Neopets – Mega Mini Games Collection – The Neopian Arcade Odyssey – For the nostalgic, not the fans

Neopets is that nostalgic, internet website that I feel everyone my age played when they were a child. It’s a website that I feel like most people have heard of, if not for it’s strange past than for the forums and ways that the website was played. I actually still play Neopets daily – I’ve got a subscription, I do my quests, and I spend some time chasing avatars and reading to my pets. So, I was mildly curious what the Neopets – Mega Mini Games Collection – The Neopian Arcade Odyssey would actually be like.

Neopets – Mega Mini Games Collection – The Neopian Arcade Odyssey is a sort of collection of a bunch of mini-games that can be played, right now, on the Neopets website – often with visual upgrades. There is a total of 25 popular games from the website, some of which feature a two-player mode, which can be played in a story mode. The story is about trying to get to the top of a leaderboard through a Neopian world-wide event that’s taking place.

You will need to play games in a specific order, achieving scores that allow you to pass, which will progress the story. These games aren’t particularly better than they are on the website, some of them are even still quite buggy if I’m honest.

While some still have the flaws, others feel slightly finessed and different: Turmac Roll, in particular, feels quite different as you cannot slow down or speed up, instead you can only jump! I also find it quite an odd choice that Neopets – Mega Mini Games Collection – The Neopian Arcade Odyssey forces players to use WASD and doesn’t also work with arrow keys in a lot of games — but, despite this, everything is still very much playable.

You can connect your NeoPass account so that the mini-games do count just like playing mini-games within the website, so you will gain a bunch of Neopoints as well. I think this is nice, as I do like getting Neopoints. Playing through the story, I did get to experience a lot of games that I used to overlook as well, so it did give me a new perspective on the games that I have previously not spent much time on.

I do think that Neopets – Mega Mini Games Collection – The Neopian Arcade Odyssey is for those who are nostalgic about Neopets but haven’t actually played on the website recently. It feels like the target audience is people who are aware of and remember some of the games but don’t actively play.

The story feels pretty basic, with no real interactions or choices. No matter what scores you get, you will still see the same scoreboard and listen to the Neopets talk about who is winning which token. The map itself is nice looking and I do like seeing it reveal over time! It’s an interesting idea, to have this sort of collection of mini-games that are still free to play on the website itself, but bringing it to the likes of Nintendo Switch and PC.

It would be even more interesting, for me as a website player, if this game had launched with some major game fixes with the website, as there are MANY games on the website that do not work as intended. What makes this worse is often on the Neopet‘s website, there are games that are selected for double Neopoints, despite being completely unplayable.

But, if you are looking for a boost of nostalgia and haven’t touched Neopets in a decade, I don’t see why you wouldn’t want to play Neopets – Mega Mini Games Collection – The Neopian Arcade Odyssey, although it’s worth being aware of the game being a bit buggy!

Neopets – Mega Mini Games Collection – The Neopian Arcade Odyssey is out now on PC and Nintendo Switch.