3-in-1 Chicken Review

Here's my usual little intro for this pet. I'd never seen or heard of this pet before I purchased it from a stall at a local market. As usual it was more of an accident that I found it, but picked it up cheap I only paid maybe $5-$6 Australian.


Name: 3-in-1 Chicken
Manufacturer: Unknown
Produced:Unknown
Country of origin: Unknown


Aesthetics:
This Pet is in one of the cutest shell designs I've come across. Its a Little half hatched chicken design, with a comb from its head and little feet sticking out the bottom.The eggshell is white, with green speckles and pink buttons. The pink buttons always seemed out of place with the green, but this doesn't detract much from the visual appeal of the pet. This she design is available in another colour, with red speckles.

The background is a bit plain,with green bands along the top and bottom of the screen along where the icons are, but considering the colours of the rest of the toy, this it quite fitting. It was also available in 2 other shell designs with a penguin and a dinosaur.As was popular with V-Pets of the 90's it has an attached ball chain loop at the top to be attached to keys or other handy items.

*Creatures*
The characters in this game are cute but sometimes a little ambiguous as to what they are, partially because of their simplicity, partially because I'm not sure if the creatures are linear in their growth i.e the bird looks like a bird through all its life cycle (as i thought i had a bird but all of a sudden it changed to a dinosaur).
There are 15 available characters , 1 for each life stage of each of the three choices of egg. The three potential final characters are a penguin, a dinosaur and a chicken.


*Icons*
These icons are the standard pictogram's you find with any pet. They do have a fair bit of detail though, the alarm clock representing the "call" icon has little increments on the clock and even the bells and ringer have tiny little sticks attaching them.


*Sound and Sound quality*
The sounds are possibly the biggest downfall of this V-pet, Ive found they are a bit monotonous, and are a very dull sounding beep.Its a bit loud and thankfully it has an included sound off function, the main problem with this sound off function is that the pet when waking up with automatically turn it back on again and beep like crazy.



Game-play:
The game play is about standard for most V-pets of the 90's. It has one really interesting part of its game play, its the clock function. For this game the clock looses an hour overnight, and you have to put it back an hour when the pet awakes. Ive found that it can be a bit annoying, especially if like me, you use your V-pets to keep time.

I personally think this part of the game was because the clock function was designed a bit dodgy.
The games for keeping up the "Mood" gauge are a basic guess the direction game and a little more difficult "Rock, Paper, Scissors" game.
The gauges that show the standard of care have an interesting addition, as this includes the pet needing regular water.

* Life stages*
Upon starting up the choice of three eggs is given, you pick an egg and it will hatch into a standard little black blob character for the first stage of any of the choices, again this is a demanding stage and close attention it required.It needs food, water and play regularly, as well as one short cycle of sleep requiring you to put the clock back.

At any stage, playing with the v-pet is very easy particularly where you must push the button in relations to what direction the pet is facing, this is very very easy as the pet is slow moving and you can win it almost every time. The rock,paper scissors game is harder as you have to hit the button in time to stop the hand icon of the right choice to beat the stationary hands choice. The game play is pretty standard and doesn't change as the pet grows.

*Buttons*
This V-pet is a traditional 3 buttons unit, the first being menu, the second being confirm and the third being cancel. the first and third buttons double as directional buttons in the direction game.


*Resilience*
This pet is pretty difficult to kill, I did manage to neglect it to death once, but this was due to its clock function being out for a few days and it waking up in the night and not being checked and eventually dying. It is more demanding in its baby stage and therefore more susceptible to neglect. Any of the other life stages are a little more hardy and give you quite some time between getting sick and dying.

Additional features:

Clock-Yes
Connectability-No
Sound on/off-Yes
Pause-No

I really like the 3 in one chicken, its a bit more relaxed than most pets and I could take care of it at work on breaks and it would still be fine. Its a very cute, good quality pet and besides the clock and annoying sound, care of this pet is enjoyable.
Sound can be turned on and off but its a bit unreliable if you are up early and forget to wake the pet up and turn the sound back off. The fact that the pet has a max age of 119 makes it fun if you like a longer term V-pet.

May also enjoy:Tamagotchi P1
Nano pets
Gureichi alien