Furby Boom: It's back, and making offspring on your tablet
Hasbro's newly announced follow-up to last year's Furby reboot gets even stranger than before: breeding new Furbies, earning Furbucks...and making poop.
- Nearly 20 years writing about tech, and over a decade reviewing wearable tech, VR, and AR products and apps
As you may remember, Hasbro's Furby reboot of 2012 got all-new LED eyes, trippy personalities, and an iOS companion app that translated Furbish and played minigames.
The 2013 version unveiled today and coming this fall adds some over-the-top new color patterns, but the biggest change is a big update to the free companion iOS app. Instead of Furby getting its own app, it's almost like the iOS game's getting its own companion Furby.
I played with the new app a bit during a meeting with Hasbro earlier this summer, and survived to tell the tale.
The new app, which I tried on an iPad, has a lot of content: you can encourage your Furby to lay an egg into your iPad (a process that's a little bizarre), which later hatches to become a little virtual Furby (a "Furbling") that you can play games with and feed/maintain like a Tamagotchi. You can earn Furbucks to unlock extras, but it's just to keep you playing: Hasbro says there won't be any insidious in-app purchases, and you won't be able to buy Furbucks with cash.
You can collect up to 50 of these eggs, and eventually unlock a whole Furby Boom city.
And, yes, I wasn't lying: there's a toilet your Furby can poop in. Sometimes it's just poop, and sometimes it's treasure or other weird items. You just can't make this up.
Overall, Furby Boom seems to have something in common with the upcoming Angry Birds Star Wars II and its toys: apps are increasingly coming with toys to go with them, and not necessarily the other way around.
Furby Boom will come in six new patterns and has an expanded eye animations and "double the content." It'll be available this fall for $64.99.
