Sea monkeys weren’t necessarily the most anticlimactic toy ever offered by comic books—those x-ray specs weren’t penetrating any dresses—but there was something especially pernicious about sea monkeys. They tricked you into believing you were getting a pet when what you really got was soup. If you were lucky enough to avoid this disappointment, let me evoke it for you. Imagine going to the pet store and buying a fish tank that the manager promises will contain a school of pirana and a dead cow, but when you get the tank home and open it up, what you have is a glass of water with white floaties that look like Wonder bread backwash. If this clumsy analogy fails to evoke the proper depth of disappointment, you can recreate it perfectly by purchasing The Amazing Virtual Sea-Monkeys.

First, there’s a giant difference between what the manual promises and what the game delivers. Amidst numerous exclamation points, you’re told that your virtual sea monkeys will try to communicate with you, will put on shows, and will even forge complex societies that provide ample entertainment. Put them on your screen saver to maximize the potential excitement! What the manual fails to mention is that the sea monkeys’ so-called attempts to communicate amount to a limited series of movements made at mostly random times. And when they’re not astounding you with these attempts to shatter the language barrier, your sea monkeys swim around their amazing virtual aquarium harvesting pearls, which you use to buy amazing luxuries or necessities to provide nourishment, entertainment, or companionship for your virtual pets.

Every item is accompanied by a description that includes jokes hilarious enough to have been written by eighties comedian Sinbad. The items themselves are in four different groups. You can select from a long list of fish or other aquatic life to share your sea monkeys’ water. These are essentially different colored, two-dimensional models that float back and forth across the screen. For a better idea of the hypnotic effect this invokes, load up the fish aquarium screen saver that came with Windows 98. Besides fishy friends, there’s the usual battery of food and steroid-like plasma that drives the monkeys crazy. To keep things more or less interesting, there are entertainment items like karaoke machines, which your sea monkeys love, juke boxes, which your sea monkeys sometimes fight over, and sunken pirate ships, which your monkeys completely ignore. Their idea of good entertainment should be your first clue of how much fun these sea monkeys are. If your idea of a great weekend is rocking to synthesized pop music and then singing karaoke, you just might be the intended audience of The Amazing Virtual Sea-Monkeys.

However, if you’re old enough to read this, chances are you’re not the intended audience for Sea-Monkeys. This is one of those game that proves the rating system is full of lies. When The Amazing Virtual Sea-Monkeys claims to be rated "E for Everyone," what they really mean is "Unless you’re younger than twelve, you will be helpless to imagine a world in which you could enjoy this game." That’s not because older people are incapable of appreciating simple pleasures. It’s just that we’ve been around longer, and we’ve played more games, so we recognize a cheap knock-off of The Sims mixed with a cheaper knock-off of Black and White. We understand that the strength of Black and White was the sophistication with which you could interact with the game world, just as we understand that the terrible weakness of The Amazing Virtual Sea-Monkeys is the game’s presumption that it’s fun to watch bitmaps float across your monitor when you could be drinking beer or watching leaves grow.