Genre: Simulation
Publisher: Atari
Developer: Empire Interactive
Release Date: September 23, 2008
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Games like Animal Paradise make me wish that Nintendogs had never been created. Because of that pet simulator title, we've been inundated with various pet simulators on the Nintendo DS, the majority of which are bland, uninspired affairs that hide under the pretense of being kids' titles. In reality, they just don't have a lot of interesting content on and are usually presented at a budget price to match the development effort that's been put into creating these titles in the first place.
I can't see the appeal in playing Animal Paradise for more than a few minutes, and I played it for a lot longer than that, so yeah, I'm slightly bitter. I kept waiting for the game to change something across the 18 "different" animals that I encountered, but it devolved into the same caretaking system as the next, just with different 3-D animal models with which to interact.
The game is based upon the photography of Yoneo Morita, who popularized the Hana Deka style of photos, which means "big nose" in Japanese. Hana Deka might not be a term familiar to western players, and while you might think you're not familiar with Morita's photography, chances are that you've seen it just about everywhere. It's the fish eye style of animal photos that shows them with enormously huge heads attached to pictures of various creatures, and while the popularity has fallen off a bit in recent years, there's still plenty of merchandise out there that sports this look, so it's no surprise that someone thought it would be a great idea to make a video game out of it.
While the photography is the source of the popularity, Animal Paradise doesn't have you take on the role of a photographer. Instead, the story presents you as a nephew or niece to your in-game aunt and cousin, who need your help in befriending the local wildlife so they can take some snapshots of the animals to help their fledgling business model. This is probably the first mistake the game makes because it really seems like this could have been an interesting photography-based title, but instead you're stuck with the menial task of approaching animals, petting, combing and playing with them until they like you well enough to allow your cousin to take a photo. Even the photos you take are just unlocked pictures of actual Hana Deka images, and they don't do anything to affect gameplay.
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Once you get past the introductions, you can access a map on the touch-screen that you can drag around with the stylus. There are various locations, and you usually tap on an animal near one of these spots to begin your interactions. The packaging indicates that there are 18 animals to choose from, but there are only about six varieties with different types between them: birds, bunnies, cats, dogs, hamsters, etc. They all behave in a similar fashion, and the majority of them share the same interactivity functions, so aside from appearance, there's not much to differentiate the animals.
You're then brought to a screen that displays the animal on the touch-screen. There's a small menu that runs horizontally along the bottom and gives you different options to interact with the creatures, like brush, feed, walk, wash and so on. If you click on feed, you'll be given three different food types on the left side, and then you must follow the directions to feed the animal the appropriate type of food by dragging it to its mouth with the stylus. The "brush" option simply has you sliding the stylus along different points on the animal, and successfully brushing the animal will result in a fake-looking fur animation, until you've done all the brushing you can do and are shown a little sparkle to let you know that it's done. After every little event, you'll get a screen telling you the animal likes you a bit more, and eventually your cousin will be able to take a snapshot. Building up your friendship with the beast also unlocks more animals to interact with, along with the possibility of small mini-game activities that barely qualify as mini-games.
That's the entire game in a nutshell: Click on an animal, go through every single event until the pictures are taken, and go on to the next creature. Rinse and repeat this process to unlock everything Animal Paradise has to offer, and that's all you need to do. The unlocked mini-games are limited and pretty lame. One has you dressing up an animal from a variety of options; you're required to match whatever the animal is thinking to the choices you have from the dresser, and you need to do this within a time limit. The allotted time is very generous, and aside from not paying attention, there's no real way to fail the task — but you don't get a reward for doing it correctly, either.
As I mentioned earlier, Animal Paradise is geared toward younger kids, but this title will only keep them occupied for a couple of hours at most because even kids are going to see through the paper-thin amount of content in this game.
Score: 3.0/10
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