Happy Aquarium is an aquarium for face book which can be loaded up with fish, but is it really happy? There are four meters for this game: cleanliness, experience, money and hunger. Cleanliness is easy to fill. The fish tank gets dirty over time, click on the brush icon, click the fish tank and it gets a little bit cleaner. My preferred method for cleaning was to switch to the brush and then click the tank really fast, completing the task in a few seconds. Experience is gained by cleaning the tank, feeding the fish and training the fish.

Hunger gauges how hungry the fish are as a collective whole. Fish food can be purchased with money, received as a gift from thoughtful friends, or gained through the fish training game. A starving fish can not be mated or trained, and will not continue to mature to adulthood. Hunger is a bit harder to fill, unfortunately. The fish food icon switches the cursor to a little food shaker. Fish flakes enter the tank from the top, and trickle down in a burst of seven or eight flakes. This provides a number of problems, as fish continue eating even if they are full, and hungry fish are lulled into an inactive state. Sometimes, hungry fish settle at the bottom of the tank and not the top. The other fish will swarm the food enough that no flakes reach the bottom and the starving fish at the bottom sit around and mope about being hungry, oblivious to their owner actively trying to feed them. It may take a few attempts to get food to the bottom of the tank, and often involves leading the fish at the top off to one side. The sides of the tank are a bit inconvenient, as it is possible to shake food outside of the tank. The flakes fall as if they were in water, but the fish mash their faces against the wall in impotent fury, unable to reach the little red flakes of sustenance.

The store allows one to buy new fish, props and decorations for the tank and so on. A treasure chest at the bottom of the fish tank mysteriously fills itself every day with gold coins and awards an amount based on the number of friends one has with the game. Money can also be obtained through fish training. Once a fish is full, it can be sent through a little obstacle course once every four hours in order to learn a trick, up to seven tricks. The little fish zooms forward through an obstacle course and the player must move cats, umbrellas, mines, fishing lines and piranha plants out of the way, while being careful not to click on poison or squid ink. Yes, you read that right. If you play this game, someone is throwing umbrellas, mines, and poison into your fish tank to make it harder to train fish. Of course, this does not make a whole lot of sense. Avoided poison canisters could be a potential hazard after training, as they would build up and potentially contaminate the entire tank, and why would someone store their umbrella in a fish tank, or more than one umbrella for that matter?

Training the fish allows them to do tricks when the player switches to the hand cursor and taps on the glass of the fish tank. The fish do not synchronize their tricks and choose one out of their repertoire completely at random. The result is every single fish will flip out completely when their owner obnoxiously pounds on their home. Fish mating is available, and probably the best way to make money. Once mating is selected from the fish options, a percentage is given as the chance that mating will happen and if it does occur, the fish will rush to meet each other and swim around the tank in an explosion of red clouds. Initially, I thought these red clouds were blood, but they are clouds of love punctuated by hearts. A little fish egg will then sink to the bottom of the tank, and a new fish will emerge a few hours later. However, the fish is released into the ocean when it is ‘sold’, and as a result, training does not influence how much the fish sells for. Training a fish only makes them go nuts in the event of glass tapping and seems to be a purely aesthetic portion of the game.

After a few days of playing, I was rewarded with this screen:

Turtle, carrots, leeks. Turtle soup done simple.

This poor orphaned turtle is about to be murdered, possibly by the very man who murdered its parents. The man obviously works at a sushi bar of some sort, and there are hungry patrons waiting for their expertly prepared turtle soup. I was given the option to save the turtle, and deny hungry, paying restaurant patrons their meal. The man shows up for every ‘save the animal’ screen, and has been denied other turtles, and some squid. I let him have the turtle, because other players are hurting his potential business by stealing food from him, food he has paid for at his local fish market, which is also struggling due to over fishing and ocean contamination.