Misty

I tend to always have at least one weird medium-term hyperfixation going on, and right now it looks like it's 7/10 virtual pet games. Right now there's two games that are bouncing around my head...

Ochaken no Heya DS 2

This is a virtual pet / minigame collection based on a Sega Toys toy about little dogs with tea leaves for ears. I love dogs, I love tea, so I'm basically exactly the right person to get super into this. The virtual pet side is fairly simple; you're not taking care of your tea dog in a detailed way, but you can pet and play with them to build a bond with them, and sometimes that's plenty. The house decoration stuff is surprisingly detailed though, and I'm very happy to just squee at the screen when the tea dog goes and takes a nap on the new couch I just put in.

The other reason I'm playing this is Japanese practice; this is a game for young children, and its text is pretty much right at the limit of my ability to read Japanese. Regularly playing it and taking time to read all the text myself is turning out to help a lot with my Japanese comprehension, and I'm hoping I can use that to work my way up to more complex stuff.

Wappy Dog / Heart Energy Poochi

I haven't actually played this yet but I did fall down the research rabbithole. This is an absolutely wild robot dog toy / Nintendo DS game combination. You can play with a virtual dog on your DS, but the intended main mode is to have your DS wirelessly connected to the real robot dog, with the virtual pet raising features interacting with the actual robot dog toy you use. It sounds like the toy can do some stuff when the DS isn't connected, but the real smarts rely on the DS to do the thinking. I don't know how complex it is, but the concept is kind of wild and I haven't seen many DS games with this level of complex interaction with physical toys or accessories. Makes me wonder if you could teach other modern devices to talk to Wappy/Poochi...