Ever since Tamagotchi burst onto the scene in 1996, virtual pets have been consistently popular. The genre had humble beginnings, with tiny dot-matrix screens and limited interactions with the pets themselves, but today’s virtual pets, Nintendogs for example, use realistic polygon graphics and contain an almost endless number of ways to play with and take care of your pet —unless you’re talking about Dreamcatcher Interactive’s AniMates, possibly the least interactive virtual pet of all time.

AniMates begins with the player choosing their AniMate from the available five species: a puppy/pig hybrid, two cat/lion-style creatures, a bunny/hippo combination, or a bizarre blue alien with a huge nose. Once they’ve chosen and named their AniMate, the player gets to view their creature’s birth from a giant egg. Once the egg’s hatched, the creature must “look around” for a full minute before the player gains any control.

Not that you ever gain much control. AniMates is obviously aimed at children, so in an effort to simplify the controls, everything in the game is done by tapping the touch screen. That would be all well and good were it not for the fact that the game tends to regard your taps as mere suggestions, rather than actually controlling anything. Tapping the environment is supposed to make your creature walk that direction, but as often as not, it will just sit there and look at you. When you do manage to get it to go anywhere, it’s agonizingly slow, to the point that it can take several minutes to get anywhere you’re trying to go.

And really, there’s just not that much to do. Your AniMate has meters, Sims-style, that track its need for food, water, entertainment, bathroom trips, showers, and so on. As they steadily deplete, you must instruct the creature to wander from each meter’s specific restock point (puddles, a shower, a slide, etc) to keep them from running out. And that’s it, that’s all there is to the game. Sure, you can find a couple of shoddy minigames, but they’re all pretty boring. And you can choose to take care of multiple AniMates at once, but really, you’d just be multiplying your tedium. The environment you’re exploring doesn’t even offer any distractions, as it is a largely barren, flat wasteland, devoid of anything interesting to see or do.

AniMate’s graphics are uneven, at best. While the environment is bland and flat, the characters are fairly detailed 3D models. Ironically, they don’t animate particularly well, and only have a small set of movements. Glitches are also frequent, and can be game-breaking; one game session ended when my creature became stuck in a wall and couldn’t get away, causing him to expire from hunger and thirst (actually, he expired because I turned the system off without saving, but hunger and thirst would have gotten him eventually). The game’s sound is marginally better than its graphics, but between its one simple song and your creature’s limited range of noises, you’re better off keeping the sound turned off.

On the whole, children have shorter attention spans than adults; seeing as I struggled to remain interested approaching the 15-minute mark, I don’t know if there’s a kid out there who could pay attention to this game long enough to make it past the “looking around” sequence. With so many better choices out there (the aforementioned Nintendogs, for instance), it’s hard to recommend AniMates to any but the most hardcore virtual pet fans.

Gameplay: 3.6
Tap the screen, and sometimes something happens slowly. If that sounds like your idea of a good time, I recommend you pick up a copy of AniMates.

Graphics: 4.3
While the character models are decent and the creatures themselves are kinda cute (despite looking like the Pokemon B-team), there are plenty of bland environments, animation issues, and glitches here.

Sound: 4.7
The one song that plays constantly actually isn’t that bad; not great, but sort of sweet in a simple way. Unfortunately, since it loops constantly, you’ll get sick of it pretty quick. Your AniMate makes a small variety of squeaky sounds, all of which will get on your nerves.

Difficulty: Easy
Assuming you don’t get stuck in a wall or something, it’s pretty simple to keep your AniMate satisfied. Slow and boring, definitely, but not that difficult.

Concept: 3.7
Digital pets are nothing new. The fact that someone set out to make a digital pet game expressly for children isn’t really that astonishing.

Overall: 3.7
There are tons of better choices available for anyone looking for a digital pet game on DS. Between an utter lack of interesting activities, ridiculously slow pace, and frequent technical problems, AniMates is one to avoid.