And so it begins: an intro

Meet Meg! I'm 21 and I collect toys, but for this blog I'm going to focus on my obsession with virtual pets.

I'm sure most people who stumble across this will have a good idea of what a virtual pet is ( Either you've owned one, had a kid who has owned one or even just seen a TV advertizement).
I'm sure lots of my fellow collectors will also come across this page.

For those who don't , a virtual pet is usually a small pocket-to -handheld size electronic toy in a plastic shell which emulates the care of a pet or other creature (feeding, cleaning, playing with etc.). It will often contain mini games and other interesting aspects. They can range from very simple (basic black and green style LCD screen,simple game play and cute child like graphics), to very advanced (connectible game play with , Colour LCD and more advanced graphics).

Virtual pet gained their popularity in the late 90's, this is where I come in. When I was in primary school (think grades 1-7 for the American readers), if you didn't have a Tamagotchi, you were out of the loop. I was out of the loop. This I think explains that now I have disposable adult income, I devote a lot of time and money to these toys.

It wasn't till 1998 when I got my first V-pet, a nano kitty clone, My younger sister got a Genuine Gyaopii II pet about the same time.About 2000 we both got version 5 Digimon, and in 2004 we got Digimon pendulum. My poor mum ended up looking after them most of the time.

From that point up until about 2 years ago I didn't give them another thought.Until, whilst I worked in a Big W department store I saw a Tamagotchi version 4 for 5 dollars each. I got two just for little nostalgia and 10 dollars for an afternoons worth of fun is good enough value for me.

Only this year did I start collecting V-pets seriously.At this present time I own approximately 70 pets, and it is steadily growing by about 5 new pets a week.

In this blog I intend to do a weekly review of different pets ( I tend to have one different pet running per week, and life cycles of most pets never run for more than one week).I will also catalogue my collection, suggest good places to obtain V-pets and maybe do some trade and sale.I don't mind constructive criticism, as long as it is constructive.

For this week I'll go back to the beginning and review an early Tamagotchi pet circa 1997.