SimAnt (1991)

You are the Black Ant. You are All the Black Ants. Soldier and worker, drone and queen; you are the guiding force behind them all, and all is not well. The spiders prey upon you, taking advantage of your poor micro and sucking your scattered troops dry. The humans annihilate you, with spray and foot and mower. And of course, the red ants seek to supplant you, to colonize your rightful land, to eat your food, to inhabit your nest and gobble your tasty tasty eggs.

Lead your legions to victory, bringing the fight to the enemy hive or overwhelming larger predators with superior numbers. Drive the humans from their home by spreading to every nook and cranny, no matter the losses. In time, know that you have become the dominant life form on this tiny square of suburbia, and that anything which lives there does so only by your decree. This is SimAnt: The Electronic Ant Colony.

...Of course, the problem with this epic battle for yard dominance is that the game is pretty mediocre, regardless of the version you choose. The original release for Mac and PC was an extremely simplistic affair in which you'd bring food to the nest, dig out a fairly arbitrary series of tunnels, raise some soldiers, and eventually Zerg rush the red ants and eat their queen. Once that was done, you'd repeat the process a few dozen more times as you spread from patch of yard to patch of yard, eventually invading the home and facing a handful of additional dangers. Nothing differentiated any portion of the massive yard from the next, and there was an extremely small array of non-ant lifeforms to interact with. For the most part, however, colonies worked much better when you weren't present and micromanaging them, so eventually you just wound up overseeing the breeding screen and launching freshly boinked queens at new terrain and watching the red ants fall to your relentless tide of babies. A decent kid's game, but none too enduring. 3 stars, and only because I actually did learn a decent amount of useful ant trivia, and the ant-barf animations never, ever stopped being funny.

The SNES release attempted to spice up the formula by enhancing the graphics and adding a campaign mode to challenge yourself through. Unfortunately, it also added the slowest save system I've ever come across, reduced your field of vision immensely, and unless you had that weird SNES mouse adapter the new controls were garbage. 1 star, both for being bad and for making me block out much of the ant information I learned in the Mac version.