Petz Wild Animals: Dolphinz

As a general rule, I try to stay far, far away from all games involving virtual animals as pets, and that replace all S’s with Z’s.  That is usually left for my daughter to review (thank Jeebas I’ll never be reviewing Hamsterz). 

In this case, I was bored enough while waiting for Ymiris’ flight to land that I grabbed whatever was close.. and was pleasantly surprised to find myself engaged, even addicted.

Dolphinz premise is that you’re a teen sent to help your Uncle on a tropical island for the summer.  Your uncle owns the island, and is putting in an aquatic animal park, which you now are going to help take care of.

You start by feeding the animals, then cleaning their pools, then giving them their medicines, and lastly training the dolphins or orcas.  While this is a limit of 4 minigames that you play over, and over, and over, and over.. (with 2 of those games being almost identical), by the 4th or 5th day, you realize you’re hooked.  Over the minutes that you play, the animals get hungry or sick, the pools get dirty, and you are required to take care of more & more animals & pools. 

While this premise alone feels rather redundant and unrewarding, the complications that each day brings, and the rewards you get for finishing the days, are quite the reward some of us are looking for.  taking care up to so many points gets you a new pool, or enough points to move to the next day, or another animal in a pool you already have.  Or you could get an Informational sheet on one of your animals, or an underwater camera to watch your favorite animals (I loved watching the Rays myself).

The biggest downfall of the game would have to be the Training exercise.  You are given a specific design (a line, a curl, or a squiggle usually), and you must trace that design perfectly.  If you do it quickly, you get a “great!”.  The problem is if your DS is a little older, it doesn’t recognize some of the pen marks as being right on, and you fail.  Depending on how well you trace that design, the dolphin or orca will do some trick, and this is really where it fails.  You don’t get to pick what trick it should do when, you just trace, and the game does the trick for you.  How hard would it have been to have taught you what shape tells the animal to do what trick, and let YOU decide what order to do it in, in order to wow the crowd?  And would it really have been that difficult to put you in an actual arena to do these tricks, instead of doing them in the same pool you’ve taken care of them in?

The storyline alternates between rewarding and annoying.  The personal storylines of stale jokes and strange offshoots can be skipped easily, but the animal storylines make you feel like you’re making a difference, as strange as that is.  I actually felt like I had accomplished something when I was able to save some whales that had lost their way & were caught in a cove, or once I had all 8 penguins (I hate those penguins now). 

The most rewarding is an underlying storyline with 2 surprise twists in the last few days.    I won’t give it away, but I’ve told Ymiris that it’s worth finishing just for those last few days.  If you really want to know what the 2 twists are, post below & I’ll e-mail them to you. 

 Now for the Couple Gaming part of this review…

The game allows for 3 save spots, thus 3 people to play at different times.  My daughter got to day 4 and stopped playing, Ymiris has played up to day 30, and I finished the game (45 days).  While very few DS games actually allow you to play together, per se, I still consider this a great “couple game”, as it’s fun to see who can finish first, and the different ways we take care of our animals.  Ymiris is thorough & makes sure everything has 5 stars… whereas by day 20, I was only fixing things that were 3 stars or less.  Granted, I had 1 day I had to redo over 15 times because of that, but I still stand by my timing (especially because I finished long before he has). 

It has a little bit of everything for everyone… so if you find it in the discount bin (which I’m sure you will within days), I say pick it up.  it’s a good few weeks worth of easy entertainment in 5-minute intervals. 

Oh, do be careful with your intervals, though.  The game only saves when you move on to the next day (not good when someone else sees the DS laying around & stops your game to start theirs), and either the game or my DS is quite buggy, as a few times I’d close the DS and find it has turned itself off.