Virtual Pet Games

[Corrupted Unicorn]

Hello, hello all, this is the topic where we discuss one of my favourite things that ever game from the digital world: virtual pets! Some of the engagement, none of the mess, very affordable for people who don't want or can't have actual pets. Of course, they can't replace what a real animal can bring, but they do have charm of their own 

I'm currently focused on browser-based virtual pet websites. I encourage you to talk about your own favourites and bring points about what makes them special.  Of course, if portable virtual pets (like Tamagotchi!), or particular games (Petz anyone?) or even robot buddies (Aibo fans, we hear you!) are more your thing, you're free to discuss them as well! All virtual pets are welcome here 

Here's my choice picks for browser pets.

- Moderneopets: Or Mneo, as I like to call it  Bringing back the classic Neopets feel bit by bit, rebalancing games/economics, coming up with new colours and species for your pets and overall bringing a fairer experience. It's still kind of small, but the community is very nice and welcoming.

- Dragon Cave: A classic in the world of pets that grow through viewing/clicking. I love the classic dragon designs!

- GPX+: Bringing Pokemon to view/clicking-based mechanics! Slowly updating with the newest Pokemon from gens 8 onward. I also gotta say this game has the best clicking-based gameplay I've seen. They put in a lot of effort in making clicking hundreds of other users' eggs/Pokemon not feel like a huge effort to you.

- Flowergame: An obscure favourite! Grow yourself a little virtual garden with these endearing pet plants. Comes with simple minigames so you can grow the plants yourself without relying on other people's views. I especially love the Halloween-exclusive carnivorous plants, they're funny.

- Marapets: Kind of an acquired taste and I don't play it anymore nowadays, but this was the game of my teenhood and I remember it fondly. An edgier take on Neopets with a more balanced economy. Home of the best virtual pet ever, the Yuni.

Honorable mentions that sadly aren't with us nowadays: Boopets, Nebulapets, VDex Project, DragonAdopters, Squiby...

[Colliewood]

I actually bought myself a virtual pet game, its very barebones though and I don't know if I just have rosy memories of my old old tamagotchi or if it's always been like this but this virtual pet is very boring. All you can do is wash it or feed it for free, any games or activities you can do your pet is never in the mood for more than once, so its a constant back and forth between playing, feeding, playing, feeding, playing, cleaning, feeding, playing all just to get enough coins to buy a present.

I will say the main appeal of the game is the sheer variety of creatures you can own. each pet is displayed as a small grid of pixels but in so many shapes, you can have a bunny, a snail, a bird, a squid, a dinosaur, original blobby creatures, and indecipherable messes of pixels its a real bootleggy sort of thing so theres also pokemon looking pets and straight rips of tamogotchis. In fact the presents that you work your ass off to be able to afford don't do anything except change what sort of creature your virtual pet is. That is the game, was a ripped off? no it was way cheaper than a tamagotchi, and I'm not sure if I'd even be happier with that product, I wanted a toy that would beep and I could pet it, that's what I got.

Is there anything significant that I'm missing from my experience? I don't want to write off my memories of tamagotchi as being an easily entertained child but I cant pin point anything other than being able to "evolve" your tamagotchi and in some cases being able to have others interact, which I wouldn't be able to do being the only one with one of these anyway.

[TheFrugalGamer]

Oh I've been obsessed with virtual pet games since I was a kid! I mostly play on Neopets, DragonCave, and Subeta these days, but I have a whole list of them that I've been meaning to check out.

Is there anything significant that I'm missing from my experience? I don't want to write off my memories of tamagotchi as being an easily entertained child but I cant pin point anything other than being able to "evolve" your tamagotchi and in some cases being able to have others interact, which I wouldn't be able to do being the only one with one of these anywa

You might have gotten what's known as the "Bunny ROM" virtual pets that are sold as rip-offs these days. They're pretty basic, though most of them have a bug that speeds up the clock so much over time that they manage to die before you can get through a week or so. But even so, they're not for everyone. It's kind of a check it every now and then, smile at the cuteness, and then see how many days you can keep it alive for. I've reviewed some of the more obscure ones on my blog, but a lot of folks just aren't into them, and that's fine!

If you want a basic, well-made virtual pet I'd recommend the Gigapets that are on Amazon right now. There's more to them than the old ones, but they're simplistic enough that they don't get to be too much of a time suck. Folks who want something more gamified would probably like Digimon, which can be connected to each other and made to fight battles.

[levya]

ooh I was just thinking of making a virtual pets thread! I just recently discovered Poppy Seed Pets, which is a recreation of PsyPets if anyone played that. it's a very interesting kind of petsite where your pet performs some kind of action every hour, and that's how you get most of your stuff like money, food, and other items. your pet also gains levels and stats based on what they do, like if they level up while fighting a monster they increase their brawl stat.
site features unlock based on what your pet does, so the game can feel verrrrry slow starting out, but I love that it makes my pet feel like its own independent little creature!

I used to be a neopets kid, the petpages feature is what got me into html coding! I remember staying up hours later than I was supposed to just working on my petpage. zafaras were my favorite kind of pet!
then when I started losing interest in neopets, I tried a whole bunch of other petsites that were like neo and found aftermathzone, which became my new favorite but sadly it isn't around anymore. it had a single player arena that was basically like a strategy rpg that I loved so much and still miss. I wonder if I could learn how to code something similar?

nowadays I mostly only play flight rising, though I'm taking a break at the moment. for those unfamiliar, you get to collect dragons that come in all kinds of different breeds, colors, and markings, which you can then breed or use to battle monsters in the colosseum. you also join an elemental flight when you first start, which is like your house/guild/whatever and every week flights compete for dominance by exalting dragons (basically a positive way to get rid of dragons you don't want).
my personal favorite thing to do on flight rising is try to collect fandragons, which are dragons that are bred, gened, and dressed to look like a character. for example I have a dragon I tried to make look like Skull Kid from Majora's Mask!

[Colliewood]

I meant to update this a while ago with a picture of my virtual pet. i honestly haven't touched this since around christmas and my bunny-turned-snail or my snunny is still perfectly healthy, there's not even any mess to clean up or illness to cure or anything. this pet just goes into stasis when I'm not looking at it.

[Inkerlink]

I've recently started taking care of some new Digimon again after a few years. The battery died out but luckily these 20th Anniversary Edition VPets have internal memory so I didn't lose my progress. Taking care of a SaviourHuckmon and a Wingdramon right now. I don't have anyone IRL that I can battle with unfortunately but it's still a lot of fun.

I meant to update this a while ago with a picture of my virtual pet. i honestly haven't touched this since around christmas and my bunny-turned-snail or my snunny is still perfectly healthy, there's not even any mess to clean up or illness to cure or anything. this pet just goes into stasis when I'm not looking at it.

Cool, I had a Tamagotchi as well, one of the Music Star ones, but I've lost it from a few moves ago unfortunately. Cool Snail!

[mousey]

Weeping tears of joy right now from discovering the neopets reboot. Thank you for this post. (I also use flightrising, shadow flight 4lyfe)

[wygolvillage]

I've always loved virtual pets but got stressed out when they can die (not a dealbreaker though)   I've played and enjoyed some browser games (like Goatlings, some Pokemon one I forget the name of, etc) but I always prefer when I have some more in depth interaction with them. I also played a ton of pet games on my DS as a kid.

TBH I'm always surprised there's not a huge amount of virtual pet games made for phones, it seems like they'd be a fairly easy fit for a device that's designed to always be with you. It just seems like there could've been a new virtual pet boom that just never happened.

I've never owned a tamagotchi (always wanted one though!!!) but I do remember having a sort of similar thing where it was a pixelated screen on a cube with a virtual stick figure that you could play minigames with.

[anglade]

There were a couple virtual pet sites I used to play all the time, but the only one (aside from Flight Rising, which someone already linked) is Aywas. Which I have completely forgotten all my account info for. Don't ask how lol

Side note, apparently I had a Dragon Cave account I totally forgot about? I had login details already saved in my browser lol.

[pinkvampyr]

I very recently got into dappervolk! it's honestly not that similar to a lot of other petsites, in fact it reminds me more of Gaia online in some ways, but there are pets that you can hatch from different items and you can interact with them. again not as much like neopets or flight rising but I'm having fun! feel free to add me if you like. I'd love to have more friends there. 💗

[devils]

I love browser pets! Right now, my main focus is Virtu.pet (an OG Neopets clone). It has more games and is more faithful to the original game than Modern Neopets (I love both though).

Other than that, Icepets is really sweet browser pet site, although not very well-known.

Finally, one of the most unique browser pet games is Pixel Cat's End. It's lore-heavy and the gameplay is based on TTRPGs!

I'd like to add that all the sites mentioned have really chill communities (especially VP, I'm most active there and on their Discord).

[pinkvampyr]

since i mentioned it in the shoutbox i thought i'd echo what was already said about modern neopets! it's making me feel so nostalgic <3 regular neopets left such a hole in my heart wrt virtual pets bc i could never get into it now, what with the inflation and level of difficulty and all the broken flash stuff, not to mention the whole NFT thing. i THINK registrations are only open every couple of months on a specific day since theyre still very much in beta, but i got the 7 dollar tier subscription on patreon and got a registration key! personally it felt very much worth it, i'm having a lot of fun and it's definitely a lot fairer than regular neopets even in the early days.

[grovyle]

I can't wait until moderneopets opens registrations again! I hadn't heard of it before, and when I tried to go back to neopets a few weeks ago it was a fiasco. I hadn't realised how much of it relied on flash, so sad to see it like this now :(

I really like online virtual pet games, but I have bad luck on when I get into them, as they tend to die as soon as I sign up. Tamagotchis never really took off where I'm from, and if they showed up anywhere they were extremely expensive (basically a collectors' item), so my and my friends' only chance at a virtual pet was on the web. Besides neopets we really liked panfu, although I don't know if you could call it a virtual pet exactly. It was like club penguin but with pandas. It also shut down a while ago, and I think unofficial servers have been going up, so I might go check that out until I wait for moderneo 

[Memory]

I've been on so many of those sites, but I always lose steam with virtual pet stuff easily. I play on grundos.cafe actively rn, but that's it.

I've got accounts on flowergame, Flight Rising, GPX+, Goatlings, Dragon Cave... might be missing something.
I really like GPX+ but shiny hunts being difficult to finish due to no eggs of what I'm hunting showing up means I don't go on there much at all, until I check in and it's the honey plus thing and I get lucky finding eggs. and that's the cycle. yes I do breed my own but you can only take one... or two, if you have the heart sweets, and that's just tedious.

[Y2KStardust]

One thing I will say re: Neopets proper - they made me sob recently-ish by introducing Autism Acceptance items. AAC devices, infinity symbol shirts.. they also have pride items now! Makes me happy ^.^

I also play a bit of goatlings, it feels pretty quiet in comparison to other places I'm on like FR/Neo/etc but I still enjoy it a lot c: