How to Guide to Microsoft Ants Game

Imagine a world where ants come in the colors of red, green, black and blue. A world where ants have their food stolen and use bombs and fire to protect themselves. This is your guide to Microsoft's Ants game. Ants was a game originally launched around 1998 on the MSN gaming zone. Ants was quite popular with having their rooms to play so full that many times you would have to wait to get in. The created of Ants is Jason Cook. He regularly would visit the ant gaming rooms. Sadly Microsoft took off Ants in 2006 and disappointed many fans.

Luckily another gaming website picked up the game. World Gaming Center is now the new current home of ants. You can download and play at http://wgcenter.com/links.php?game=Microsoft%20Ants To be able to connect to others in a multi player game you need to have the program Hamachi. This is a free download that allows you to join other's gaming servers to connect to the game. The download doesn't take very long, even on dial up it was only a few minutes. Currently Hamachi is available only for Windows 2000, 2003 and XP. You can access console versions for Linux and OS X.

Ants consists of up to 4 players in each game that fight to win the most points. You earn points by eating. Some foods such as the Cheerio looking cereal purple and pink colored gives you 30 points. There's also pizza in a tub, potted meat, candy worms, fried chicken and spilled soda.

When the game first starts, your ant is the color of how you entered the room. First is green, second is red, third is blue and the fourth person is black. Each player's ants are at the ant hill base when the game begins. You have the option of having 1 or all 6 ants eat food from any source. To control all ants press together on your keyboard CTRL + A. There's usually food in the middle, depending on the map you're playing, food up top, bottom and on the sides. There are 100's of maps to choose from. Some last only 6 minutes while others an hour or more. You can download single or map packs at: http://antsmaps.com/

Power ups are items in the map that allow you to have extra protection power. To obtain a power up you simply point your ant with your mouse on the power up. One is a fire hat that allows you to put fire in front of your cap hole to avoid thief power up ants from stealing your food. You can also place fires on any ground on the map. Another option is the bomber power up. Having this power up allows you to place bombs around your base or your enemy's base. When a enemy hits your bombs, his ant loses two points each time. Each ants health is 10 points to begin with.

You can heal your ant by simply going back into your ants home. Other power ups are a swimmer's scuba mask for swimming in the water, a thief bandit mask to steal from others and lastly a combat power up. A combat is on auto pilot to move and hit whenever an enemy is around him. When the combat hits, the ant's health loses 2 points every time. A combat hit is also one that hurts farther then any other ant hitting. When you have reached 200 points, you are allowed to hatch a new ant.

Another cool feature with ants is the ants talk. The most common phrases are "ready and waiting", "your command", "grrr", "On my way", "Here I go", "Move Out", "Yep" and "You Bet". Each ants voice changes depending on the power up the ant has acquired. When you are fighting an enemy, a call goes out to alert with the command "We're under attack".

Ants is an amusing game and many users will catch on quickly. Best of all it's free to play and download. Simply register on World Gaming Center, download the ants game/maps and Hamachi. Once you've installed the applications you can start to play. Overall I recommend Ants.