Section: Reviews, Features, Japanese Imports, Opinions, Handhelds, DS, Genres, Adventure, Sim

Title: Pet Shop Monogatari DS

Price: $48.90

System: Nintendo DS

Release Date: July 8, 2008

Publisher (Developer): Taito (Dream Age Collection)

ESRB Rating: Everyone

Pros: Simple controls, huge selection of pets to discover, variety of items to accessorize pets, many locations to explore, not having to clean any pet dander

Cons: Simple game play may become repetitive, trial and error pet catching can become frustrating, lack of ability to actually pet animals

Overall Score: One thumb up, one thumb sideways; 88/100; B+; ***1/2 out of five

Welcome to Green Town

Greentown is a bright and happy town where everyone is incredibly adorable and they all want you to help them find a pet. Days are spent by either exploring surrounding locations scavenging for exotic pets, or performing favors for the townspeople which revolve around their pets. Ironically, it seems that even though Greentown’s folk are enamored with furry friends, they lack discipline whatsoever to actually care for them.

In addition to being a bit overly demanding at times, the townpeople also enforce a time limit for each favor. The number of actions a player can perform throughout the game is governed by an icon system that gradually increases as you complete more tasks for the various townsfolk. Once a player has exhausted actions for a single day, Mama makes you go to bed (even though it’s still light out) and another day passes.

Pets on Parade - Cute and Fluffy, Sometimes Infuriating

There are several different activities that to choose from providing for hours of entertainment. In addition to neighborly pet quests, you can also choose one pet for yourself. While you can only have one pet at a time, there is no stigma associated with changing your mind later should you find a more desirable pet in future areas (like a panda! Yes, there are pandas.).

Pet activities range from the menial tasks of bathing and brushing to entering a handful of different contests that reward you with rare items to accessorize your pet with. While the game won’t allow you to stuff your favorite teacup poodle into a designer purse, there are quite a few items that can be bought to outfit the pets in. Personally, I’ve already outfitted the town’s penguin in a leather jacket complete with a spiked collar and a blue sailor’s hat. 

As you progress through the game, the immense assortment of pets becomes increasingly more temperamental and unpredictable. For example, you may be able to catch a rabbit by baiting it with its favorite food (the carrot), but if you run into a lop-eared rabbit in another area, the same strategy will not prove as successful. There are a plethora of different tools and foods that can be utilized, but requires the art of patience to figure out which will work with what animals. Expect to spend at least half an hour trying to entice a pygmy boar to go home with you, or inevitably deciding to give up on bacon bits after that much time.

Simplicity at Its Best

PSMDS revolves around a very simple touch menu interface composed of self-explanatory pictures. Players who don’t know any Japanese will find it very easy to navigate this game due the picture-based characteristics and the fact that all text is displayed in simple Japanese characters (hiragana and katakana).

Happy-Go-Lucky

Overall, the incredibly simple style of this game may quickly wear off, but the abundance of different areas, pets, and items to discover will definitely keep a player hooked. Just when you think you’ve done all that you can do, this game’s pacing draws you in by opening up more areas to explore. I’m already on my 39th day and I’ve probably only discovered half of what it has to offer. With such a simple interface, this game is incredibly import friendly, and if you’re looking for a light-hearted game for your DS, this game will definitely assist you in losing track of time.

If only Pet Shop Monogatari DS were to have a baby with Nintendogs, it would result in the ultimate love child of pet games. You hear that Nintendo? Taito?

Site [Pet Shop Monogatari DS] Buy [Play-Asia] Read [Gamertell]

Full Story » | Written by Janine Dong for Gamertell. | Comment on this Article »

Update: As it turns out, this information was false.

——-

Update: EA community manager eaapoc, the bloke who started this whole affair, has acknowledged that his initial threat was “inaccurate and a mistake on my part.”

“If we suspend or ban you from the forums, that does not affect your in-game account and certainly it does not impact your in-game account for other games,” reads a new post. “I had a misunderstanding with regards to our new upcoming forums and website and never meant to infer that if we ban or suspend you on the forums, you would be banned in-game as well. This is not correct, my mistake, my bad.”

Original Story:

“Your forum account will be directly tied to your Master EA Account, so if we ban you on the forums, you would be banned from the game as well since the login process is the same,” he wrote. “And you’d actually be banned from your other EA games as well since it’s all tied to your account. So if you have Spore and Red Alert 3 and you get yourself banned on our forums or in-game, well, your Spore account would be banned to. It’s all one in the same, so I strongly recommend people play nice and act mature.”

“Those banned will stay banned, but like most other internet services, its not that hard to create a new fake e-mail account,” he added. “However, its a lot harder to get a new serial key.”

As Kotaku points out, neither the Forums Help page nor EA’s Terms of Usage say anything about what constitutes a ban-worth offense, although the Forums front page says, “We ask all members of the community to respect each other and each other’s opinion. These message boards should be considered ‘E’ for Everyone and the moderators will close any posts that break the EA Terms of Service. Further violation of the EA Terms of Service will result in a banning of the offending account.”

Read more: http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/87102-EA-Get-Banned-From-Forums-Lose-Your-Games

On a day associated with fear, more robot overlords:

to finish her sentence…creepy.

Related posts:

1. It Starts With the Children Aeon Co. has dropped off this lovely robot babysitter…

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Well as fast as the official web page for “The Grey People” went up, the quicker it fell. My web host has to disable my entire site because it appears to be taking too much of their CPU status. This is not because of the visitors or even because of the web pages themselves, this is really because the web pages are being attacked by a spammer. But this isn’t the typical spammer, this spammer is mimicking the result of what would be millions of visitors accessing the page all at once, accessing all of the data from the web page all at once, which is literally draining the memory from the server.

So temporarily, both Moonlight Pictures and its other hosted sites, including the grey people official webpage will be shut down. We will be re-releasing the sites very soon that will prevent such occurances from happening again.

We are slowly learning the webhosting can be very frustrating. If I had only purchased a Joomla firewall…

We will keep you all posted on the updates.

I totally love Google reader - and I like a few of the features and I have a few feature requests, but this post from RKG show us to export starred items from google.
I always find myself starring things and never getting back to them.  This will help.

Section: News, PCs, Windows, Game-Companies, Developers, Publishers, Genres, 3D, MMO, Sim, Strategy, Web-Sites, Official-Sites

As expected, Deep Silver is finally releasing more information on its forthcoming MMO 7Million. In particular, more information about the game’s local, Paradise City, and one faction players can join, the Cúram, have been revealed.

See, 7Million isn’t a standard MMO. Instead of being focused on battles, it is focused on accomplishing missions to become the best crook/thief/spy in Paradise City. You have to be smart and resourceful to outwit authorities and other layers to become the best.

So far, it looks like the free-to-play game will be released in early 2009. The game’s currently in a closed beta phase, with only select people able to participate. When it does finally launch, a VIP version, which people can pay to subscribe to, will be added in to compliment the free portion.

Its nice to start to see more variety in the MMO genre. I can remember way back to when MapleStory and Ever Quest were the two top dogs. The fact that developers and publishers are starting to get imaginative and look at other alternatives is a good sign that some incredibly creative games could be arrive in the coming years.

Read [MCV] Also Read [SpawnPoint] Site [7Million]

Full Story » | Written by Jenni Lada for Gamertell. | Comment on this Article »

Hollywood is full of catch 22’s, if I haven’t said this already. The trick for a new actor moving here is somehow to have a job that pays the bills, and yet still have time open for auditions and roles. This is difficult because there are, literally, millions of actors here. If there is just one thing that makes the role more difficult for the producers, they can find someone else who does not have that one thing — they certainly will not reschedule for you when you are a new actor, an unknown, a nobody.

Filming goes on here 24/7, so no matter when you work your real job, it will conflict with something you want to do. I’ve been doing odd jobs, losing various jobs (not my fault, I promise!) and generally struggling like a maniac to make ends meet. Well, this past week it almost all fell apart.

Pulling the weeds out

I think that Hollywood kind of works like college calculus — it is simply there to weed out people who can’t hack it. The weeding process here like this — can you somehow work, pay extravagant rent, eat, keep your car working, go to auditions, improve your craft with classes, get an agent, get into SAG, and build your resume all at the same time? No wonder people give up all the time, it’s a daunting task.

Last week I found myself facing a near eviction, phone being turned off, my car insurance expired, ramen and beans to eat, and an empty gas tank. I had been writing a screenplay for someone that I expected to be finished weeks ago — and now it was done and I needed to deliver it to the client about 60 miles away. Except that I had no money to print out the script, and maybe enough gas to get down there, but not get back. I was paid in cash last time so I figured he might do cash again and I could get some gas to go back home. Otherwise, I guess I’d be stranded in Costa Mesa.

Why didn’t I borrow some money? ‘Cause I already had! The people I usually ask didn’t have any for me or had just lent me some. That was just the way it was. So, I figured I’d drive down and see what fate had for me. I’m actually not going to tell you what I did to make it ’cause it wasn’t pretty — but I did get down there and get paid.

I found myself missing North Carolina, my steady job, place to live, normal work hours, getting enough sleep, much less stress… but I’m sort of trapped here being broke. I couldn’t get back if I wanted to.

These are signs you see all around L.A. They are all the same, yellow, with an arrow, text written both ways. It means this way to the set of this movie. Sometimes the title is a false name they are using for the movie that only cast and crew knows so people don’t try to crash the next Brad Pitt set.  I wanted to show you one since they are a part of the Hollywoo d experience.

Anyway, well, I’m here for now. I’m still out of half of stuff I need (thanks Donald for the toothpaste and deodorant!) and low on everything, but if I keep going now I should be at least livable in a few months. I may have to take a break from auditions — hell who am I kidding, I haven’t been out to auditions for months because I’ve been desperately looking for paid work. Anyway I’m going to scrape by for now, and try not to let this happen again. I don’t think I could make it if it did — I’d just have to join the pile of weeds.