Toy Shop

Toy Shop, a new simulation game for Nintendo DS, attempts to show the inner workings of what goes on before childhood superheroes are born. As the owner for a toy store, you build every plaything from scratch, throw it onto the shelf, and hope parents are willing to pay whatever price you slap on the box. It’s an industry tradition that has occurred every year since the first toys were invented. And now you’re at the helm.

Toy Story

Before your store is opened and ready for business, you’ll step into your workshop and get to work on the first batch of items. Only a handful are available at the start – a doll, a train, and other primitive playthings. You’ll gain access to modern-day action figures, toy spiders, sharks, and other goodies after making an insane amount of the toys that are currently available.

I don’t know if it was the kid in me, the gamer in me (who loves strategy and simulation games), or some unexplainable oddity, but there was something that made me want to see which toys were available. I spent hours trying to find out, a fact that will surprise gamers (of any age) when they learn what this means.

As store clerk, you do nothing. You can click the Open/Closed sign, align shelves with various toy offerings, and choose how to furnish your store (shelves, boxes, display cases, etc.). But all of that takes no more than a few seconds to complete. It isn’t something that has to be managed constantly. Basically, if you have enough toys in stock, you can click the Open sign at 9am, leave for five minutes, and return at closing time (7pm game time) to see how much cash was raked in. It’s a do-it-yourself experience, and the game does most everything on its own.

This doesn’t make a whole lot of sense at first, but there’s a reason why the store runs itself. While the female character enjoys the sound of every cha-ching, the male character is off making toys. By switching over to him, you’ll now be in charge of D-pad manufacturing: painting, hammering, clamping, and some other tool whose icon I couldn’t quite decipher. These four actions are assigned to each of the four D-pad buttons: up, down, left and right.

Down with the D-pad

If you’re in the market for a full train set, which has a five-second manufacturing rating, you could put down your DS and walk away. The game produces everything you tell it to (by dropping toy icons into the toy manufacturing slot) automatically. Which must make you wonder: why would anyone ever intervene?

Because if you don’t, the full five seconds will be taken with every train. Before you know it, a lot of time has gone by, a lot of money has been spent (toys aren’t made for nothing – you’ll have to spend some of your starting cash and profits to make them), and not very many toys have been made.

Players will be especially aware of their funds in the early part of the game, which is presented yearly and separated into four 30-day seasons. Trains and dolls do well in the spring. Not much else will sell. You can spend the whole time working on those items, but then you’ll be in trouble when summer hits. In the summer, kids wants stuff they can use outside, like a blowup water tube. But you’ll have to manufacture other, less significant toys before the tube becomes available. And you’ll have to do that while dealing with customers who want trains and dolls – which must also be manufactured.

By hitting specific parts of the D-pad as various icons are thrown onto the screen, players can reduce the amount of time it takes to manufacture each toy. As you can imagine, this is less fun than watching wet cement dry. There aren’t any rhythmic elements applied, nor does the game do anything to make the excessive D-pad antics anything more than the most mundane experience you’ll ever have.

As Easy as a Plaything

Desperately seeking a smidgen of challenge, Toy Shop prohibits toy growth with a percentage-based system that calculates the likelihood that a toy can be manufactured successfully. Every toy begins at 9%. And every failed attempt costs just as much as a toy that’s finished and thrown onto a shelf. In other words, you’re going to waste a lot of time – and a lot of money – trying to manufacture toys that will not be completed. The only way to increase your percentage is to continue making toys that don’t want to be made. It’s a punch-yourself-in-the-face experience. You’re battling against yourself. There is no enemy, no competitor, and not a single overarching goal to achieve.

What do you get for all your hard work? Nothing. If you’re careless and run of money, your characters’ parents will offer financial aid. It’s the video game equivalent of when a nation’s government steps in to stop a corporation from going bankrupt. However necessary this may be in the real world (a debatable issue for another time and place), it teaches gamers that they don’t have to be their best. They can be lazy and be saved in the end, because there’s no such thing as “game over” in this world.

And let’s be real: do the screenshots, childish box art, or anything I’ve had to say in this review sound like something any gamer will be dying to get their hands on? Kids will be bored to tears. Adults will wish it were an object in Grand Theft Auto they could destroy. Teens will laugh it off and go back to playing Halo. That leaves…grandma and grandpa, who are too busy playing Wii Sports Tennis to eye a game that will surely put them to sleep.

In fact, that’s just what it did. While waiting for the game to manufacture 40 action figures (I eventually tired of pressing the D-pad and vowed to avoid this play style), I decided to grab a pillow and lay down. Next thing I knew, a few hours had passed. But since you can’t program the game to work multiple days consecutively, just one game day had passed, and only a handful of action figures had been manufactured.