oooh, VACATION ISLAND!

Okay, most of you know I'm a geek. In OH SO MANY WAYS. I love to play video games - I still have a Super NES. Super Mario World is STILL one of my favorite games. And Resident Evil on the Playstation? Well, I can't play it late at night when I'm up by myself because it creeps me, but I love it.
And online, I am only a little ashamed to admit that I play Neopets AND Marapets.
I KNOW. STOP IT.

So for Christmas, my daughter got a Nintendo DS.
I.LOVE.THIS.GAME.SYSTEM.

Plus I love to play the Pokemon games. Shut up.

I'm glad we she got the thing, because we got to review a game: GoPets: Vacation Island.

Overall? My daughter and I both liked it, it was fun. I like games where you have to unlock areas to explore, there are games to play & earn shells ($$), and adopt pets and dress 'em up.
You also start with a little "bungalow" that you can decorate with rugs and chairs and a fishbowl and curtains & other cute little things.
You can 'pet' your pets - and other people's pets too (and bathe them, and feed them)! You can communicate with other 'islanders' by Iku - which consists of little symbol cards with which you can make little haiku type messages.

What I DIDN'T like is that when you make "buddies" out of the villagers, you get INUNDATED with Iku messages. I mean like spam-in-your-email inundated. And if you try to answer all of them (just to be polite, for goodness sake!) some of your 'buddies' get mad and send you nasty Ikus. Like "NO MORE MESSAGE ! !"
Sort of rude. I didn't care for that part.


A couple things...
Maybe because I'm a grownup I struggled a little more with it than my daughter did, at first. I mean I had to actually READ all the instruction booklet to make sense of some things - to figure them out. And the Iku thing. And also? In the game area (OH, some of the games are REALLY FUN, like making food!!), one of the games has a big red "X" on it and we've yet to figure out if that even CAN be unlocked as a single player game.

BUT.
We haven't tried this feature yet, but you can do the multi-player thing if you've got wi-fi! Hook up and make new online friends, play with more pets, earn more shells, buy more stuff!
I likee.
Unfortunately, I don't have wi-fi so... we're hoping to try that out eventually. I'll let you know how it goes.

If your kid (or YOU) likes to play the pet games, like Dogz or Catz or Webkinz or one of those other Z things, I think you'd have fun with this game. It would be better if there was more stuff to do on the single-player game, though.
Still, I'd buy it.

Now, I have to go trump up some reason to ground my daughter from the DS so I can play.

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OH and PS:
If you missed last night's FRIDAY NIGHT LIVE, feel free (and encouraged!) to go get the podcast.

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That is all.
Have a day.