Beanie Babies 2.0

Beanie Babies, one of the major fads of the late 1990s...I used to be a part of that fad for a couple of months as a kid. Somehow I ended up giving up the ones I owned. I don't really remember what actually happened to them. About a year or two ago, my mom decided to get into beanie babies after she started to help my girlfriend buy some one day. So, we went down the dark path of collecting many of them for my mom. Luckily, most of them were pretty cheap because the fad has been dead so long. A lot of people want to get rid of their beanie baby collection, which makes it pretty cheap. You can buy a lot of them for a dollar a piece at flea markets.

This review below is based on the web site before the April 3rd update
The original beanie baby line came to an end at the end of December 2007. Ty, the producers and creators of beanie babies, decided to relaunch their legendary toy line. To compete against Webkinz, Ty created Beanie Babies 2.0. This new line of beanie babies offer similar, but higher quality beanie babies along with a secret code for an online flash game world web site. This site offers a 2D cartoony virtual world with games and chat rooms. The competition, Webkinz has had many years to develop and create their own hot selling brand with their own web site. From my quick research, Webkinz pretty much ripped off the Neopets game system. Unfortunately, Beanie Babies 2.0 virtual world doesn't even compare at all that Webkinz and Neopets offer in gameplay, features, and content. It's still extremely early, but it's very worrisome.

So far, the 2.0 system is very bare. There are many different flash games you can play, items that you receive from playing those games, and chat rooms, but that's about it. They hint towards some type of adventure game, but it's no where to be found at the moment. You can also max out your current stats of beanies, friends, hunger, and games played to unlock some type of item with no known purpose. So, to sum up the Beanie Babies 2.0 virtual world is simply that its an interface to play and unlock a collection of short flash games, a collection of limited graphical chat rooms, and a small collecting element. Each beanie unlocks their own personal room, however these rooms are featureless except holding your mouse over a couple of items that contains different animations. One could hope that since the site was recently launched in January 08, that Ty will push for the game system to be greatly improved and added to. I know they have fixed many bugs, but the engine still has glitches and slows down. Either way, if Ty expects to compete, the game engine has to be serevely upgraded with a lot more features than what they have right now.

I just completed an overview of the whole system. I realize now more than ever that the system is really still in beta. It's ultimately incomplete and still broken. There are locked chat rooms and games that can only be opened with a key. They give you this key, but you have to use it every single time to open any of them. However, based on what they say, there are meant to be unique keys to open selected areas. This concept doesn't work yet. You can also bypass some of those locks through a shortcut menu. I also maxed out my stats and was given a watering can. I have no idea what to use it for. The stats are still maxed out too. So, I'm basically at dead end for now. This looks pretty bad for Ty. That's for sure. However, I believe that the system holds a lot of promise if they keep developing it. I do really like the graphics and feel of the whole thing. If they could just upgrade it with a lot more, it'll be something special.