NeoPets

"Damn you, Pikachu!"

Look what you did, you stupid yellow rat. You spawned tons of crappy games, and even worse TV shows. They don’t even have to be monsters in the story line for the show or game to be terrible. Take Card Captors, for example. That show is crap. The new one, “Yugio-Oh-Wah” something or other looks like crap. Digimon is just a smidgen better then the rest of the monsters crap. We have Cubix, which is laugh out loud terrible. Now, we have Neopets. Billed as “The Greatest Virtual Pet Site on the Internet”, Neopets grabs you and doesn’t let go till you sacrificed many hours of your life.

Never dull.
There is always something happening on Neopets, let it be a new land, story, or game. The stories that they put up are actually interesting, and I found myself following them. When they finally released the Battle Dome, they had a week long story about a group of pets searching for it. A while back, they were working on opening a new world, The Lost Desert. They ran a two-week story about Brucey B (A Neopet) and two of his friends searching for it. Right now at Neopets, a new pirate filled world has been discovered, and a skeleton pirate has been screwing around with Neopia. The stories are very well thought out, and are surprisingly fun to follow.
STORY SCORE (10/10)

This is surprisingly original for being a monster game clone.
You got over 40 Neopets to choose from when you start to play, but you can only have four at a time. The Neopets are all somewhat original, and are really neat looking. Sure, you know that they must have a dragon Neopet on the site. Dragons are cool to the target audience. But, Neopets goes a step forward and makes the dragon look fairly original and a pleasure to look at. Don’t you need toys and food and other items to use on your Neopets? Neopets takes care of it. Neopets has an amazing amount of items at your disposal, ranging from the tasty Green Apple to the rare Codestone. These items are well designed, and have surprised me more then a few times. The worlds are all neat to mosey around in. Each world has a theme, such as the tropical island to a mysterious space station. I must admire the artists on this site. They must have one hell of a sore hand.
NEOPET, WORLD, AND ITEM DESIGN (10/10)

Oh… this is why it gets a 7.
Gameplay… um… isn’t good. They have good ideas, but they are not executed properly. You are allowed to adopt or create 4 pets, name them, and take care of them. You can feed them, read them books, play with them, or use them in the Battle Dome. You get a whole hell of a lot of options in Neopia. Things in Neopia cost money. You use the site currency, Neopoints, to buy the items and play games with your cute and cuddly pets. You must go to a store to buy things, thus bringing us to the first problem. Let me give you this simple equation.

Fast Computers + The Shops = People who manage to buy A LOT.

Now, here is the second equation.

Slow Computers + The Shops = Angry, frustrated users because all the good items were bought by people with fast computers.

The shops are stocked with a set amount of items. You click on the items, and a haggle screen pops up where you can barter with the shopowner, and lower the price. Those with the fast computers will blaze through this while those with slow computers will be told “Item is SOLD OUT”. That itself is a pain in the ass. Now, the second problem… those with fast computers hoard the good, rare items and shove them in their shops and sell them for an insane amount of NP. The means the slow computers to wander to the fast computer’s shops and shell out a lot of NP to get that faerie they have been wanting. On the plus side, it is impossible to be really poor. The games they have are really fun and easy, and most of them give you a good amount of NP if you win. They have over 80 games, so there has to be a game over at Neopets that you are good at. If they found a way to fix the shops so people with fast computers wouldn’t have a high advantage, this would have gotten a 10.
GAMEPLAY SCORE (7/10)

Tons of games = Always something fun
Neopets has an estimated 80+ games on the site. The only bad thing is that the games are terrible on REALLY slow computers. If your computer is at average speed, then the games should be fine. Every game is different, and offers different challenge levels. If you do not find a game at Neopets that you are good at, you must have no skill. Honestly, the games vary so much that there has to be a game that you are good at. The game’s graphics and originality levels are high, and fun to play and practice at. Also, if you are REALLY good at a game, you can win a neat little trophy!
GAME SCORE (9/10)

Well…
Next is the sound, right? Well, my speakers are crazy. They don’t work, and haven’t worked in months. So, I honestly can’t rate the sound.
SOUND SCORE (?/10)

Pretty confusing to the newbies, but if you have patience you can do it.
When I introduced Neopets to my friends, they kept coming up to me and asking me how to go places and do things. Admittedly, the site layout is pretty confusing. It took me about 2 months to finally get the whole site layout down in my head, and to this day I still have a tiny bit of problems.
SITE LAYOUT SCORE (7/10)

Control? Duh.
You use a mouse. You click. Duh.
CONTROL SCORE (10/10)

Terrible, terrible, terrible way of promoting sponsors.
Oh ho, this is the worst. Neopets thrive on sponsorship. You sign up with their sponsors, they get cash and you get NP. The good thing is you usually get an item or NP for every sponsor you sign up with. The bad thing is that this lands with a whole lot of our enemy, spam. I go to check my email every day and I have over 40+ messages from the sponsors I signed up with at Neopets. Another bad thing is that they continue to promote the same sponsor ALL THE TIME. I am reminded of the Million NP offer, where a million NP was going to be awarded to random people who signed up with a certain sponsor. Sadly for me though, I already have signed up with that sponsor. I vainly attempted to sign up with it again to be entered in the Million NP offer, but I got “This email already has an account” message on the sponsor sign up form. To make matters worse, you must have entered your email that you used when you signed up with Neopets to be entered in the Million NP offer. They continue to promote the same sponsors to this day, and that is very, very frustrating. I’ve tried emailing them about this, but I got no response. If you’re under 13, forget about it. You can’t sign up with barely any of the sponsors on the site, so you are left in the dust while others sign up to get NP and items.
SPONSERSHIP PROMOTION SCORE (1/10)

Any teenybopper with a hacking program can get your account.
Security is low. I admire the staff for blocking some of the hacking programs as much as they can, but new hacking programs are being built each day. They gets point for Security simply because they try as hard as they can to keep accounts safe.
SECURITY SCORE (8/10)

Are you a Neoholic?
Depending on your age, Neopets has different replay values. If you’re a little teenybopper (9-12), odds are that you’ll be playing this every day as much as you can. If you’re above teenybopper age, you’ll be content with just coming on to feed your pets and play games for a few minutes.
REPLAY VALUE (1-10/10)

NOTES:
If this wins ROTW, I’ll rip off my pants and spank an alligator.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 09/27/01, Updated 09/27/01