Jugaccino

Following the huge success of the Electronic Arts game  for the Nintendo DS, Littlest Pet Shop, the developers have now announced that they will be adding another game to its stack in the form of Littlest Pet Shop Spring in March 2009.

The launch clearly follows in the footsteps and success of its predecessor games; Littlest Pet Shop Winter, Garden and Jungle, each available on the DS, Wii and PC platforms.

This latest version of the game is, sorry lads, aimed at girls aged between 6 and 9 and has been inspired, the developers say, by the Hasbro Inc toy line.  As the name suggests, the game will be based in a beautiful, Spring environment and will feature six new pets for the players to have fun with.

Vice President and General Manager of Electronic Arts, Chip Lange, claimed that the new game couldn’t NOT be made as the public demand was so high.  “The response to our Littlest Pet Shop video games has been overwhelmingly positive and shown that girls want quality games, too.  The team has been barraged with fan mail and girls are already clamouring for the next version so they can keep expanding their Littlest Pet Shop digital collection. We think they’ll be really excited about the Spring theme and it is scheduled to land at retail just in time to hop into Easter baskets,” said Lange.

The General Manager of Digital Media and Gaming at Hasbro, Mark Blecher, has applauded Electronic Arts on such a successful set of releases, saying, “EA has done a tremendous job of taking one of the most popular toy brands among young girls and bringing it to life on digital platforms.  The performance of the first wave of LITTLEST PET SHOP games launched in 2008 was amazing and we don’t expect the momentum behind this property to slow down anytime soon.”

It’s true, it is sad that the game is a tad on the sexist side when it announces that its target audience is girls.  Never a day goes by where I don’t whip out My Little Pony and have a good old trot around the living room, but I suppose sometimes you have to stand back and let the girls have some fun too.

The game is set to feature four new mini-games and 20 new accessories, such as hats, scarves and glasses.

Nintendo, and in particular the DS console, has been at the forefront of backing weird and different ideas.  The Wii and DS in themselves are very different gaming consoles compared to the likes of the tried and tested PlayStations and Xboxs.  Nintendo wanted to push the boundaries of game playing by trying to bring the player into the experience as much as possible.  It seems as though the Littlest Pet Shop group of games has been one of those boundary pushing releases as well and has clearly proved to be an almighty success.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 6th, 2009 at 3:45 pm and is filed under Game Development, Gaming, Nintendo DS. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.