Eyepet is a PSP game that makes use of the PSP camera to help you interact in your home environment with a pet creature that sort of resembles a monkey. Using the special card that comes with the game, you’ll need to focus the PSP camera with the card centered in the field of vision. From there, you’ll name your pet, watch it hatch and learn how to care for and play with it.
The main ways to interact with your pet are to play certain mini-games with it, such as bowling, driving, fishing, trampoline, flowers, treasure hunt and sailing. You can place the card on any flat surface you wish, and by pointing the PSP and camera and card at it, the game will generate the appropriate play event. It gives a nice illusion that your Eyepet is interacting with your environment, but you’ll need to keep the system steadily focused on the special card, or else the action will be interrupted.
We particularly enjoyed the fishing mini-game, in which you work together with your Eyepet, who causes fish to jump out of a virtual small pond, and it’s up to you to catch them in your net. Once you catch the fish, you can display them in a fishtank back in the Eyepet’s virtual home. In other games, you may use the joystick or directional pad to help the pet jump on trampolines, or drive a car around a small track.
Although it’s mostly just a fun novelty, you could make the argument that PSP helps teach players compassion and responsibility as they need to look out and care for their pet. At the very least, it puts players in the mindset of thinking about another creature (albeit virtual), and we think that has some educational value.
We do feel compelled to point out a couple of technical issues we had with Eyepet. As with many PSP games, load times can seem to take a really long time. We can normally live with this, but twice during the creation phase of our pet, we kept and waiting and waiting and eventually had to restart, because the game stalled out. Because load times are so long, it wasn’t immediately clear that the game wasn’t working. It was frustrating to have to go through the entire opening sequence repeatedly, with no way to skip through since we had already created a pet. In fact, we had to start over completely.
Overall, we think Eyepet is a very cute and novel video game concept, and really enjoy seeing the pet as part of whatever environment we point the PSP camera at. There are a number of fun little mini-games that help keep your pet happy, and there’s at least some satisfaction in knowing that you are helping care for another creature, even if it is virtual. We think there’s a neat opportunity for parents to play together with younger kids, who may not be able to aim the PSP precisely enough, and we definitely think that kids and tweens will enjoy this a fun, different way to play PSP.