EyePet Comes To Life

It was nearly a year ago that EyePet made it’s debut at the 2008 Leipzig Games Convention, and whilst the trailer caught a lot of people’s attention, its appearance wasn’t entirely welcome by all sections of the PlayStation community as the development of EyePet meant that Sony didn’t have the resources to develop a PS3 version of The Getaway and an interesting looking new IP called Eight Days, and instead was turning it’s attention to social gaming and projects like EyePet. Not everyone was disappointed however as the majority of people could see the fun that EyePet will bring to families, and even the most hardcore gamer can see that the wider the PlayStation’s appeal the more successful the platform will be for everybody.

Well practically a year on it’s time to check in on how the EyePet is progressing, as no doubt the title will come under closer scrutiny after Microsoft recently announced Project Natal and Milo, whilst completely different to EyePet there are surely similarities in some of the underlying technology. One big difference however, is that EyePet isn’t a concept being shown off to developers it is actually a full blown game, and will be out later this year.

Not only does it look fun to mess around with, but the game features goals and challenges, completing the challenges unlocks more in-game toys for your Pet to play with and in turn more challenges associated with these unlocked toys. One of the more interesting things you can do with your Pet is to draw objects on a piece of paper which when held up to the camera will be copied by your pet, and will come to life for your pet to interact with, draw a car and the Pet will jump in and you can drive it around with the PS3 controller, draw a plane it’ll jump in and again you can fly it.

The cuteness of the EyePet means that Sony are aiming this at the family market particularly those with younger children, but it’s not hard to see that the underlying technology will have uses in a variety of future games and applications. I predict great things for EyePet and firmly believe it will be a system seller.

Take a look at the E3 trailer to save me waffling on any more.