“I like it, but I don’t remember where I put it.”

Quoted directly from my 7-year-old son, who has fond, but fleeting memories of playing Plushees (Destineer, 2008), a virtual land full of beanie-baby-esque fuzzy things that almost resemble the small collectible bean-filled critters found at most card and gift shops.

Game play is very simple, perhaps too simple to keep older kids engaged for long.  There are essentially only two activities in single-person play; Arcade and Plushee Play.  In the arcade, play is rewarded with tickets, much like your kid’s favorite mouse-themed pizza parlor, and these tickets can be redeemed for additional features in the game.  If enough tickets are earned, additional fuzzy friends can be accumulated.

There is a limit to the number of friends you can buy – 26.  Buy ‘em all and you’re pretty much wrapped up with the game.   Move on, folks, there’s nothing more to see.  In Plushees, though, the tickets are worth more than the aforementioned mouse-themed pizza parlor.  The most expensive Plushee pal will only set you back around 1,000 of those tickets.  Compare that to the pizza joint.

Unlike the real arcade, though, Plushees arcade only has four games; alley-ball (similar to skee-ball), Ka-Plinko (a pachinko machine derivative), Pop-A-Loon, which is little more than stylus-tapping of balloon-shaped objects, and Whack-A-Troll, where the object to be ‘whacked’ strongly resembles a green, shabbily-dressed ogre character with a bad Scottish accent popularized in recent full-length animated motion pictures.

In Plushee Play, the activities Simon Says, Jump Rope, Hide-N-Seek and Butterfly Catch will earn you Plushee Points, which can be converted to tickets, with a conversion rate that seems to vary, somewhere around 25 Plushee Points to 1 ticket.  Perhaps it is using the Nintendo DS WiFi capability to access Forex and link today’s foreign exchange rates.  Unclear.

The games, either in the Arcade or Plushee Play,  are all stylus-oriented, involving tapping and sliding, which means younger kids who still haven’t developed fine motor control will play with ease.

There is also a multi-player feature that takes advantage of the Wifi communications of the Nintendo DS, although both players must have a Plushees game cartridge.  Its called Playtime, and allows you and your friends to take your Plushee pals you’ve acquired and romp through a virtual kingdom, with a castle, grass and trees, but this feature is VERY limited; players cannot play arcade games together, or even enter the castle.

I was disappointed in these limitations at first, but much to my surprise and the saving grace for this game perhaps, is that kids simply LOVE the ability to take their Plushees they’ve collected and run and chase each other around.  We had two cartridges and two kids captive in the back seat on some long car rides, and both were fully entertained by simply running their characters around in this virtual garden with the decorative castle.  No rules, no puzzles - just Plushees running and hugging.

Plushees is a best bet for younger kids, between 5 and 8 as a rule of thumb.  The low cost of ownership - $18.99 at Amazon as of this review – make this so-so activity a bit more appealing.  But don’t expect your kids to be engaged by this game’s level depth or puzzle-solving.  Not happening.  Expect a game where a kid can be a kid and just play around – in a virtual non-mouse-themed pizza parlor sort of sense.