Hungry Red Planet Lauded by The Philadelphia Inquirer for Combination of Learning and Real-Time Strategy

Review by Dennis McCauley
The Philadelphia Inquirer

Hungry Red Planet Health Media Lab, PC. $29.95.

February 20, 2003 — The most blatantly educational of this week’s games, I expected Hungry Red Planet to be about as entertaining as a C-Span marathon. I was wrong.

Intended for a school-age audience, Hungry Red Planet challenges gamers to lead an expedition to Mars two decades in the future.

It seems that an earlier team was lost to a mysterious virus. Poor nutrition played a major role in the first team’s demise, so proper meal planning is the first order of business — and the game’s primary focus.

Using the familiar nutritional pyramid, players decide what their team members will munch on.

Manipulating various food icons even provided a learning experience for this reviewer. Pizza isn’t health food? Who knew?

But if Hungry Red Planet was simply about creating menus, it would be little more than a kitchen simulator. What makes this adventure come alive is the real-time strategy game lurking within.

Once meals are planned, players can expand their Martian base using the building concept popularized in Command & Conquer. Expedition leaders must order the construction of houses, farms, factories and other buildings to develop their colony.

On the scary side, mutants will occasionally attack. They can be driven off by using selected foods as defensive weapons.

There’s a clever educational twist hidden in this mutant food fight. When the danger appears, players have just a few seconds to pick the proper food from a list. Scanning the list will teach them things about cholesterol, sodium, and fat content they would probably never notice otherwise.

On the Web
www.hungryredplanet.com/consumer