Push Button B

Another quick iThing update: Pets Live is the closest game I’ve found to Pokemon on the App Store to date. You pick a starter pet (each with a different elemental specialty: earth, air, water, fire), from there you get to spend mana to quest or energy to battle other pet trainers. You start with 100/100 health, 100/100 mana, and 4/4 energy. Both battling other trainers and questing nets you experience points – get enough of those to level up and you can allocate some bonus stat points into more health, more mana, more energy, etc.

Unlike Pokemon, there is no real graphic interface or walking around in the tall grass. Pets Live is all menu based: push “do it” to start/finish a quest for x amount of mana, push “battle” to fight another trainer. Your health, mana, and energy levels are all self-replenishing, on different timers. Every ten minutes, you regain 10 health; five minutes regenerates 10 mana; three minutes for one energy. So depending on how you want to play Pets Live, you can really build the game to suit your needs. I prefer to avoid battling and simply quest to upgrade my pets’ abilities and find new pets to train, so I sunk most of my ability points into mana which lets me do more questing. This lets me check in on the game every few hours to spend my regenerated mana pool and see if anything new has shown up. On the other hand, my wife chose to spend her points into energy, letting her actively battle in order to upgrade her roster. This versatility has made Pets Live a pretty successful app, and at the low, low price of free, there are plenty of people in the Pets community to play with.