Virtual Pet Reviews: Oddballz

Something funny happened, I ended up on a Wiki page listing a bunch of virtual pet games and I had this big realisation of ‘Holy crap I’ve played pretty much ALL of these’. Virtual pet games are definitely a niche special interest of mine and the idea to do a blog review series on them felt like a great idea.

I wanted to start this series with a review of one of my childhood favourite virtual pet games from the 90s, it’s Oddballz: Your Wacky Computer Petz!

Oddballz: Review

Oddballz was a CD-ROM game for Windows released in 1996. My mum bought Oddballz for me when we were hunting PC World for ‘Dogz’ (another PF.Magic title). Dogz was unavailable, so I had the choice of Catz (not really my thing) or Oddballz, which features monsters (a little more my thing).

Oddballz was a fairly simple game, upon loading up you’d have a window with a ‘Care panel’ and nothing else but a bunch of space.

Your care panel contained a bunch of eggs, toys, food and other little bits. Out of the box Oddballz only came with six eggs, these contained the pets Honker, Lips, Modvark, Quadrapus, Zott and Dynaroo. These were the only pets I ever had because you needed the internet for the others and it was ever-so-slightly before my online beginning.

You’d pick up an egg and it would immediately hatch in to your pet, eggs were just the way of choosing which pet to play with, there was no incubation or raising mechanic, in fact if you played long enough your fully aged up pets would live inside the eggs.

My favourite pet was the Dynaroo – probably because it was the closest thing to a dragon (a weird bouncy dinosaur-looking monster).

My memories of the game are admittedly hazy as hell by now, but I remember having my favourite characters and I enjoyed the fact that you could interact with them using the hand cursor to hold, pet and a double-click would call them over!

Gaming Mechanics

The only real thing to do in Oddballz was to watch your pet play around on your screen with the aid of the care panel toys. Whatever you pull out of the panel would dictate the animations and behaviour of your pet.

Most of these were fairly simple – the Oddballz would chase the ball toy around, they’d wince if you blasted them with the ice blaster (mean!) Or you’d watch them eat food if you pulled out the slime.

Some of the more fun aspects for me were the customisation options in the game. You could choose any image from your computer to be the background graphic (queue me drawing gardens and living rooms for my monsters!) and you could also paint your Oddballz different colours and come up with some pretty cute designs yourself.

Do dismiss your pet you just dragged and dropped them in to the funnel at the top of the care panel and off they’d go back in to their egg!

That’s about it as far as gaming goes. It doesn’t sound like much, and honestly it wasn’t. But I was playing Oddballz as an animal obsessed eight year old and I had a ton of fun with it. Oddballz was one of those games where it needs a kid’s imagination to really appreciate it.

Scoring

I’m grading virtual pet games that I review based on four metrics:

• Fun: Simply put, how entertaining is the game?
• Pet Design: How cute, interesting and good of a concept are the pet designs?
• Progression: What, if any, benefits are they to caring for the pets? Do they serve another in game purpose? How fulfilling is taking care of these pets?
• Replay-ability: How much would I go back to this pet game, and why.

Fun: 2/5

Oddballz is kinda questionable on the fun-level, even though I have a super soft spot for the game. I can’t imagine it holding my attention for more than five minutes as an adult. There’s a lot to look at in terms of weird and wacky animation, but when you’ve exhausted all the interaction options there really isn’t anything more to do in the game.

Pet Design: 4/5

Oddballz is so much better of a game than Cats and Dogs in terms of the ‘Pets’ themselves. Weird and wacky monsters and enough choice to find the one you like best. My favourite designs were the Dynaroo and the Zott. You could also change the colours of your monsters yourself which is a nice feature. Every time I see a rare instance of Oddballz fan-art online I immediately recognise what it is, surely that counts for something.

Progression: 0.5/5

Oddballz offers next to nothing in terms of game progression. Your pets do appear more mature after several instances of loading the game, but that’s literally it. There’s no benefit to raising the pets; they won’t die, learn tricks, grow or breed in to new pets.

This is a game from 1996 though, so how much can you hope for?

Replay-ability: 1/5

Oddballz once again, has a pretty finite number of things to do in it. As an adult reviewing the game I feel like it’s impossible to give it any rating on replay-ability. After you’ve seen what all the toys and items do, you’ve pretty much completed the game.

Final Score: 1.875

Omg that is such a low score for a game I LOVED as a child. But there’s just objectively so many better titles on my list. Oddballz was a perfectly cute little game for keeping a kid entertained on the PC but at the same time there’s a reason it never had a sequel.