My Pet Shop

My Pet Shop

Help you mum run the best pet shop in town and she’ll give you some pocket money, plus you’ll make some cool friends. Bless.

Nintendogs has proven that kids and cute-obsessed teens will go nuts for virtual pet care. So why not have an entire shop full of them? No need to stop at just dogs when you can have cats, rabbits, pigs, and penguins too. Throw in an element of mystery and adventure and you get "My Pet Shop", from the same team that brought you the "Cooking Mama" series on DS and Wii.

As activity-based games go My Pet Shop isn’t quite as imaginative as Cooking Mama. Whereas the touch screen in the latter imitates chopping and stirring motions, when it comes to pet care the action resorts to basic scrubbing and pointing. A quick shampoo requires that you keep the stylus inside of a series of tiny circles, brushing has you scratching in the direction of an arrow. Tossing out treats uses a timed meter, and you’ll earn more points by tapping the screen at the highest point. But this isn’t the whole picture, and the Cooking Mama magic is still very much in evidence.

Outside of taking dogs / cats / pigs for an afternoon walk and decorating them with ribbons, etc is the quest of keeping everyone in Green Town happy. This starts with the task of finding an animal they most desire such as a ‘black cat’ or a ‘dog with a long body and short legs’. In order to provide such a thing you’ll go hunting in nearby forests and grassy areas shaking trees and bushes until something scurries out.

To keep things interesting there are snakes and swarms of bees to scare you away… but if you give them a good poke they’ll vanish (the bees even leave you some gold coins!). Confronted by a startled animal your immediate task is to seduce it by throwing out tasty morsels or simply being careful stepping toward or away from its position. Such escapades are brilliant fun the first few times, but after an hour or so they can become quite a chore.

indeedm, chores are literally the order of the day, and you’ll have several to complete before the sun goes down – your timeline is represented by a row of little sun-shines. Venturing further away from Green Town for more exotic animals can be exciting, but requires mostly the same tactics as anywhere else. But what keeps you going is the fascinating little lives of the cute townspeople, including a moody emo chick and a spoiled little boy whose mother gives him no credit.

In small measures My Little Pet Shop is very sweet, but don’t be expecting complexity to rival Pokemon or Spectrobes for that matter (also reviewed this week).

3 out of 5