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My Pet Shop DS

Format:
DS

Genre:
Minigames

Buy/Support:
Support Clare, click to buy via us...

My Pet Shop was destined to please my young daughter, who is animal mad, and would love to have as many animals in real life as she can on this game!

The story of the game is that your character's Mum owns the pet shop, and she lets you help her out by finding and caring for the animals in the shop. My only criticism of the game is that the character is female - there is no option to choose a little boy as your player, only a girl, which seems a bit too gender stereotyped for my liking, but there we go.

Customers arrive at the store, and as well as putting in orders for pets from poodles to penguins, they will also come and ask you to take care of their pets - either small jobs like washing them, or bigger tasks such as taking care of them for a week while they go on holiday. You can have one pet yourself as well, which you can train to do tricks and enter contests.

The gameplay is all touchscreen led and the controls are easy to pick up, as the game is aimed at the younger market, none of the activities are very difficult either.

There are lots of different areas to explore, and each location has a different type of animal to find, or an item to look for, from which you collect food or money. This keeps the interest going, and makes the game seem quite big. You can visit neighbours both before and after they've bought pets from your shop, as well as browsing in other shops like the item, food, and fashion store. Not only that, but you also have a room in your house that you can decorate using different themes from the interior design shop! Money to fund all this is earned both from your allowance and bonuses come from pleasing the customers.

The game is well suited to the younger gamer, it is definitely not challenging to play, but will keep a child who likes this sort of role play simulation game occupied for ages as it has plenty of different activities to complete, a wide variety of animals to collect, train, and accessorise, as well as lots of interaction with other characters in the story.

The original pet care game that everyone knows is Nintendogs, which my daughter played for ages and ages. She's had a few more pet games since then and all of them have been cast aside in favour of Nintendogs because that was simply a better game. However, My Pet Shop has so many facets to it that it is proving a worthy rival for Nintendogs, in fact my daughter likes it better because of the wider variety of animals that it contains. It is definitely a worthwhile addition to a child's game collection.

Written by Clare Sharpe

You can support Clare by buying My Pet Shop



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Clare Sharpe writes the Eclectic Gamer column.

"I think it's probably true that most of us have grown up with computer games - I have a dark and distant memory of some sort of black box with two controllers that allowed us to play an extremely primitive and pixelated game of tennis."

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