Tamagotchi Pix 90s Nostalgia at it’s Finest

Tamagotchi Pix 90s Nostalgia at it’s Finest

Tamagotchi’s are back and better than ever. Well, at least they are better than they were in the 1990s. And that isn’t to say that they were bad in the 1990s. They were fun. They were a type of LCD game where you’d raise and play with a virtual pet for a week or two. Every day you’d have to interact with the virtual pet which could range from being a bird to a cat to a dinosaur and look after it to keep the game going.

Tamagotchi’s have never really gone away, but they certainly had their heyday. I think the creation of Pokémon may have overshadowed the Tamagotchi. Instead of one virtual pet, people could pick up a Game Boy and have a few hundred monsters as their virtual pets and not only did you not have to clean up their virtual poo, but you could also battle them.

Tamagotchi’s were succeeded directly by Digimon in the late 1990s but whilst these battling Digimon fined some popularity they never were as big as Tamagotchi’s were.

But that was a lot of years ago, and even though there’s been Tamagitchi apps, video games and revivals there’s never been a true update to the original idea of the pocket virtual pet. Having an app on your phone or a Game Boy or a Nintendog that you have to switch on and choose to interact with isn’t the same as getting a beep from your pocket to let you know your dinky dino wants feeding.

A Reimagined Classic

But now there is the Tamagotchi Pix which is the true modern update to what the original Tamagotchi was. The Pix has a full colour screen, a built in camera and sensor based buttons which aren’t actual buttons at all.

The charm of this thing is great. It both gave me a huge feeling of nostalgia whilst being a modern device. And when I say it’s a modern device I use that term loosely. The whole thing screams 2002 in terms of…well everything.

The screen is full colour but the graphics really really look like what you’d have got on a Game Boy Advance. This isn’t a bad thing at all as it looks great and I love the retro charm of it…which is weird to say considering how much of an upgrade it is over the original. The device is also quite chunky and at least two or three times larger than the original Tamagotchi.

The built in camera is also hilariously bad but functional for its uses when its needed. The camera isn’t designed for people to take photos to keep and get printed. Instead it allows you to take photos with your Tamagotchi and use the photo data to affect several things that happen. At times it may ask you take a photo of your surroundings to help determine where you’ll take your Tamagotchi out for a walk. This then affects what character you meet out on your walk.

The camera will also pick up the colour of what you take pics of and this can be used to create different types of food or ingredients that match that colour. It’s a neat feature which makes it feel you are really helping to make the food and get the right coloured ingredients to create different food types. You’ll then need to wipe back and forth across the sensor buttons to simulate mixing the food. It’s all really quite clever.

The buttons are used several times for you to wipe across them to simulate different things. Often this is in the mini games such as swiping left or right to play tennis or just going in one direction to speed up a carousel.

Other mini games include playing football to do a penalty shootout, catch money from popping balloons and doing hula hoop and guess the card. None of these mini games are brilliant and none of them are that hard, but sometimes you’ll still lose.

It has to be said that the sensor buttons do often misread when you try to press and does the wrong thing. And I get it, as an adult male playing on a pink Tamagotchi intended for little girls my fingers and thumbs aren’t as slender as it was designed for and I’m misdialling with my fat Andre the Giant digits. But that said, there’s no way this was genuinely just designed for kids. We’re at the stage where LCD games from the 90s are being rereleased of Sonic or Transformers and even though they were a kids toy in the past, the companies making them now know a good amounts of adults wanting that nostalgia kick will be buying.

The virtual pet, which you get to name will grow through a few stages of life and go from being an egg that hatches to a small critter to a medium critter and then a full sized one.

I found that my first critter eventually became quite attention hungry and you’d have to swipe back and forth to pet it constantly. There are metres to show if the pet is hungry and how happy it is and if this gets too low it will start to not do as well. Fortunately I did all the right things but after about a week or so something unexpected happened.

Now, I was attentive to the Tamagotchi, and would check in on it several times a day or if I ever heard it beep and when I heard a beep one time I checked it and it thanked me for everything and then flew off in a space ship. I like the fact that the game doesn’t have to end with a sad note, but was still weird to have your Tamagotchi eventually leave you for its own life now it’s all grown up.

When this happened I was immediately given a new egg and the process started again in a strange new game plus style mode. All of the items including accessories and room designs you can get for the Tamagotchi carried over and so did the money you earn from playing the mini games. This was great as it meant I could treat my second generation critter with luxuries that I wasn’t able to with the first one.

You do have the option to turn the screen brightness down and the sound off. Whilst the sounds are sometimes useful for getting timing right on some mini games, I’d say to turn these off if you can as during the span of two generations I’ve had to change batteries twice. The first set of batteries I had were a little old but barely used but the brand new second set only lasted a week.

Overall I’d say this was a lot of fun to step back in time to have a virtual pet again. It’s cool that it was more modern than the original but still had that Game Boy Advance style vibe.

Rating: 4 out of 5.

You can get loads more Action Figures and Collectibles articles in the Toys and Collectibles section of the site, and don’t forget to check out all our collectibles videos on the Geek Battle YouTube Channel and the Geek Battle comedy panel show on the Extreme Improv XStreamed YouTube Channel For more gaming articles check the Gaming Section and our Gaming YouTube Channel.