Tamagotchi Connection: Corner Shop review (DS)

The most interesting and fun shop is the dentist, where you have to help customers who come in with toothaches, cavities, and missing teeth. You can select a drill to drill out a cavity, select colored wadding to fill in the hole, and then clean it all up with a toothbrush. If you take too long, the customer will start to cry, at which point you can administer a shot of Novocain or just let him or her suffer. If they suffer too much, they'll leave and you won't get paid.

There are two special hybrid shops that you can unlock by upgrading other shops. The florist jeweler is a mix between a jewelry store and a florist, so you just make necklaces and brooches with flowers instead of gems. The strangest store is the dental salon, where all the Tamagotchi go to get some grill work done. Customers will give you a picture of what they want their teeth to look like, and you just have to copy the look using various colored glazes, letters, silver etchings, and accessories like diamonds or pink bows.

In all of the shops you get rated on your performance, but the rating has no effect on your earnings. The only way to do poorly at any of the minigames is to just take too long performing a task. That isn't much of a threat, though, since the customers are extremely tolerant. In fact, they're so tolerant that even if you completely botch the job, or do nothing at all and just click the Done tab, you'll still get paid the same. This is true for all of the minigames, and it removes any sort of challenge or incentive to keep playing.

Most of the minigames are fun for at least a few minutes, and they do make good use of the DS touch screen. But the novelty quickly wears off and you're left with a lot of fairly menial and repetitive diversions. You'll eventually earn upgrades for each shop. You can upgrade a shop three times, but there's not much that changes with each upgrade. You get a little bit more money per customer, and you might see some slightly more challenging requests, but for the most part the upgrades are only important because they allow you to open up other types of shops. Once you've unlocked all the shops, the only reason to keep playing is to earn money to purchase items for your Tamagotchi. However, most of the items aren't worth the time and effort required to earn the money. For example, you can decorate a hundred cakes to buy a bookshelf, which you can then place in your Tamagotchi's room and look at, but that isn't much of a reward.

The best part of Corner Store is the unique sense of style. The back of the box advertises the fact that this game is from the creators of PaRappa the Rapper, and indeed you can spot the similarities. The 2D characters are all colorful and crudely drawn, but they fit perfectly with the quirky theme of the game. The backgrounds are equally crude and cheerful, and they all look good despite the simplicity. The interface is all managed with tabbed menus. There are tabs along the left and right edges of the screen, which you touch with the stylus to access menus, where you can select items you need for each minigame. This menu system works fairly well, although it feels a bit convoluted when you start getting into submenus.

The sound in the game is good, too. The tunes are catchy and upbeat, which is just what you need when you're drilling teeth or arranging bouquets. The creatures do speak, but it's a squealing gibberish that sounds a lot like the language the creatures speak in Animal Crossing. The sound effects are mostly variations of the voices of the creatures, so while it sounds interesting and cute at first, it can get annoying to hear the same weird noise every time you put icing on a cake or brush a tooth.

Tamagotchi Connection: Corner Shop is fun at first, but the novelty is fleeting. There just isn't enough here to keep you occupied for more than a few hours. You can unlock and upgrade every shop in the game in a few hours, and beyond that there just isn't much to do. You can link up with a friend to trade gifts, and you can also let a friend download a demo of the game, for which you'll get one gotchi point. If you're looking for a virtual pet experience, you won't find it here. But if you just like to play with the touch screen and don't mind a lot of repetition, then you'll find a few hours of light fun in Corner Shop.