'SimAnimals' Puts Families in Touch With Nature

Jan. 27, 2009— -- Families can get in touch with nature, literally, in "SimAnimals," a new forest simulation from Electronic Arts for the Nintendo Wii and DS.

Full of charming squirrels, playful bears, shy skunks and determined beavers, this game combines natural science with fantasy to create an immersive world that is hard to put down.

As you tinker within the different forest environments, ranging from woodlands to swamps to desert environments, you can use a cursor that looks like a floating hand to touch and pick up more than 30 forest animals and 80 plants. While pursuing the goal of making the forest happy, you learn about the interconnectivity of the animals and plants.

When you enter an environment, you see a bar graph on the top of the screen indicating that the environment isn't happy. As you do things within this location, your actions have consequences either expressed as happy-faced or sad-faced energy that aggregates on the happiness bar.

For an animal, happiness results when it finds enough to eat, builds a home, gets enough rest, finds a mate and has fun. For plants, it means having the right soil and enough water. Thus, if you put your hand over an acorn tree and shake it back and forth with the Wii remote, a seed might fall out. If you pick up that acorn and drop it on top of a squirrel, it will eat it and then emit happy energy.

On the other hand, if you pick up a skunk, whirl it around and fling it in the nearest stream, it will emit a sad energy. Likewise, if you scoop up a tree and plop it into a soil it doesn't like, it will release sad energy.

To help you, the game offers nature lessons and presents you with challenges that earn medals and unlock other animals and plants. You can choose which of these challenges to pursue. Most teach you more about how to interact with the animals and plants in a positive way, but a few have surprising consequences. For instance, if you pursue the challenge to make a skunk spray your hand, your hand icon faints and drops to the ground.