Is the idea of raising a creature to send it out to fight a little perverse? "At first I had an emotional attachment toward my monster and I felt bad about having to send it out to fight," Shannon said. Players can save their monsters on memory cards, then load them onto other PlayStations, where they can do battle with other monsters. "If you don't punish him," said Linda Shannon, a Tecmo spokeswoman, "he'll get spoiled and whiny and disloyal and he won't follow your commands." Nor Players then rear, feed, train, work and discipline their monsters. Then reads the CD and creates a monster based on the coding of the CD. After loading the game, a player puts an ordinary compact disc into the PlayStation - anything from a rock music CD, to Microsoft Office or Excel. The game includes more than 220 monsters, which are created in unusual fashion. It already has been on the top 10 chart for six months in Japan and has shipped about 600,000 copies. Rancher, an arcade game for Sony's PlayStation. In fact, this may be the year of the virtual gladiators,Ĭreatures children nurture and love and then, like any proud parent, send out to kick some serious byte. The owner gets bragging rights and, one hopes, not carpal tunnel syndrome.īandai, the makers of Tamagotchi and DigiMon, is not the only toy company to make a foray into digital Darwinism. The winner gets stronger, the loser weaker. Is designed to fight, and your job is to prepare it.Īfter training the DigiMon, you hook it up to another DigiMon and the two battle it out for digital dominance. But there is one key difference from its more passive progenitor: DigiMon And like Tamagotchi, it beeps when it wants food and attention. Like Tamagotchi, the computerized DigiMon appears on a small LCD readout device attached to a key chain. International devotion among youngsters not seen since the heyday of Menudo. It is the sequel to Tamagotchi, a primitive digital chicken that sold a blazing 40 million copies last year and inspired The creature is called DigiMon, short for digital monster, and it will soon be heavily promoted at a retailer near you. This creature merely is a virtual pet, but it is one you may soon be hearing more about - when all theĬhildren you know start clamoring for their own.
I offer one final reflection: Who's bringing the snacks? This is going to be great!īefore you surrender me to the police, the ASPCA or the local anti-cockfighting hot line, there's something you should know. Ten hours from now, the creature I have doted upon and nurtured for all of his young life faces the day of reckoning. The Tamagotchi: Toy Life-Form Invades the U.S.Ĭoming Soon to the Virtual Pet Store: 'Creatures' Who Live, Eat and Reproduce Tamagotchi Diary: Week 3 - Requiem for a Digital Egg From Virtual Pet to Virtual Pit Bull: Fighting Cyber Toysįrom Virtual Pet to Virtual Pit Bull: Fighting Cyber Toys By MATT RICHTEL