Imitation is truly the sincerest form of flattery. I could end the review right there and pretty much leave you with the overriding sentiment you'll garner from a play session with Tamagotchi Connection: Corner Shop 3. It isn't evident immediately, so we'll come back to this. The Tamagotchi Connection look is well established now since the first game hit our fair shores two years ago. The branding is well known, if you were around in the 80s when the toy was booming. It's maintained a life on shelves and the game has found a new audience, the children of those 80s mall rats, most likely. It is impossible to hate these little characters. They are cute and innocent, they don't fight or scratch, and even when they're unhappy they make you laugh. The world they inhabit is visually placed between a child's crayon scribble and Jeff Koons'. The cuteness is intentional. Navigating the world of Tamagotchi Connection: Corner Shop 3 is accomplished through symbols and signs, good for a target audience that may not yet be big on the reading thing. As a parent of a five-year old, I can attest to how quickly reading instructions will shut down a small kid's enjoyment of a game; all the same, gaming did teach my child to read the words: "Yes, No, Start, and Continue." Parents accustomed to helping out, or kids that are well-established readers, will appreciate the basic instructions accompanying all the game segments. It's just rarely necessary to read instructions because the games are foolproof and convey everything through simple visuals.

There isn't much variety in music, but cute sound effects abound. The characters in Tamagotchi Connection: Corner Shop 3 pull out the same chirpy dialogue that I recall from Animal Crossing back when that was the only town around filled with kooky characters in need of some labor and design assistance. Remember that piece about imitation and flattery? Accompanying each mini-game are a collection of silly little sounds that are cute the first ten times and a bit tedious on times eleven through infinity, if you're over the age of eight. The shelf-life for Tamagotchi Connection: Corner Shop 3 is questionable.

Poor replay value notwithstanding, the first few hours of Tamagotchi Connection: Corner Shop 3 are fun as heck. There's plenty of life in the game for younger gamers over the long haul, at least until Tamagotchi Connection: Corner Shop 4 hits shelves. A playable intro segment welcomes you to the town where you'll spend the duration of the game, and you'll meet a few of the characters that make up the cast. They'll put you to work right away. The idea of doing chores in a game is neat, perhaps more to people that don't actually work eight hours a day... Still, if my job was this simple and I didn't have to take a pay cut, I'd be a happy camper. In Tamagotchi Connection: Corner Shop 3 you'll find that people pay good money... "gotchi" in this case... for you to do things like plant seeds to raise flowers, bake, pick up trash, and dig for buried treasure. Over the course of the game, you'll find eleven unique shops and two with combined themes. If baking and gardening sounds good, or a decorating spa experience is your cup of tea, the combined shops will be right up your alley.

Apart from working in shops, you'll have a chance to explore a few extra locations, where you can hook up wirelessly with friends and trade items, or just treat your Tamagotchi to some candy sweets. The park is yours to decorate with items you purchase with your hard-earned gotchi, and you'll have to keep the place clean. It's a good thing you have well-honed trash collecting and recycling skills from your work in the shops, eh? The other area you'll visit is the town's Clock Tower, basically a place to hang out and put different outfits on your Tamagotchi friends. There's a journal that you can use to log activities privately, or keep public to trade with friends. Teachers in my day just confiscated notes; what the heck do they do today when people can wirelessly trade journals? If it all sounds incredibly saccharine, it's because this is supposed to be a fun, lightweight experience for kids that aren't ready for survival horror and thermonuclear war. What's wrong with a little saccharine, as long as it's well executed? Tamagotchi Connection: Corner Shop 3 has very little staying power, but then again it predates Pokemon as a brand. Who imitated who, really?

All the games associated with shops are easy to master and include very basic instructions that help you if for some reason you can't nail the task. An indication of how the difficulty is slanted toward a younger player is that it is virtually impossible to fail a task. You can do the wrong thing until the batteries on your DS fail and you won't lose anything. Experimentation combined with paying attention to visual cues gets you through 80% of the game. For the remainder, there's always experimentation... The most difficult thing about Tamagotchi Connection: Corner Shop 3 is navigating menus and figuring out what to do once the introduction plays out. The first four shops are basically back-to-back, but those remaining are more free form. This may leave the youngest players a bit lost, but again it pays to experiment. The basic gameplay model remains the same from shop to shop; even though the context changes, you know after shops 1-4 that you'll have to perform a series of tasks with objects and when you get the object right, you'll be rewarded with some event, animation, sound, etc. The navigation between different areas in the game isn't perfectly clear at first, in terms of why you go certain places and do certain things. The real reason for this is that Tamagotchi Connection: Corner Shop 3 isn't a game with a story arc. It plays out in little snippets and gamers are free to do what they want, when they want. It seems a bit odd to adult sensibilities, but it's exactly how little kids like to play. They don't tolerate a long buildup to a final outcome, in general. So this kind of dabbling gameplay is perfecto for the small set.

The buried menus will work your patience a bit, but nothing more complicated than stylus tapping is required to appreciate Tamagotchi Connection: Corner Shop 3. The online component is a bit buried as well, but it shows up in the segments outside the shop. One way to think about it is that this is really 50% about trading items, writing in your journal, and pampering your Tamagotchi - the old "work to keep your Tamagotchi alive" routine that was first introduced with the advent of the toy isn't present here. Dying toys are just too dark for little ones, I guess... The other half of the game is the action in the shops, which is much like a series of mini-games. Scoring points in these games enables much of the other gameplay, unless you just want to take items from your friends and have nothing to trade. You do? Selfish brat! The trading extends to a special feature accessed from the game's top menu, before you actually launch the game itself. One option from this screen is to send a demo of the game wirelessly to a friend, and the other is to access special items through entering a code. The first code is contained in the game's manual, yet another good reason to read the instructions...

The imitation label that one could pin on Tamagotchi Connection: Corner Shop 3 because of its close resemblance to Animal Crossing isn't really fair, since the whole notion of caring for virtual animals really started with Tamagotchi. Even Pokemon is a variation on a theme that originated here. Tamagotchi Connection: Corner Shop 3 just isn't a very deep game and it seems especially light in comparison to brands like Pokemon or Animal Crossing. It's not so much that this is an inferior game; it is aimed at a younger set of gamers that don't find lots of reading palatable or won't spend so much time mastering complex chains of gameplay dependencies. Taken for what it is, Tamagotchi Connection: Corner Shop 3 works fine, but there is more long-term entertainment value in buying your child a classic arcade collection or something revamped like Space Invaders Extreme. Every parent has the choice to make; this won't rot your kids' minds, but it is the equivalent of sugar-free gum for their gaming palettes. Some sequels were best left on the cutting-room floor.