Check out Explosionville, our My Game Space page: Explosionville!!!
4.7 not all bad
Who has time to sit around all day listening to country music? Not me.
In Pets Fun House, from Linksolutions, you play a middle-aged woman who has finally saved up enough money to open your own business. No more of that country music! (Except maybe Taylor Swift.) But you're a little wishy-washy because all this time you were saving your pennies eating egg sandwiches and ramen noodles... without a goal or dream business in mind. You just wanted to get out of the house and make it rich. I myself would have opened a detective agency, but the name of this game is Pets Fun House. So instead of a funhouse for pets your character opens a pet shop.
In the beginning you sell only Siamese cats (AKA "diamonds of the moon") and beagles (AKA "Snoopies"), but as your business grows you'll unlock more and varied breeds.
As you already guessed, this is a time management game. Pets sit on their beds and thought balloons pop up to indicate what they need. Be it food, toys, a shampoo, a trip to the magic floating outhouse, whatever. If you ignore your pets' needs for too long, they'll become unhappy and everyone knows that unhappy pets never sell! Once you feed a pet enough chow, it will grow larger and begin to sparkle. That means it's ready to sell.
Occasionally customers will enter the store looking for a specific breed of cat or dog. Pets Fun House really brings home the plight of unwanted mill pets. If you choose to stock a lot of Siamese cats and they aren't trendy that day, you're unlikely to sell them all. Everyone will want beagles or dalmatians and you'll be stuck with a lot of poor unloved sparkling cats. Life is cruel for pets in pet shops, there's no doubt about it.
Right away you'll notice several problems with Pets Fun House. The interface is weird. The selection process for choosing a new pet to adopt is odd, for example. I think it was designed by aliens or ghosts. It's hard to figure out which pet you're selecting because when you try to mouse over the pet you want, it jumps up out of the selection stack like a card in a lounge magician's card trick. You get used to it eventually.
An eyebrow-raising aspect of the game is that the "poo poo" (as the game calls it) that a pet produces appears long after it has finished going to the bathroom. Come on, Linksolutions, do some basic research on the topic of your game!
There are five pet shops to run, and each is right next to a dangerous two lane highway. If you've ever lost a pet to a road accident like I have, you'll realize what a bad location your character has chosen for her pet shops! And as you make more and more money in each shop, you can unlock largely useless bonus items like sofas. You can even choose to remove these furnishings for some reason. Kind of odd.
Allow me to rant for a moment or two. What is it with these time management games and dragging people around? All day, for every interaction with pets and customers, you click on things to walk to them, pick them up, move them around, etc. But then when you sell a pet the game has you clicking on the customer and dragging them across the floor to the pet's bed. A little bird told me that Linksolutions just didn't want to spend time animating a scene of the customer and pet making friends. I understand, I'm lazy, too, but my excuse is that I'm not a game developer.
The graphics aren't bad, but the 3D character of your very fidgety shop owner isn't as cute as she is in the opening comic. She sweats constantly and wipes her brow every few seconds. Or she smoothes out her apron.
Pets Fun House is one of the slowest-loading games I've seen, and I saw it was using more then 500 megabytes of memory. What is it doing, calculating node simularities on B-trees? There's no reason for a game like this to use so much memory.
Calling all casual gamers! Are you sick of all the misspellings and bad grammar in games these days? I know I am. The next time you want to buy a game with horrible English... where a middle-aged woman in a pre-game comic talks about opening a "conventient store" ... or the game tells you, "The bonus items added to your shop. Nice jobs." ... think twice about the message you're sending to casual game developers. That message is, "I don't care that you skimped on the quality of your game, I'll reward you anyway."
Until we give circus clowns license to run around and hit bad spellers on the head with rubber mallets, that's our only choice.