#keychain pet

Does anyone still remember this toy from 2005-2006? I had the bird one as a kid, and later bought the cat one a few years ago, together with this turtle one:

This turtle one is a later version that came out in 2007, and comes with different maps, games and objectives. Apparently the only difference is that one of them is called the ‘LPS Digital Pet’ and the other, ‘LPS Digital Pets’.

So anyway, I recently dug these two out and put batteries in them. I never played the newer version as a kid, so I decided to play with that one first. While the objective of the earlier version was to visit various parts of the town to play various minigames and earn stickers, the objective of the second one is to just find the 10 lost animals around the island. In order to find them, you have to clear certain minigames on the different maps, but you don’t know which games they are, so you essentially have to go visit all the maps and play all the games to find them all.

And so I did, and I found all the 10 animals and ‘beat’ the game, and was greeted with a cool animation of my pet turtle bringing the 10 turtles he found into the LPS shop, along with some upbeat music.

So I decided to try to ‘beat’ the game on the older version too. In the older one, you have to complete the same minigame multiple times to earn stickers. Some stickers were earnt from interacting with certain objects, though. Also, all but the last sticker in each set is earnt from playing the games. The last one is only earnt after you have all but the last sticker, and then being invited back to the place you played the game at. Some of the stickers needed to be earnt from playing with the same object at different places. The ball and the koala fence stickers are two of them. (Oh boy, the ball game was pretty merciless too, as you have to make sure it lands on only one specific part of your pet’s head. And one mistake and you’ll have to restart.)

The newer version certainly eased things a lot more, as you only have to play the minigame once, and it doesn’t have to be all of them.

The problem with the older one was that a lot of games were luck-based rather than skill-based. From the top of my head, the luck-based games included:

- a fence game where your pets hides behind 3 fences and you have to guess which one it’s behind

- a carrot game where you have to select 1 of 4 carrots that you think is the big one (it showed you the answer after you guess)

- a pillow game where there are 3 pillows and the bone is under one of them

- a buried bone game where you have to choose 3 pits and guess which one the bone is buried in

- a bush game where you have to guess where the koala is hiding (this one showed you the answer after you guess too)

These were seriously the most difficult stickers to get due to their random nature.

However, I eventually realised that these games were not completely random. I noticed that it followed a particular pattern, which makes sense as I didn’t think the programmers were actually able to make it random. It seemed like the patterns went in a certain order, say 3-2-3-1-1-3, as an example. The game would randomly choose one position to start from, so in one game, it might be 1-1-3, and in another game, 2-3-1, just to give an example.

The koala fence game, where the answer is revealed regardless of whether you guess right or wrong, was what caused me to realised that. I immediately took down notes of the pattern, and did the same for the rest of the luck-based games, though it was more difficult as it doesn’t show the answer after your guess. The carrot one, while more difficult due to there being 4 choices, became immediately easy for me after I figured out what the pattern was.

In case anyone else is still playing with their LPS Digital Pets in 2021 (or beyond), I shall share my notes on the patterns that I have taken down:

Carrot game:

322413432

Buried bone game (a few different patterns I found. ‘X’ are for unknown values.)

22X1

X22XX3

2X3

333231

Pillow bone game:

1331

(Tip: To ‘cheat’, if you get a wrong choice on your first selection, insert either the food or the brush into the device to cancel the game and start over until you get it right on your first selection. Really helped in allowing me to figure out the patterns.)

So yeah, I played all the games for the specific number of times, got all the stickers, and completed my sticker book, and guess what I got?

Drumroll, please.

................

Nothing.

That’s right. No cool animation or music to congratulate me on completing the sticker book.

This is why I shouldn’t have played the newer version first.........