I like a good play on words. Vegetable Stock then, starts out well, with a solid 1-2 combo of an attractive, colourful loading screen coupled with a solid double-meaning title.
Vegetable Stock, you see, is NOT a recipe app demonstrating how to prepare a soupy vegetable breakdown.
It is a trading game, where you buy stocks in vegetables. Chuckle? I almost chortled.
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| +1% for a well-placed exclamation mark |
A strong start then, ESPECIALLY when you consider that I also love a good trading game : 1984, Brewery, Football Manager. That kind of thing. I'm surely going to love this.
So, skimming past the instructions, I prepare to invest my 500 pennies wisely.
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| Are YOU the vegetative Gordon Gekko? |
This is the gamiest part. You can in fact, try to spend more than 500 pennies if you get your maths wrong, and the game beeps out a BANKRUPT message and STOPs.
A quick GOTO 3 will get you going again, so no worries.
Having navigated the financial wizardry of picking your vegetables (accidental pun there, sorry), you can sit back and watch your holdings grow and/or shrink. Each month, the price of each veg goes up or down, or doesn't. Exciting stuff. It takes about a minute to tick through the 120 months and then you find out how well you did. Except the total is always wrong - you should add up the numbers yourself if you wish to maintain an accurate record.
Adding up the scores wrong is not the mathematical flaw that bothers me though.
No.
Here's the problem.
Every month, there's an equal chance for a stock to go either up or down. It always goes up or down by 1 unit, regardless of the current price. This needs to be a percentage in order to more accurately model the market. The only way to get a good score then is to always buy 50 Mangold. Nobody likes that stuff. Ruined the whole experience for me.
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| A Mangold, yesterday. |
Thus, despite a strong start, I declare this game
Scores
Technical Ability - 20%
BASIC. Could do without that STOP. Can't add 4 numbers up accurately.
Achievement - 25%
It's a game, I guess. It's a low bar, but R-Tape has just about managed not to smack it with his genitals.
Fun - 10%
Not really. At least it avoids the dirty trick of making the months take longer than they need to.
Crap Factor - 49%
Not good enough to load it twice, but not crap enough to make your blood really boil.
Roundup
Pros -
- Lovely Loading Screen
- Solid Pun
- Tasteful use of FLASH
- Mercifully brief
Cons -
- Just yer average, mid-range generic crapness.
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