L.B. Jeffries writes:
"There's a mountain of stuff they could have done with this game. They could take the Pokemon route and have your pets compete in competitions. They could take the pet sim route and have each pet interact and depend on your daily care. They could have the animals get jealous, they could have them fight with each other. But walking from animal to animal for the sake of a few photos and low key mini-games doesn't even create a reward structure strong enough to sustain beating the game the first time. These aren't action figures; you can only manipulate an animal with your imagination so much when it's stuck on a screen all by itself. I may not be a kid, and I may not even be a parent, but in either case you want a game that is worth playing not just once, but numerous times. Animal Paradise delivers the same thing to the player that it does for unlocking content: cute images and sounds that don't ever amount to much of anything."
Zoo Games, Inc. today announced the opening of a European office in Bushey, Hertfordshire, England. This division will be called 'Zoo Entertainment Europe Limited'. The parent company Zoo Games, Inc. has undergone a rapid period of growth in North America and this new office will enable them to become a major player in the European casual gaming market.
The game is based upon the photography of Yoneo Morita, who popularized the Hana Deka style of photos, which means "big nose" in Japanese. Hana Deka might not be a term familiar to western players, and while you might think you're not familiar with Morita's photography, chances are that you've seen it just about everywhere. It's the fish eye style of animal photos that shows them with enormously huge heads attached to pictures of various creatures, and while the popularity has fallen off a bit in recent years, there's still plenty of merchandise out there that sports this look, so it's no surprise that someone thought it would be a great idea to make a video game out of it.
Photography-centric games are uncommon, but when they show up, they're usually pretty damn good. Pokemon Snap, Fatal Frame, Beyond Good and Evil, Dark Cloud 2… these are all games that utilized photography as a gameplay mechanic and were much better games because of it. The latest photographic game, Animal Paradise, on the other hand, breaks this chain by being a game about animal photography that doesn't actually let you photograph the animals in question. Instead, you're merely going through a few simple minigames to get them ready.
