EyePet

Review - Martin likes monkey... sometimes

EyePet is not, as the name suggests, a pet made out of eyes. The reality, a mix between Gizmo from Gremlins and a tiny monkey, is far more adorable. And it's surprising how often the technology works: as an advert for webcam gaming EyePet is a nothing short of a triumph, the game's best moments coming from the virtual pet seamlessly interacting with the on-screen mirror of your living room. He'll spot your fingers wiggling, jump over your hand when it passes by, scamper over to your legs when you tap your toes and, if you accidentally knock him too hard, will fall over onto his lovably fluffy back. Plus you can dress him up in a stripy t-shirt, pop a beret on his noggin and call him Monsieur Bobbins.

The illusion is made possible largely due to a simple piece of decorated cardboard - dubbed the 'Magic Card' by EyePet HQ's benevolent... Professor EyePet? I can't remember him being given a name or title. The game uses the position and angle of the card to define the boundaries between the foreground, which the EyePet occupies, and the background where your legs live. The card, complete with a handle on its reverse side, is also used as an instrument between reality and the screen whenever one is required, assuming roles such as milk bottle, shower and cookie dispenser. It's not delivering the hands-free webcam gameplay in the style of Microsoft's elusive Project Natal, but EyePet's technology offers the benefit of having something tangible the player can use to bridge the gap between tedious reality and the exciting fantasy version of your living room that exists on the telly.

But problems with the kit become apparent before long. It might generally be responsive but it only works when the room is lit with bright, natural light - an increasingly-scarce commodity for a game being released the same week the clocks go back. Also, whilst the game is ostensibly aimed at children, its occasional difficulties in operation make the execution counter-productive to the intention. Plus it requires the user to tidy their room beforehand, thus automatically ruling most of today's youth right out.

Having tidied my room, tilted the camera to look at the floor and made sure I was at home during the four hour period of the day when there was enough natural light in the room, I sat on the floor and booted up the game to learn that despite being fluffy, cute and entirely mammal-looking the EyePet hatches out of an egg. Thankfully it's pre-fertilised, but the player still has to work to crack its shell. First they're instructed to warm the egg with the aid of a tiny, portable heater with a presumably-busted on switch: positioning your hand sort-of where the heater is, the player has to repeatedly tap down for a few minutes to slowly warm the egg. It's an uncomfortable, jarring motion that goes on for far longer than it should.

After that comes a period of rocking the egg back and forth, another motion which proved to be fiddlier than it should. But the experience vastly improved after the creature finally hatched. It's certainly hard not to be enamoured to the thing after watching it scamper around the floor observing any old bit of moving scenery with a child-like curiosity that warms the cold, bitter heart of all but the most disgruntled scrooges.

Like any hand-sized object new to the world, EyePet's are completely reliant on the charity of others, requiring frequent showering, feeding and attention to stop them from having a sulk. That's about as extreme as it gets - the creatures can't be killed by neglect and they never, ever need to have a poo, regardless of how many cookies they've been fed. It's all about the sparkly bond between a person and the CPU construct that will always, always love them.

To make it all a bit more like a game, however, there's a series of challenges to complete. These are split across a series of fifteen in-game days, with each day unlocked by completing a certain amount of challenges. It's entirely possible to complete multiple days of EyePet in a single afternoon, which is an odd feeling.

With each new day comes a message from Professor EyePet, congratulating you on your excellent work and usually providing you with some kind of new toy to play with. Most interesting of these is the magic crayon: you draw an outline on a piece of paper - with a thick black pen, one of which I needed to nip out and buy - then hold it up to the screen. The EyePet will copy it, only to have it pop out of the paper and turn into something else to play with. It generally works well, albeit with an extremely prescribed list of items, and the effect is remarkable. When it works, that is.

When it doesn't work it's downright aggravating. There's a challenge early on which requires the player to get their head in the frame, smile, and take a picture whilst their pet lovingly looks on. I had a few problems with this. Firstly, as the camera is pointed directly at the ground, I found I had to approach the task by lying on my back and shuffling towards the camera (the only other alternative would have been to smoosh the front of my face up against my floor, and anyone who has seen my carpet will attest to that being an experience best avoided). Despite my sterling efforts the game would simply not accept my picture - it would also not provide any feedback to inform me what was going wrong. Eventually I took so many pictures I filled up the photo album, only to discover there's no batch delete function. Rage.

There's some other interesting features, such as teaching the EyePet to sing, bowling him into pins (it's not cruel - he enjoys it) or having him float across the screen in a bubble. But the biggest problem is that all feels more akin to some fancy tech demo rather than a series of events bound together to make a cohesive, enjoyable experience. Like a game.

And despite being an obvious showcase for some fancy technology, EyePet finds itself woefully lacking in certain areas. There's understandably some support for downloading trinkets from the PlayStation Store, but there's also absolutely no feature for sharing captured photos and videos other than exporting to the PlayStation's hard drive and going from there. There's no sense of community, either, with no online profiles, friends' browser or ability to swap items. It's completely out of touch with the Web 2.0 generation, and feels even more jarring after Sony utilised community spirit so effectively in last year's LittleBigPlanet.

But it's hard to stay mad at a title so adorable. Perhaps it's the viciously saccharine soundtrack, the relentless enthusiasm of the creature itself or the simple pleasure attained from completing tasks, but I found myself completely entranced by the game on numerous occasions. Admittedly it's more of a charming toy than a game, and its many occasional quirks will definitely put a strain on a user's patience. It also has very little long-term appeal. Still, when it all clicks in place it's quite easily the fluffiest, most lovable experience you're going to get on Sony's black monolith.

And you get a camera with it.

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