Crazy Pig

When a farm animal goes 'crazy', a man in a white coat turns up at your farm and tells you to set fire to it. Popular culture has appropriated the term 'crazy', however, applying it to a variety of personality types ranging from those with dribbling psychosis to those who wear spectacles with coloured frames in the workplace.

Crazy Pig, you'll be glad to hear, belongs at the latter end of this spectrum, which is to say he behaves sensibly for the most part, but you can dress him up like a person and he won't object.

A kids' mini-game collection from mobile developer Kaolink, Crazy Pig begins in the most unprepossessing way. The graphics are 2D and simplistic, the mini-game genre overpopulated, and the attribution of craziness to the title character almost unbelievably hackneyed. These weaknesses aside, however, it's actually a reasonable game.

You're looking after a pig, so goes the premise. You need to feed, water, wash, and groom him using materials that you earn by completing mini-games. In terms of this maintenance mechanic, Crazy Pig is actually quite shallow, giving you just four varieties of food, fluid, washing material or grooming implement to use, along with a few garments with which you can adorn your pig.

This latter facility serves no purpose, incidentally, and since the clothes only show on the static pig in the top screen, leaving the animated one with which you interact permanently naked, we suspect the garments have been included to pad the game out where it's thin on content.

However, despite their paucity the resource management features work well together. Feeding your pig jam will make him dirty, bringing forward his next bath; washing him down with hay will make him angry, so that he'll need a conciliatory groom. What you choose to feed, water, or wash your pig with depends not only on the availability of that substance, but the availability of the substance that using it will in turn necessitate.

You can just fudge it, of course, giving your pig whatever you want to, but substances are sufficiently hard to come by (you get one every time you play a mini-game) that it's just about worthwhile rationing, and Crazy Pig is a decent introduction for youngsters to the enthralling world of resource management.

The mini-games themselves make up most of the experience, of course, and while these are also fairly few in number, they're varied and they make full use of the stylus and touchscreen.

To give you a flavour, one of them involves running along a rooftop by moving the stylus back and forth between two foot symbols, then jumping from the gable end and opening an umbrella by dragging the stylus up it, and finally sustaining your height by blowing into the microphone every time you pass a windmill.

Another involves tapping the stylus over divots in the ground to unearth truffles, and then dragging them into a basket, pausing every now and then to rebuke your pig with a swift tap for sneaking up on the basket, and screaming, 'Go away!' into the microphone every time the big bad wolf tries to steal a handful.

Yet another involves racing the wolf by running along on a round bail, circling the stylus over it, darting across to pop rubber tyres or open fences to clear your path.

There are eight in all, each completable at three different difficulty levels, so that finishing them means playing 24 in total. Four of them are bound to the seasons, and therefore only available at certain times, while the other four unlock in sequence as you complete the preceding one at all three levels.

Once you've done the lot, all that remains is to tend to your pig, buying clothes and other items for him by replaying the same sub-games. Obviously, eight games won't hold even the slowest child's attention for very long, and as a virtual pet Crazy Pig is far too shallow to compete with the absolute best of its kind. But if you're of the view that a pet is just for Christmas, and disposable thereafter, there are worse ways to spend it than with this one.