Hanging Around at Marapets

Okay, it may seem silly, but my daughter had me try one of her favorite game sites called Marapets. Okay, okay. Before you go snickering, I actually found the site pretty interesting. For one, it isn’t just for kids—so don’t put it down yet. It is designed to be kid friendly, while catering to all ages. So, the candy sweet coating aside, it actually has some interesting concepts going on.

The site lives and breaths through its various currencies. The primary one being MP. On the surface, you can play the various flash based games and earn a little MP that you can then use in the shops to outfit your pet. Seems pretty standard fare, right. Wrong. It goes much deeper.

So, instead of pet site, think monopoly with RPG elements. Besides playing the flash games, you can play quests where you find items and return them for other items or more MP or other currencies. Now, here is where it gets interesting. The shops restock every 5 minutes and only offer a limited selection during the 5 minutes. That means, a lot of what you need to find isn’t readily available. Fortunately, there are alternatives. You can also buy from player shops, head to the auctions, or trade with others.

To make things even more interesting, items have a rarity that limits their availability. So, do you keep trying the shops and hope your item shows up, or, do you see if someone has it available for sale? Now remember, you can then take those items and set up your own shop, collect them and show them off, auction them off, trade them, or use them in quests. I was surprised how much depth a simple pets game site could have. In fact, this whole commerce system is actually my favorite part of Marapets.

If you are old enough, you can also participate in clubs and forums. That helps since you also earn MP by posting. And you can explore the site to see where things are at. Marapets even has a bit of SIM flavor where you can level up your pets or even get them a job. Pretty much anything you want to do, you can.

Now that said, I was pretty put off by the large number of ads. But that is understandable considering the site is free. You can also donate or buy account upgrades that will add rare items to your inventory. However, you can’t turn off the ads. Live with it.

One disappointment with the site is the number of bugs or glitches as they are called by the web master of the site. For example, there is an upload site for images that you can use for forum and mail siggies (signatures). However, it doesn’t work when you try to upload images. This may not sound bad, except that you can only use images from the Marapets sites. So, you have to find old members to upload images for you. Fortunately, the glitches aren’t usually show stopping and won’t keep you from enjoying the site.

Well, if you’re still with me and this still sounds like fun, head over to Marapets and make sure you mention that DaddyDude sent you!