Tamagotchi Pix Review: Trust me, I’m Tama-serious

The latest and greatest in Tamagotchi innovation is here. It includes new bear on-sensitive buttons, a few gameplay additions and a congenital-in camera that's reminiscent of the tater-quality sensor on my starting time flip phone.

Beyond that, it'due south the same onetime Tamagotchi vocal and trip the light fantastic — y'all raise information technology for a few days, forget about information technology for a few days, it dies — rinse and repeat.

There are absurd aspects and exciting innovations in this virtual pet and I recollect there's a possibility younger children will be really into it, but it'southward a difficult sell at roughly $75 CAD; especially since a basic Tamagotchi costs effectually $30 and offers a fairly similar gameplay experience.

The Pros

I'll first with some positives about the Pix before getting also negative on the overpriced toy.

To commencement, the Pix, like the Tamagotchi ON, features a 64-bit colour screen that really brings the Tamagotchi globe and characters to life in a style not seen since the Tamagotchi Show from 2009. The fine art style is cute and fits the fashion of the toy perfectly. It's worth mentioning that most people I showed it to were diddled away by the graphics more annihilation else.

Beyond that, Bandai has added several new gameplay systems that influence what job your virtual pet ends upward with and how its child Tamagotchi will look. This ways that raising your pet and decorating your house will help decide its futurity profession and what your next egg looks similar.

Since the Tamagotchi Pix features a 64-fleck screen, there are a lot more details included in the virtual pets, which is a fun addition. I murdered somewhere around five or six of them and never had the same grapheme twice.

Why, Bandai?

To kicking off using the Pix, one of the offset things you demand to do is accept a picture of yourself for the Tamagotchi 'Attribute Quiz.' This sounds fun, just right from the get-go, I noticed how terrible the photographic camera really is. For a toy this chunky and expensive, I was expecting something a little bit ameliorate.

Later on that, yous need to input a name for your virtual pet using the new touch-sensitive buttons. These are horrible and the buttons included in the Tamagotchi Pix Bandai sent me aren't even perfectly centred. Further, every third or fourth time I tried to interact with a button, it would misread my touch. They're spaced far enough apart and my fingers aren't huge, but somehow they failed to work reliably. This becomes specially annoying when you're trying to pick upward your Tamagotchi's poop for the 100,000th time.

On the plus side, the new touch buttons create more control schemes, allowing you to swipe across all three buttons at one time to explore your Tama-house or to play games. That said, depending on what screen yous're on, they act differently, which took me quite some time to become used to.

In one case you go into actually living your Tama-life, it plays out pretty much the aforementioned as every other Tamagotchi toy, albeit with better graphics. You start past feeding your creature and cleaning upward Tama-poops. Then, as information technology ages, you'll exist able to play more mini-games and activities.

I remember sinking hours into these simple games as a kid, but every bit an adult, they're mind-numbing. The simply challenging part is making sure the buttons really respond to the manner y'all press them.

The camera is used for more than than just the attribution quiz at the beginning of the game too. When you're cooking, you can use it to take pictures of two items in the existent world and the game pulls 5 colours from that motion-picture show to mix into your food. The food yous create varies based on the colour philharmonic you input. You can as well use the camera to utilize colours to items that you identify in your house for a footling more customization.

One of the more interesting features allows yous to 'Explore' the existent world effectually you lot with your Tamagotchi to notice other Tamagotchi characters that can be stored in your drove log. This is kind of cool, but information technology gets old fast after you lot find a couple of them since all y'all need to practise is move your photographic camera around.

Finally, the camera tin be used to take pictures, but don't expect to become great results. Yous also can't offload these from your device, and then there'south no real mode to share them with other people. Plus, taking a moving-picture show of the screen and brightening it upwardly to exist visible takes a fiddling extra Photoshop magic.

Tama-clusion

Overall, the Pix offers a pretty standard Tamagotchi experience despite its new features. I'm sure die-hard fans and children volition savour using it, merely the camera doesn't actually add that much to the experience. With that in mind, I'd wait most kids would savor a regular Tamagotchi just as much.

If I morphed the Pix into the perfect Tamagotchi, I'd probably have the colourful screen and slap information technology onto an older/slimmer model with physical buttons. I call back the simplicity of a Tamagotchi is 1 of its most meaning strengths, and adding these weird swipe buttons takes away from that.

Overall, the Tamagotchi Pix is a costly virtual pet that doesn't experience like it'south justified its $lx USD (roughly $75 CAD) price tag with the underwhelming features meant to shake upward the Tamagotchi status-quo.