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Virtual Pets Fun – Tamagotchi and Punirunes

Posted on July 14, 2025 by Aywren

Way back when Tamagotchi was first released, I know I owned one of my own. While I was a young adult at the time, and not the original age-group market for the device, the idea of raising a virtual pet has always been something appealing to me.

I don’t know what happened to my original Tama – it might be in a box in the shed somewhere, sadly. I should look for it someday, though I doubt it would still be in working condition even if I were to find it.

I’m not sure why Tamagotchi popped into my mind more recently. I believe it was last year that I first started looking it up again, and realized there were new Tamagotchis still being released – how cool!

A few months back, I even poked around the local Walmart for one, only to find they had zero in stock.

However, during the Amazon Prime Days sale, Tamagotchi popped up on my radar again. Some of the Connection and regular Tamas were on Prime sale. But I didn’t know enough about Tamagotchi to understand the differences. So, just like anything else I get stuck on, it was down the rabbit trail I went.

I had heard that a new Tamagotchi was set to be released this year – Tamagotchi Paradise. However, looking into it, I now know I missed my chance at the first wave of pre-orders. While I will be keeping my eyes open for Paradise in local stores once they release in NA, I did already put in a second-wave preorder for a purple sky Paradise just to be double sure I get one – though this won’t be until September based on what the site says.

Yes, I’d normally opt for blue. However, the secret character for purple is a unicorn, and you know what that means. I wasn’t as big on the blue secret character, though I think the red is quite nice with a cute little dragon.

Anyhow, to tide myself over, I was on the search for a virtual pet or two of my own. The previous generation of Tamagotchi, known as the Tamagotch Uni, is no longer being developed and is incredibly expensive to buy now – brand new or used. Like in the hundreds of dollars to purchase. And that’s a big nope to me.

I am also leery of the Uni because it seems to rely on Internet based servers, paid DLC, and that sort of thing. I just want a stand alone, old school virtual pet without needing to care about whether they’re going to be shutting servers down in the future. I might pick up an Uni once the market for them settles to be something more sane in the future – hoping for the release of Paradise to mean folks will start dropping the prices as the interest in Uni fades.

My options were then two: Connection and Pix.

The Pix is more pricey and harder to get as it’s full color, has a camera feature, and is the generation before Uni. Surprisingly, it’s no where near as pricey as the Uni currently is. I also heard that Pix focuses more on nurturing your Tama than Uni (which is more about collections and dress-up). That made Pix much more appealing to me.

You can still buy some brand new Pix at a decent price from third party sellers on Amazon, so that’s what I did.

And because there were certain colors of Connection that were under $20 due to Prime Day Sales, I broke down and bought one, too. I got the clear pink, which would not be my normal choice, mostly just to try it out and see how the Connection works at a low price. I later found out it shot up to $40 after the Prime Day sale!

So far, I’ve only been playing with the Pix, since I have a lot to learn. And since I ended up picking up a non-Tamagotchi virtual pet. The Punirunes were on Amazon Prime Day sale for $9. Usually a much more expensive device, I bought one of those, too.

The gimmick for the Punirunes is that it has a squishy internal button that you can press with your finger. It’s supposed to imitate actually touching the pet within, but in my experience, it’s not as responsive as it needs to be to play the games and interact to the fullest.

My Punirunes arrived before my Tamagotchi, so I set up a run of that first. While I do enjoy it, I can already see the limitations the device has compared to what all the Tamagotchi Pix does. There are basically some games (though relying on the squishy button makes it so only one or two are truly playable), a very limited number of accessories, unlockable gifts you collect when you send your Rune away as an adult…  And well, that’s as much as I’ve seen so far.

I have a feeling that once I run through my Punirunes a few times, unless I find a Rune that I really want to keep, I will probably shift to Tamagotchi for the long run.

I’ve been keeping a record of my experiences with Punirunes and Tamagotchi Pix in my Microblog Virtual Pets section. I’m happy to be using the Microblog for something after not having an idea what to do with it for a while – here’s the July archives!

I haven’t unboxed my Connection just yet because running two pets as a new owner is more than enough for now!

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