I saw this app on the apples itunes store, and as I grew up in the era of the first tamagotchis I was really intrigued. I searched for reviews on it, and everything I had found seemed the people had given up on it after half an hour. My first thought was, if it was anything like the original tamagotchis it takes time. Otherwise you’re just going to be staring at an egg for a few hours.

The iGotchi (currently playing with a soccerball)

And thus I decided I would dedicate time to learn about the application, use it over a period of a week and really give it a chance. Not just immediately deem it a failure and move on. After all, it’s been the number 1 app for a long time (since I started pining for my iphone and checking for new apps almost every day). Surely there has to be more to it than just a furball? The curiosity was killing me.

So I bought it.

Settings found within iGotchi

The name - when you first create your iGotchi you have to name it. This can’t be changed during the lifetime of your igotchi. As you can see here I’ve named mine “Turbo” after my dog in real life.

The colour – you have a choice of Brown, Pink and Green. Choosing the colour impacts not only your igotchi, but the colour of the menus and various buttons within the program. I tested it out by changing the colour of my igotchi a few times, here’s an image of a pink one (it’s currently eating – hence the table of bananas and apples).

Maintenance level - good idea to include this. For those who want to be checking in on their igotchi’s a LOT then you can choose high maintenance (something akin to having a Paris Hilton igotchi), or for something less severe there’s Medium and Low.

Giggle type – this is with regards to the noise the igotchi makes when you tickle it’s belly (more on that later). I left it on New, the original one was a little annoying, whereas the new one I tended to find a bit silly and enjoyed it more.

That’s basically all you need to do when you first get your iGotchi. After that, the furball is created and away you go. You can feed it, give it drinks, play a game (there’s 3 to choose from), “give it love”, or make it exercise (in the form of dancing). Otherwise, when the program is idel it will just remain on the screen entertaining itself. Sometimes you might catch it with a soccer ball, or dancing by itself.

To ensure your iGotchi is at peak hunger/thirst/love/health levels there is a statistics menu displaying a status bar for each.

The status bar for the iGotchi

Food is pretty obvious – whether or not you’ve fed the furball. To feed it you simply double tap on the burger icon in the main window (holding your finger down on the second tap) then drag it to the furball. You can just tap the burger icon to feed it, but it’s got a novelty value that when you double tap you get to see the products that you bought from the shop. I’ve noticed that depending on what you feed the furball it can react different ways. Sometimes it will make a munching sound, but when I fed it beans it farted. At first I thought I had heard wrong, but subsequent feedings of beans have also produced the sound. Cute.

Water is also self explanatory, how thirsty the furball is. Once again you can buy items from the shop, double tap the glass icon in the main window and drag it to the iGotchi to see the icons for what you bought. Or just single tap. Whatever takes your fancy. I don’t think I’ve heard it burp (to rival the farting noise for eating), just slurping sounds. But I didn’t really experiment that much.

Love is how much attention you give to your iGotchi. As mentioned above with the giggle types, if you tickle your furball’s belly (by moving your finger up and down in the area where it’s belly roughly is) it will start to laugh. This can be quite cute, Mat even had a crack at this. Also, you can rub the iGotchi’s head side to side and it will make a purring noise. Keep these activities up and your “love” bar (doesn’t that just sound wrong!) will stay at it’s max.

Health is a combination of a few things. Is it getting enough exercise, and are you feeding it healthy items. Each food/drink has a rating “junk food/healthy/very healthy”, so too many junk food items (which are usually cheaper funnily enough – just like real life) will cause your iGotchi’s health to drop. To combat this, you can exercise the iGotchi by making it dance (double tapping on either side of the iGotchi in the main window to make it move side to side) or play games with it.

An image of items you can buy in the shop

There’s a shop that consists of food, drinks, games, and items you can buy. Items were things like sunglasses, or a blanket etc. I found the prices were pretty astronomical though, it was roughly 400 “gotchas” for the sunglasses, but if you have your furball on medium maintenance and you only check in on it a few times a day it’s going to take a LOT of budgeting and saving to get those glasses. The games are free thankfully, and you can choose from a see saw, merry go round, or playing volleyball. I should note that everything you do with your iGotchi you get points for – giving love, exercising, playing games. So you would have to be pretty fanatical to get a lot of points.

The Help menu for the iGotchi

I have to say I was quite impressed with the help menu though. Each category had extensive information that really helped, and was easy to understand.

The iGotchi also has a link to user forums about the program, which is where I found the answer to my most burning question. Would it grow some eyes? And unfortunately the answer was no. I discovered that unless you saved and bought those glasses, or a blanket, or whatever, the appearance of the furball was going to remain the same.

And thus it appeared my most favourite aspect of the original tamagotchi was left out. I loved seeing what the character would grow into. Did I have a chicken, a dog, cat, cow or alien? In this one there’s nothing left to the imagination, you simply have a furball.

Once I knew that (which was sadly on day 1), I only lasted 3 days before I was over it. So my overall wind up of the application is that it’s cute, it has it’s novelty value, kids might really enjoy it. But I think they’ll be over it as quick as I was – without the physical changes I can’t imagine them holding onto it for too long. Not to mention the fact I can’t imagine many 5 – 6 year olds with an iphone stuck to their bodies all day long while they get points to buy glasses.

I think the developer should work hard on building a growing mechanism into the program, it would definitely bring a spark to it. Other than that, the program is pretty good for kids. At the moment I suspect that anyone else who has bought this probably feels like they got suckered into parting with their cash, which is exactly how I feel now. Hopefully other people will be able to find this review and get a comprehensive look at the application so they can make an informed choice before purchasing it. I wish someone had gone into this much detail before I bought it. But anyway, my curiosity satisfied I can now go and search aimlessly for that next app that will keep me entertained for a few days! Enjoy!

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