NeoPets

"NeoPets: Your Anti-Life"

Neopets is the largest online pet community on the web. Once a wonderful website with a caring staff, Neopets is now a shadow of its former self.

Gameplay 7/10
The wierd thing about Neopets is, it's not really that fun, but it's totally addicting. You could say that it's like a drug... Anyway, when you first start out you'll have some fun feeding and playing with your pet. However, this gets tiring by the end of your first month or two. This first month makes or breaks your time on NeoPets 90% of the time. If you learn the secrets of Neopets and start accumulating lots of Neopoints (the currency used in Neopets), then you will likely play on for a year or two. If however, you stay a newbie and only make about 100,000 Neopoints (NP) in the month, you'll probably quit the game and move on to better things.

The great thing about Neopets is the variety of things you can do. You can train your pet and start fighting in the battledome, or you can start collecting items with similar properties and create a gallery! Maybe you want to earn as many trophies as you can playing the Flash games! You have numerous ways to spend your time.

However, the bit about trophies brings me to my next point, the Flash games on Neopets really stink. 99% of them are just classic games like Snake or Bust-A-Move with Neopets characters in them. Some, like in the case of the Bust-A-Move rip-off, are much worse than the originals! Also, most of the games are very tedious and half the time, high scores are more a test of patience than skill. As this is the largest source of income for newbies (It's chickenfeed once you learn how to make some real cash), this is very disappointing.

My last point is about the whole game as a whole. The Neopets Team (TNT) seems to deprove more things than the improve. The restock system for example is the largest source of income for experienced players, however Neopets changes it to “give newbies a chance at grabbing items.” All this did however, was make it more boring for experienced restockers to make money and still gave the newbies nothing. The restock system has been degraded multiple times and is laughable. Hopefully someone will teach the saying “If it's not broken, DON'T FIX IT!”

Control 9/10
You click with a mouse, how hard is that? The only thing wrong is that sometimes navigation is tough due to the large amount of maps to go through. However, after a while you learn where your favourite spots are and can click them without even the pictures loading.

Graphics 9/10
The artists on the staff seem to be the ones that do actual work. The various maps are well designed, and they're being updated to even nicer and more detailed areas. The pets are also very well drawn along with the tens of thousands of items on the site. Even through all this, not many parts of the website lag too much, which is a good thing as all of Neopets is done on the internet.

Sound 8/10
There is no sound, which is perfect. Many people listen to music on the internet, and music on Neopets would just be annoying. However, users sometimes put music in their usershops, which is one of the most aggravating things on the site. It makes the webpage slower to load and then annoying to listen to. I do however wish they'd put some sounds into the plots they do in Flash.

Lifeline 8/10
I've been playing this game for about 3 years now. That's a long time. However, in those three years I've been frozen for one. This is the biggest killer of the lifeline. TNT freezes without thinking. Newbies (most of the website) go without knowing all this, because they aren't targetted too often. After a year however, you start seeing friends of yours frozen for no apparent reason. There are stupid reasons for being frozen like “being off-topic on the NeoBoards” to “cheating on Flash Games” when you haven't played a Flash game in months. It's come to a point where even playing a Flash game or posting on the NeoBoards is a large risk. TNT needs to vastly improve their freezing bots or they will lose many of their valuable players (more than they already have).

Overall 8/10
You'll need to make a lot of friends on the website for it to stay fun. Most of my friends (real life and online) have quit, so I find myself playing it less and less. It is however a free game, so I'd recommend you to try it out. Just remember not to let it interfere with work or school =)

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 10/20/04