Surely everyone remembers that crazy Tamagotchi craze that hit quite a few years back. For those of you who were living in caves at the time, Tamagotchis were one of the original electronic pets. About the size of a large chicken egg, Tamagotchis were portable pets that kids (and even some adults) could carry around with them. You had to make sure to feed and exercise them at regular intervals, and over time they would evolve into new forms. Other than that all the pets really did was sit there performing rudimentary animations on a black and white LCD display. But none of that mattered, because Tamagotchis were cool. While the original Tamagotchis have been gone for nearly a decade now, they've returned in the form of a new Nintendo DS game called Tamagotchi Connection: Corner Shop.

The first thing you will notice about Corner Shop is that it makes no qualms about using a very distinct art style. The developer is NaNaOn-Sha, who are best known for the Parappa the Rappa series on the PlayStation. If cutesy anime is a big turnoff for you, you’ll probably look at this game and run for the hills. This is a game meant for kids. That said, given the audience, the graphics are extremely detailed and paint a distinct picture of the unique world of Tamagotchi. While I’m not familiar with the list of original Tamagotchis, its safe to say that throughout the various mini-games, you will see every previous type of Tamagotchi, and even a few new faces. Many of the more unique and potentially confusing facets of the games are made exceptionally clear by the crisp visuals.

Just as the art style is intensely cute, the sound of music mainly consists of the type of stuff you’d hear from a typical children’s anime cartoon. Lots of simple guitars and high-pitched squeaking voices.

Tamagotchi Connection: Corner Shop is basically a collection of mini-games that utilize the DS’s unique touch screen controls. These mini-games take the form of shops you and your Tamagotchi companion operate. After successfully running your business for a while, the shop will get larger and the games required to run that business get a little more complex.

Just as every aspect of this game revels in the strange and unusual, even the nature of the games is quirky. Take dentistry for example. One of the first shops available to you involves cleaning the teeth of tamagotchi. Some other shop examples are a spa, music club, and a florist.

The games are all very simple and generally involve little more than rubbing an area of the screen or dragging and dropping items. Sometimes you will get something a little more interesting like the music club, which requires timing. This simplicity is both good and bad. While it makes the game extremely accessible and easy to get into, it leaves the gameplay shallow. After a while, a specific shop just because extremely boring. Each particular “stage” of a shop just tends to take too long. Thankfully the game saves your reputation standing, so the game lends itself well to short, sporadic periods of playtime.

Tamagotchi Connection: Corner Shop is in no way a difficult game, quite the opposite in fact. While it’s important for certain types of games to be accessible, Corner Shop seems to take it to the extreme. To give on example, servicing many of your early flower shop customers requires little more than tapping color. I mean easy is fine, especially for a portable title, but that pushes the limit. To be fair, there are other games that are more challenging, such as the aforementioned music club.

The gameplay and style of the games are about as varied as you can get. While your stores are small, the games are simple, often so simple they could be called little more than mechanical. While rhythm games and dentistry can be entertaining (what’s not fun about drilling holes in cute little animals, I ask you), the sheer breadth of time you spend doing them in a row can make you feel like an underpaid worker on an assembly line. I’ll give you an example. The first stage of your dry cleaning shop consists of nothing more than tapping and color and then spinning the stylus around in a circle five or six times. This may sound mildly amusing, but now remember that you have to do this around twenty times, with lots of random tamagotchi banter in between. Only the youngest of gamers will find this engaging for very long.

And that appears to be who Tamagotchi Connection: Corner Shop is geared towards, the young gamer, that, and extremely big fans of super cute graphics. For them this game is gold, and that’s really the bottom line.