jkiiskinen: They use words like "fruition" and "ripe", so one might pose the question: where does all this ripe fruition come from? And the obvious answer is: it comes from a seed. An apple seed, a sunflower seed, a random number generator seed ... or a Dark Seed.
Dark Seed also lasts for three days, like the countdown.
Interesting! I'm surprised it took ND so long to bring it back if that is the game, though, considering they brought back IHNM relatively easily and both are DOS titles from the same devs. Must have been legal issues.
EDIT: D'oh! I thought there was a DOS version of Dark Seed 2, but I guess not. It was only for Windows 3.1.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Seed_II Maybe ND spent their time porting 2 (if that's possible)?