The most memorable video games of my childhood were Final Fantasy 2 (aka FF4 in Japan), and FF7. And the most memorable moments from those games are when they killed off playable characters that I had become quite fond of. Those 16 bit graphics on the SNES, combined with the right musical score, could create a pretty moving experience.
I never had a Tamagotchi, but I can understand how the loss of a digital pet could have been quite traumatic.
I wonder if modern graphics and voice acting might actually be making games less immersive, by asking less of players' imaginations when it comes to completing the characters. Or it may just be that I'm older now.
> I wonder if modern graphics and voice acting might actually be making games less immersive, by asking less of players' imaginations when it comes to completing the characters. Or it may just be that I'm older now.
Depends on the game but I think you may be experiencing survivorship bias. You can remember the greatness of old games (I do too, still have very fond memories of Monkey Island) but right now you are going through a raw, unfiltered experience and get to see the few good games that will be remembered and also the bad games that will be forgotten in a year or two.
Good voice acting can make the experience much more immersive than it has ever been, What Remains of Edith Finch is a great example of that. Voice acting in that game makes it feel like someone is narrating a good book and adds a ton of emotion to the story, the amazing sound track also helps with that. Modern graphics help games such as The Last of Us or Horizon Zero Down make you feel like you are part of the story, living through it along with the characters. Those things don't ask less of your imagination, they let you focus your imagination on other aspects of the story now that you don't have to worry about pretending that a bunch of blurry pixels is a person.
I'd like to conclude that that's just my personal experience and anyone can feel exactly the opposite and also be right.
> Modern graphics help games such as The Last of Us or Horizon Zero Down make you feel like you are part of the story, living through it along with the characters.
Except it doesn't work for me. It's in an uncanny valley of near realism, where I notice every flaws and bugs that instantly break the immersion. Same with character development: due to growing up and kind of getting more experience of humankind I find myself becoming more demanding on character and worldbuilding coherence. When huge parts are up to the imagination, suspension of disbelief works for me. I just found I can still get emotional over a few pixel Tamagotchi by reading that article. But with modern graphics, the bar is set very high for everything else to follow and be credible (it needs to be like a strong very long good movie).
It depends as much on the genre as it does the game. Some games aren't intended to be immersive. Take Action Fighter, The Ninja or Sonic on the Master System -- all hugely awesome action games but none are trying to build suspense-based drama, which is where the feeling of immersion is really felt the most. Like the catacombs in Phantasy Star. All of the aforementioned are Sega Master System titles but action titles invoke very different types of concentration to the latter game.
Another example is Sultan's Maze on the Amstrad CPC 464 (bottom of http://www.cpcgamereviews.com/s/index26.html). It's an 8bit game for a 64KB machine and yet that ghost used to make me jump every time despite being rather questionable graphics even for the 80s.
Imagination is definitely powerful enough to fill in the blanks but you need a particularly kind of game to draw you in.
Let's also not forget that as we age, our imagination becomes less powerful. People often blame our fondness of retro games as sample bias (like you have done too) but often it's just younger gamers having better imaginations and a lower bar for what they find entertaining. I've seen this first hand playing Atari 2600 games with my kids. Playing Jungle Hunt (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZxw4MfXnNs) my, then, 4 year old son corrected me when I referred to what appeared to me as a blocky shark -- to which my son replied "It's a crocodile daddy". And it obviously is -- but that I mean it is only obvious to adult me now that I've been told.
I've played modern generation games, grew up with 80s-era BASIC micro computers and have played on practically every system -- console and computer -- released in between. And as you might have guessed from my stories above, I still own and collect these systems too. But what made a game immersive wasn't the graphics nor voice acting (though these elements can certainly pull you from the moment if they're too jarring), it was games that required one to concentrate on longer term strategies from perspective of avatar rather than concentrate on quick reactions from immediate threats (as one typically sees in arcade-style action games).
As someone who puts Final Fantasy VII on a pedestal—for multiple reasons, including, but not limited to, the fact that I learned English to understand the plot when I was a kid—, I have to agree with you.
While the plot from Final Fantasy VII still holds up, and a certain character's death in the game was my first experience with death, games like The Last of Us—especially the second one— and Ghost of Tsushima have a much bigger impact on me today than Final Fantasy VII did at the time, and the voice acting is a big part of that; characters feel more real, which make me care.
Actually, Horizon Zero Dawn is a good example of that. My wife and I loved the game and did every single thing we could, but the atrocious voice acting means that while we loved the gameplay and story, we did not care about the characters at all.
I don't think it's age. These days I've replayed The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall and I find it more immersive than The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.
Both are of the same genre. The latter has much better graphics (and it's a great game) but the former's labyrinthine dungeons, with foreboding music, rats and bats screeching and skeletons roaring, never fail to make me feel the oppression of being in hostile underground tunnels. The relief when I exit the dungeon, quest completed, and I hear the sounds of nature, almost makes me feel the fresh air in my face...
I suspect that the difference is that, if the graphics are just "bad" enough, the player starts filling in details from their own imagination, and I suspect that this increases immersion.
Being young and impressionable probably also helps.
> I never had a Tamagotchi, but I can understand how the loss of a digital pet could have been quite traumatic.
As a kid I cried when it "died". Taking care of the thing for days, seeing it grow, caring for him when sick, it sure created some attachment even though I knew it was virtual.
And because I couldn't bring it at school, parents had to take care of it sometimes, with the pressure of knowing I would badly react if it didn't receive proper care and died (or became sick).
Not sure this is positive, it could certainly have done without this feature. At least my parents didn't thought that me crying over a piece of electronics was very healthy.
My little cousin was like this. His tamagotchi was fully happy, well fed, etc. But he seemed too attached to it.
One day I told him "I am going to set you free, bro" and reset it. He was pretty upset about it at first but then thanked me.
Few years later I saw him playing an MMO. I think it was Ultima Online. I asked him what he was doing and apparently he was ambushing and mugging newer players. I hope both things were unrelated.
I did not notice how dark some themes in the game were until later in life when I replayed the game. Seeing an entire city being poisoned, magical robots built with energy drained from enslaved magical creatures, murder, suicide, poisoining, mind control, abandoned babies, feral kids, cults, fires, cataclysms, possessed artwork, trains to the afterlife, tyranny, etc.
But that's part of what makes it a great game.
The SNES had many good JRPGs in addition to Final Fantasy, like Chrono Trigger, Secret of Mana, Seiken Dendetsu 3 (aka Trials of Mana), Super Mario RPG and others. They are worth playing even today.
It is not a very challenging game, but that is the core idea of Spiritfarer [1]. You care for spirits, help them come to terms with their finality, and take them to the afterlife. They give you enough of their back story to explain why their behaviors and preferences are what they are. You figure out their favorite foods, try to keep them happy with their accommodations and care, and then have to say goodbye forever.
It is done very, very well. It's easy to get attached to these characters and then have to let go of them.
> I wonder if modern graphics and voice acting might actually be making games less immersive, by asking less of players' imaginations when it comes to completing the characters.
I’ve had Red Dead Redemption 2 for two+ years and I accidentally read a spoiler early on and I still can’t bring myself to complete the story because I’m so attached to a character I know will die. I’m probably dreading this character’s death far more than I dreaded my Tamagotchi’s and I was well and truly devastated the first time my Tamagotchi died.
But Metal Gear Solid had great voice acting! Much better than MGS5, anyway.
And so did Deus Ex. Part of the fun was that these games did not take themselves super seriously, they did not pretend to be an overly-polished (to the point of being sterile) Hollywood blockbuster.
It's a bit like 80s movies. They weren't realistic, they had cliches, they weren't polished, but they were awesome!
Metal Gear Solid is a good counter example that I hadn’t thought of. The voice acting (or at least my memory of it) was excellent, and I really did develop a fondness for Snake and everyone else on the radio.
I have not, since I don't have a PS4. If I am ever able to get my hands on a Playstation 5 I will definitely make sure to. I think that would be a really interesting comparison.
I'm also tempted now to go and give Final Fantasy 3 (aka FF6) a play through. I've never actually played that game, even though it's widely considered to be a better game than FF2. It would be a good way determine how much of my fondness for those other games is nostalgia vs. them being great games in their own right.
As a kid growing up in the 90's I had a knock off (not sure which one), but i wasn't responsible enough to really take care of it or care other than the initial "oh wow" wore off. My pet's regular death never took note.
Now that I have a 3 year old, I think about responsibility - teaching life, death and taxes.
For some, it really did give a sense of ownership and heartbreak, which are important. For others it taught death is cheap and revival is just a click away.
No answers from me, just a lot of questions about how to raise my child.
I remember the moment when lag killed my hard core Diablo2 paladin.
Every game seemed more interesting when you had everything to lose. I found it interesting that this isn’t true for the general public, and all games started going easy mode to appease the masses (who wanted to experience games more like movies).
permadeath is a gentler mechanic in games where a run lasts at most an hour or two and either ends in a win or a loss, and not being able to play that character any more.
there's also the eve online / tarkov variation where dying results in the loss of most or all items you had equipped -- potentially a major setback if you were wearing most of your wealth -- but items stashed in other locations and skill point based progression is largely not impacted
Curiously, I'm perfectly fine with roguelikes since long ago, but I can't muster emotional energy to get back to XCOM: Enemy Unknown (the modern one) since one of my characters on a team died there (I still vaguely remember the map), even though I could theoretically reload a save from before it happened. The feeling doesn't seem to wane, and surprises me to no end every time I think about that.
So odd that this article is on HN today. I recently purchased a Tamagotchi for my five year old son and I feel a ton of responsibility for it as I don't want to disappoint my son. Unfortunately it has died a few times from accidental reset or being accidentally left in the car throughout the day. But over the past week or so while he is in school, I make sure the Tamagotchi is with me everywhere I go so I can ensure it's healthy throughout the day.
Interestingly, seeing this made me Google Tamagotchi, thinking my daughter might like an old school Tamagotchi. Apparently, a new “Tamagotchi Pix”[0] product is releasing July 1st. It’s $60 and has a camera for some reason.
Was the original Tamagotchi only marketed towards girls? It looks like the new one will be available only in purple and pink.
From personal experience I remember that majority of kids had these here in Poland in the end of 90s and early 2000s but the quality of tama egg as we called these (not knowing it was a tautology), varied. Some richer kids had the original tamagotchi while most of us got bootleg devices sold on the market by merchants from Ukraine (who also were selling bootleg copies of SNES along with cartridges - majority of these were "9999 in One" games, sometimes even taking shape of original Playstation) or in newspaper, toy stores. Bootleg copies weren't lasting long - the common issue was with ZEBRA connectors on LCD that were prone to failing if device was dropped and that happen a lot. I had luck to find some Bandai branded tamagotchi but now I doubt it was original - I did tried to look for any info about it but no luck.
Despite if it was original or not, we had fun - two classmates were really happy about their 28 in 1 type of devices, where they both pick gray aliens. Later on I had some bootleg 8 in 1 device that I really liked. We also were wearing these on ribbons around neck instead of pockets, since devices had a clock feature.
Edit: forgot to mention that there were also dating-sim tamagotchi-like device [1], not sure but probably aiming at teenagers/adults and one that had a more "natural" looking pictures of baby/kid [2]
Try the Tamagotchi On instead, which that site calls the “original.” It’s not, but it looks like it’s better for you. See: https://tamaon.tamagotchi.com/products/
If you have it around you Target sells the OG tamas, the newer ones are fun but I don’t much care for needing to transfer them to my phone to play games. The self contained aspect was enjoyable to me.
I remember the Tamagotchi being for both sexes, but popularity among males at my school dropped after the release of Digimon,which was heavily marketed to males due to the 'battle' aspect
There is a new Pokemon game coming out called "Pokemon Snap" where apparently the whole game consists of traveling through the game world and taking photos of Pokemon. Similarly there is a feature in the Pokemon Go game where you can take photos of your Pokemon in AR.
I just cannot even fathom who this would appeal to, but apparently there must be a demand for it. Are people sharing these photos on social media or something? That's the only thing I can think of that would make sense.
The focus of the game is taking photos of Pokemon, but it's more involved than just that. It's really a puzzle game - where you need to work out what to do to get certain Pokemon to come out, or get them to do certain things to get better photos. (Getting Pikachu to surf is a stand out moment).
You can make any game sound pointless by describing it with only surface level detail like this - "Tetris is stupid, you just move squares to the bottom of the screen until they disappear", "Mario is stupid, you just jump up and down while moving to the right" and so on.
> There is a new Pokemon game coming out called "Pokemon Snap" where apparently the whole game consists of traveling through the game world and taking photos of Pokemon
At first I thought you were joking as if we were in the 90s again with this tamagotchi thread. People were equally confused by the original Pokémon snap, they said the exact same thing as you. Originally, kids were disappointed that the first 3D Pokémon game was a photography game, but it ended up being a memorable hit.
I played the hell out of that when I was 9 years old.
There are several Tamagotchi like apps, In Ubuntu Touch(UBPorts) Openstore there's Sakawochi where one can grow fishes[1]. I'm not telling you should get UBPorts for this, but this was one of the Tamgagotchi like apps I tried and maybe an old phone with UBPorts for this app would be appropriate for kids.
Right, my mistake, I looked at the Amazon page which has preorders for pink and purple, but didn’t want to link that so I instead linked to the official page.
I don’t agree with that. At the height of tama mania everyone had one.
Usually, digi was a more complicated knock off that fit a different niche of people who like battling Pokémon.
Edit: I had both, but digi personally wasn’t all that fun and everyone did tama because it was mellow and easy. We played Pokémon if we wanted to battle.
Digimon was pretty much a Tamagotchi marketed heavily towards boys, but the original Tamagotchi was fairly gender neutral - I remember when they were big when I was a kid plenty of my male friends had one.
Not sure why this is downvoted. Wikipedia says that Tamagotchi was initally marketed exclusively to teenage girls, whereas Digimon -- made by the same creators -- was deliberately aimed at the male audience.
No, the Digivices [0] were a completely different toy: It lacked the caring aspect and used a pedometer to make progress in traveling the world, where on occasion you'd get an alert about encountering an enemy digimon. If you ignored it your Digimon would be injured and you'd have to heal it.
In addition, to get in on the craze, other companies made their own products that played identically to tamagotchis. Tiger Electronics had the Giga Pet brand [1], for example, from which I had the alien.
Quick edit: Ah wait maybe you meant these [2], which were before the Digivices. I never had one, don't know if they were more like tamagotchis.
Does it also download 40GB of updates the first time you turn it on? :).
I of course mean it as a cheap swing at modern consoles. It dawns on me that kids today won't experience the same thing I did when I was growing up - the ability to just turn on a console at a friend, drop a cartridge, play a few rounds of Contra or Mortal Kombat, and then go do something else. Or the experience of unboxing the new PlayStation, plugging it in, and just playing one of the games that came with it.
I'm sure a lot of Christmas evenings were ruined in the last few years, when parents and kids first discovered post-install updates and overloaded update servers...
When I was a kid Tamagotchis we’re all the rage. My parents weren’t exactly in a position to spoil me so I never had one while a good deal of my friends did. And then I learned about this. I could not believe my ears when I heard about it because how is it fair that I can’t afford one of these while others somewhere else in the world get to just throw them out? I know it’s silly but yeah that was a moment that really stuck with me.
Were these really ever expensive? Maybe they only reached my part of the world when it’d become cheap plastic. At least I certainly don’t remember ever considering them expensive (though for a child nothing is cheap).
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I never had a Tamagotchi, but I can understand how the loss of a digital pet could have been quite traumatic.
I wonder if modern graphics and voice acting might actually be making games less immersive, by asking less of players' imaginations when it comes to completing the characters. Or it may just be that I'm older now.
Depends on the game but I think you may be experiencing survivorship bias. You can remember the greatness of old games (I do too, still have very fond memories of Monkey Island) but right now you are going through a raw, unfiltered experience and get to see the few good games that will be remembered and also the bad games that will be forgotten in a year or two.
Good voice acting can make the experience much more immersive than it has ever been, What Remains of Edith Finch is a great example of that. Voice acting in that game makes it feel like someone is narrating a good book and adds a ton of emotion to the story, the amazing sound track also helps with that. Modern graphics help games such as The Last of Us or Horizon Zero Down make you feel like you are part of the story, living through it along with the characters. Those things don't ask less of your imagination, they let you focus your imagination on other aspects of the story now that you don't have to worry about pretending that a bunch of blurry pixels is a person.
I'd like to conclude that that's just my personal experience and anyone can feel exactly the opposite and also be right.
Except it doesn't work for me. It's in an uncanny valley of near realism, where I notice every flaws and bugs that instantly break the immersion. Same with character development: due to growing up and kind of getting more experience of humankind I find myself becoming more demanding on character and worldbuilding coherence. When huge parts are up to the imagination, suspension of disbelief works for me. I just found I can still get emotional over a few pixel Tamagotchi by reading that article. But with modern graphics, the bar is set very high for everything else to follow and be credible (it needs to be like a strong very long good movie).
Another example is Sultan's Maze on the Amstrad CPC 464 (bottom of http://www.cpcgamereviews.com/s/index26.html). It's an 8bit game for a 64KB machine and yet that ghost used to make me jump every time despite being rather questionable graphics even for the 80s.
Imagination is definitely powerful enough to fill in the blanks but you need a particularly kind of game to draw you in.
Let's also not forget that as we age, our imagination becomes less powerful. People often blame our fondness of retro games as sample bias (like you have done too) but often it's just younger gamers having better imaginations and a lower bar for what they find entertaining. I've seen this first hand playing Atari 2600 games with my kids. Playing Jungle Hunt (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZxw4MfXnNs) my, then, 4 year old son corrected me when I referred to what appeared to me as a blocky shark -- to which my son replied "It's a crocodile daddy". And it obviously is -- but that I mean it is only obvious to adult me now that I've been told.
I've played modern generation games, grew up with 80s-era BASIC micro computers and have played on practically every system -- console and computer -- released in between. And as you might have guessed from my stories above, I still own and collect these systems too. But what made a game immersive wasn't the graphics nor voice acting (though these elements can certainly pull you from the moment if they're too jarring), it was games that required one to concentrate on longer term strategies from perspective of avatar rather than concentrate on quick reactions from immediate threats (as one typically sees in arcade-style action games).
While the plot from Final Fantasy VII still holds up, and a certain character's death in the game was my first experience with death, games like The Last of Us—especially the second one— and Ghost of Tsushima have a much bigger impact on me today than Final Fantasy VII did at the time, and the voice acting is a big part of that; characters feel more real, which make me care.
Actually, Horizon Zero Dawn is a good example of that. My wife and I loved the game and did every single thing we could, but the atrocious voice acting means that while we loved the gameplay and story, we did not care about the characters at all.
The cannery scene was done so very well.
Both are of the same genre. The latter has much better graphics (and it's a great game) but the former's labyrinthine dungeons, with foreboding music, rats and bats screeching and skeletons roaring, never fail to make me feel the oppression of being in hostile underground tunnels. The relief when I exit the dungeon, quest completed, and I hear the sounds of nature, almost makes me feel the fresh air in my face...
Being young and impressionable probably also helps.
As a kid I cried when it "died". Taking care of the thing for days, seeing it grow, caring for him when sick, it sure created some attachment even though I knew it was virtual.
And because I couldn't bring it at school, parents had to take care of it sometimes, with the pressure of knowing I would badly react if it didn't receive proper care and died (or became sick).
Not sure this is positive, it could certainly have done without this feature. At least my parents didn't thought that me crying over a piece of electronics was very healthy.
One day I told him "I am going to set you free, bro" and reset it. He was pretty upset about it at first but then thanked me.
Few years later I saw him playing an MMO. I think it was Ultima Online. I asked him what he was doing and apparently he was ambushing and mugging newer players. I hope both things were unrelated.
I did not notice how dark some themes in the game were until later in life when I replayed the game. Seeing an entire city being poisoned, magical robots built with energy drained from enslaved magical creatures, murder, suicide, poisoining, mind control, abandoned babies, feral kids, cults, fires, cataclysms, possessed artwork, trains to the afterlife, tyranny, etc.
But that's part of what makes it a great game.
The SNES had many good JRPGs in addition to Final Fantasy, like Chrono Trigger, Secret of Mana, Seiken Dendetsu 3 (aka Trials of Mana), Super Mario RPG and others. They are worth playing even today.
It is done very, very well. It's easy to get attached to these characters and then have to let go of them.
10/10 in my book.
[1] https://thunderlotusgames.com/spiritfarer/
I’ve had Red Dead Redemption 2 for two+ years and I accidentally read a spoiler early on and I still can’t bring myself to complete the story because I’m so attached to a character I know will die. I’m probably dreading this character’s death far more than I dreaded my Tamagotchi’s and I was well and truly devastated the first time my Tamagotchi died.
And so did Deus Ex. Part of the fun was that these games did not take themselves super seriously, they did not pretend to be an overly-polished (to the point of being sterile) Hollywood blockbuster.
It's a bit like 80s movies. They weren't realistic, they had cliches, they weren't polished, but they were awesome!
I'm also tempted now to go and give Final Fantasy 3 (aka FF6) a play through. I've never actually played that game, even though it's widely considered to be a better game than FF2. It would be a good way determine how much of my fondness for those other games is nostalgia vs. them being great games in their own right.
A good script can inmerse you better than most ultraHD graphics.
Now that I have a 3 year old, I think about responsibility - teaching life, death and taxes.
For some, it really did give a sense of ownership and heartbreak, which are important. For others it taught death is cheap and revival is just a click away.
No answers from me, just a lot of questions about how to raise my child.
Every game seemed more interesting when you had everything to lose. I found it interesting that this isn’t true for the general public, and all games started going easy mode to appease the masses (who wanted to experience games more like movies).
This is why I don't play roguelikes.
there's also the eve online / tarkov variation where dying results in the loss of most or all items you had equipped -- potentially a major setback if you were wearing most of your wealth -- but items stashed in other locations and skill point based progression is largely not impacted
https://github.com/loociano/tamagotchi-tech-specs/blob/maste...
Deleted Comment
Was the original Tamagotchi only marketed towards girls? It looks like the new one will be available only in purple and pink.
[0] https://tamagotchi.com/product/tamagotchi-pix/
Despite if it was original or not, we had fun - two classmates were really happy about their 28 in 1 type of devices, where they both pick gray aliens. Later on I had some bootleg 8 in 1 device that I really liked. We also were wearing these on ribbons around neck instead of pockets, since devices had a clock feature.
Edit: forgot to mention that there were also dating-sim tamagotchi-like device [1], not sure but probably aiming at teenagers/adults and one that had a more "natural" looking pictures of baby/kid [2]
[1] - https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-W8DZLytNPQw/Ujv5_PYCoUI/AAAAAAAAC...
[2] - https://orig10.deviantart.net/e9bc/f/2017/221/7/f/babybye2_e...
Edit: I also see the "original" for $20 on Amazon, which looks like it's actually the original? See: https://smile.amazon.com/Tamagotchi-42873-Original-Sky/dp/B0...
There is a new Pokemon game coming out called "Pokemon Snap" where apparently the whole game consists of traveling through the game world and taking photos of Pokemon. Similarly there is a feature in the Pokemon Go game where you can take photos of your Pokemon in AR.
I just cannot even fathom who this would appeal to, but apparently there must be a demand for it. Are people sharing these photos on social media or something? That's the only thing I can think of that would make sense.
The focus of the game is taking photos of Pokemon, but it's more involved than just that. It's really a puzzle game - where you need to work out what to do to get certain Pokemon to come out, or get them to do certain things to get better photos. (Getting Pikachu to surf is a stand out moment).
You can make any game sound pointless by describing it with only surface level detail like this - "Tetris is stupid, you just move squares to the bottom of the screen until they disappear", "Mario is stupid, you just jump up and down while moving to the right" and so on.
At first I thought you were joking as if we were in the 90s again with this tamagotchi thread. People were equally confused by the original Pokémon snap, they said the exact same thing as you. Originally, kids were disappointed that the first 3D Pokémon game was a photography game, but it ended up being a memorable hit.
I played the hell out of that when I was 9 years old.
[1]https://open-store.io/app/sakawochi.wendigosoft
Pretty much. Girls had Tamagotchi and boys had Digimon.
Usually, digi was a more complicated knock off that fit a different niche of people who like battling Pokémon.
Edit: I had both, but digi personally wasn’t all that fun and everyone did tama because it was mellow and easy. We played Pokémon if we wanted to battle.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamagotchi
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digimon
Deleted Comment
IIRC, the boy version was Digimon. Basically the same toy, but you could battle them.
In addition, to get in on the craze, other companies made their own products that played identically to tamagotchis. Tiger Electronics had the Giga Pet brand [1], for example, from which I had the alien.
Quick edit: Ah wait maybe you meant these [2], which were before the Digivices. I never had one, don't know if they were more like tamagotchis.
[0] https://wikimon.net/Digivice_Toy
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giga_Pet
[2] https://digimon.fandom.com/wiki/Digimon_Virtual_Pet
Can still buy the old school versions and they feel very unisex to this day.
Later models seem geared towards younger kids in general.
I of course mean it as a cheap swing at modern consoles. It dawns on me that kids today won't experience the same thing I did when I was growing up - the ability to just turn on a console at a friend, drop a cartridge, play a few rounds of Contra or Mortal Kombat, and then go do something else. Or the experience of unboxing the new PlayStation, plugging it in, and just playing one of the games that came with it.
I'm sure a lot of Christmas evenings were ruined in the last few years, when parents and kids first discovered post-install updates and overloaded update servers...