Never heard of Neopets? Then you're probably not among the more than 11 million unique visitors to Neopets.com each month. It's a Nickelodeon-owned online community of people caring and raising virtual pets. What might prick up your ears, though, is that Capcom has secured the licence and set Puzzle Quest developer Infinite Interactive to work on a videogame version for Wii, PC and DS, due out this Christmas. The result is Puzzle Quest with cute animals and Reversi/Othello instead of Bejeweled as its puzzle component.
Proving that it sometimes pays to blatantly rip off other peoples' ideas, Neopets were originally unleashed upon the world via the internet in 1999, four years after the birth of Pokemon. Like Nintendo's pocket monster franchise, Neopets are virtual pets which can be tamed, trained, and interacted with in a variety of ways, albeit through Neopets.com rather than a highly popular Gameboy game.
GameVortex writes: "Neopets Puzzle Adventure is a fun game to play. There are disadvantages to the Wii version, most notably being the small text size. But there are also some really good advantages as well; the story is a lot longer and there are more in-depth characters. I recommend that you get them both. Besides, it gives you more virtual prizes that way".
Back in 2007, Wii owners were served a shoddy port of a good game in Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords. Once again, Wii owners are served up a broken version of an Infinite Interactive title. The Wii version of Neopets Puzzle Adventure is technically baffling, with broken framerates, aggravating hiccups, and other programming problems that really damage the experience. Neopets fanatics pining for a fix will do better to look to the superior (and cheaper) DS version rather than this rushed Wii project.
