Virtual Pets Blog » Musical

Private Ocean from Sega Toys

admin — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 02:01:45 +0000

CScout Japan reported on 30 June 2007 they saw Sega Toys’ new Private Ocean at the Tokyo Toy Show. Somewhat similar to Ant’s Life Studio, but it has over 100 different ocean creatures. Private Ocean becomes your own private ocean. You can change the background and the screen is backlit if different colors. It includes touch sensors (touching the top sensor gets the fish to swim together and spell out the date and time, touching the bottom sensor scares them off.

It is somewhat of a small virtual aquarium featuring ocean life in the wild.

If you connect and MP3 player or i-Pod, the fish dance to the music.

They report Private Ocean is to be released in October 2007.

Otoizm Yo-Yo from Konami

admin — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 19:11:48 +0000

Konami showed Otoizm at the Tokyo Toy Forum, then released it in June 2006 . This pet needs to be fed music. You basically wire it in series with your MP3 Player and the pet grows according to what kind of music you feed it (it classifies music into 19 types). The entire system is enclosed in a Yo-Yo that also includes a special clip to hook to your back pocket. If your friend has one, your pets can “dance” together. Plus you can record your friend’s voice and a new pet named Kotobaizm, shows up.

Sega Toys adds iPenguin – Penguins are Hot

admin — Sun, 01 Jul 2007 03:18:37 +0000

Sega Toys quite recently added an iPenguin to their lineup along with iDog and others. Plug in your MP3 player and iPenguin will act as a speaker and respond with actions to your music. Penguins are really hot this year. We look for more to follow before it cools off.

I still think about my favorite penguin from my comic book days as a kid, little Chilly Willy. He was kind of runt penguin that was always cold from the Walter Lantz Studio (Woodie Woodpecker was their big hit). I see he still has his own fan club. Those were the good old days.

Nowdays, if things were not already hot enough, Happy Feet, from Warner Brothers really put penguins on the map. Club Penguin, a virtual community from New Horizons Interactive, has capitalized on the penguin buzz by stressing the kid friendliness of their site to become a major player in the virtual community business.

Even back in the early keychain pet days, Yuki Penguin, also known as Dinky Penguin was very popular.

Artificial Life announced a Virtual Penguins game for 3G phones from Hong Kong back on 17 November 2005. A more recent, 12 Sept 2006, Artificial Life press release reports they signed a partnership with Greystripe to distribute their games through GameJump.com. Among the ones listed is V-Penguins, an improved version of the earlier game.

I noticed Youngstown State University actually has a penguin as a mascot. Plus in computer land we can’t forget Linux.

In addition to the games listed above, there are dozens more trying to capitalize on the penguin movement. The penguin market is really hot now, but just like in real life, overcrowding results in dying off from predators and starvation. The trick is to guess which animal will be hot next.