SimAnt

"Few ant colonies last very long, but maybe, with your help, this one will survive."

—the introduction to SimAnt on the SNES

An early game in which you control an ant colony by manipulating pie charts and selectively controlling the actions of individual ants whom you choose (e.g. moving the queen out of danger or leading a group of other ants into battle as a member of the soldier caste). The objective is genocide: kill the red ants, and then drive out the humans and take over their house, and you win. Originally a computer game, the game was also ported to the Super Nintendo.

Tropes used in SimAnt include:

• Ant War
• Booby Trap: Antlion nests outdoors, power sockets in the house. Death to all who enter.
  • Not quite. If you gather a large enough ant army, you can take on the antlions and turn them into food.
• Color Coded for Your Convenience: You play as the black ants, the enemies are the red ants. Your character is the yellow ant. Pure and simple.
• Enemy Eats Your Lunch: The cause of 80% of ant-on-ant violence.
• Forgets to Eat: As your ant walks around, your hunger meter goes down extremely fast. It is quite easy to starve to death in mere seconds. Even more ridiculous when you starve to death while carrying food to the nest (in your mouth). Luckily, if you have recruited other ants to follow you, they will take the initiative and feed you.
  • At least in the PC version your ant gets more combat effective the hungrier it is.
• Getting Crap Past the Radar: see Silliness Switch, one of the quotes when two ants are fighting with the comic bubbles on is "Better Dead Then Red"
• Giant Spider: The Spider gives this impression to the ants.
• Grand Theft Me: (PC/Mac Version) You can swap bodies with any other ant at will, including the Queen or the useless breeders. Can be good for ditching a starving body at the last moment, or avoiding enemy ants as a form of crude teleportation.
  • You can also possess the spider and camp out on the enemy territory. Couple with the '???' button that eventually gives the spider laser beams, and you can win map after map in minutes.
• Hold Your Hippogriffs: With the "funny" captions on, many ants will provide dialogue in this style, as if they were fresh out of a Hanna-Barbera cartoon.
• Hurricane of Puns: The manual is full of ant puns. Quite fantastic, don't you think?
• Humans Are Cthulhu: The human inhabitant of the house often commits genocide for seemingly arbitrary reasons, such as using bug spray and the lawn mower, or even just walking around outside. If you proliferate enough, though, you can win the game by punching out Cthulhu.
• Not So Weak: A queen still has a good chance of winning against a soldier, but not such a good chance against a worker ant.
• Silliness Switch: The PC and Mac versions include an option to add silly sound effects to the game, and word balloon commentary from the ants.
• Video Game Cruelty Potential: As mentioned above, you can change your player to be any other ant in the game. This means you can make yourself into the Queen and deliberately walk into the path of the spider. Hell, you can even be the spider.
• We Have Reserves: If and when you die, you immediately gain control of an ant that newly hatches.
  • If the death images haven't scared you off.