i might as well go ahead and say it... ew.
...which i guess is the point of the game. luckily, i don't eat enough leafy greens to really be affected by any of the chaos going on, but the thought still has me a bit leary.
but still, i suppose the part that grosses me out the most (and trust me, it takes a lot) is the graphics in this game. i mean... couldn't we just have their face turn green instead of having them... uh... evacuate?
i suppose this game is a bit different from the other stuff persuasivegames does, because without a doubt, it was not made to be "appealing". it referenced a disgusting subject, and i suppose in all fairness, it couldn't have been portrayed in a non-disgusting way... so... yeah. that said, the game was fun and they got their point across, but i really don't feel like playing this again anytime soon.
I like it, but its a little hard to get crops going and make some $$ when every few seconds something happens and you have to ban the produce, and pretty much destory all of the crops because you cant tell which are infected. And before you can get half of them destroyed another infection happens. But its a cute little game and I enjoyed it.
Wow, that was really no fun at all. I could not tell the difference between the good produce and the bad, not to mention I had no idea which was easier, E. Coli or Staphyllococcus.
It would have been nice to sell at least one piece of untainted produce in the three times I attempted to understand this game, but I guess that's not really the point. Hearing poo sounds must be the point of it. Okay, no more spinach or tomatoes for me again.
I didn't like it, but that's no surprise, I haven't liked any of the games from Persuasive Games. My problem with them is that they way too much thought and effort into the message of their games and not enough into the games themselves. I know the messages are the main point of their games, and games with messages are fine, but the game should be just as important as the message.
But that's just my opinion.
Not only was this a crappy game, but it was terribly easy. All you had to do to pretty much last forever was have the first row of crops only with 3 tomatoes, and 3 spinach. The "disasters" would barely ever hit it, and when they did, you only have to dig up 3 things and put them back and you're fine. I got to $1000 before I got terribly bored and quit.
to all those who can't get a grip, Bacteria salad is the most awesomest game in the world. its really easy to play and its REALLY easy to differentiate between good crops and bad and i made $3450 its really easy.
Hee hee hee! The com announcements on the loading screen made me giggle. "wet cleanup at register 4"... "Attention, shoppers, spinach is now 50% off"... "attention shoppers, are you considering salad? Try arugula- it's easy on the bowels." :)
I can't tell when my veggies are bad or not. This game was great on sounds but needed work on visuals. :(
Really cute idea, though.
Update