IGN writes: "At its recent Captivate event, Capcom unveiled a surprising new game from the makers of Puzzle Quest. Based on the Nickelodeon license of the same name, Neopets takes the Puzzle Quest formula and dresses it up with the popular children's property. Neopets are similar to Pokemon in that there are hundreds of little animals for kids to train and interact with. There are a slew of mini-games available at Neopets.com.
Aside from taking on the licensed property, the other big change to the Puzzle Quest game is that instead of Bejewelled, conflicts are settled with games of Othello (Reversi). There is still an overworld map where players travel around and accept quests (over 150 in all), and it's much larger than what we saw in PQ. But once you enter a battle, you'll find the colored chips of Othello. If you've never played the land grab game, the goal is to claim the majority of the board by sandwiching your opponent's pieces with your own. Here, the player with the highest score will win a match, not necessarily the one with the most land."
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.
