I was in a Target some time ago and saw a starter pack of U.B. Funkeys in the toys section. That resulted in my writing an e-mail to Kenny Rosenblatt of Arkadium to see if reviewer packs were available. I had previewed the game at the Casual Games Conference in Seattle in July, and my collector heart had gone pitta-pat. To the delight of my niece and nephew, there was soon this neat new toy on my desk.

A quick recap: U.B. is the USB critter that plugs into your computer, and the smaller, more colorful Funkey sits on its hollow back. Contact plates on their feet transmit the data to the base, and your online avatar changes to that particular Funkey on the fly. It was easy for a young child to set a Funkey on U.B. Strong magnets guide it into place and makes firm contact.

I had received a starter kit that consisted of U.B., two random Funkeys and the installation CD, as well as two other Funkeys to play with, and play, I did. Or I should say, we did, since I did almost all my testing with my niece and/or nephew. They are younger than the target audience, but they quickly grasped the concept and did very well exploring.

While the software was installing, we visited UBFunkeys.com, where we met Mayor Sayso and learned the history of Terrapina, read of the other lands we could travel to via portals scattered around Funkeystown and named all the Funkeys I had. Installation had gone without a hitch, and we were soon in Funkeystown, roaming around as Vroom, Duece, Twinx and Scratch. It was much more fun wandering around as a colorful Funkey rather than just plain old U.B. A sprinkling of magic dust sparkles around your online Funkey each time it changes, and the children enjoyed changing the Funkeys around. Movement in game is via point and click. You can decide to change direction while your Funkey is headed to the first destination chosen by clicking in another location.

We logged into Terrapina in front of Grand Funkeys Station so we went in and took the tram to our crib. The first thing we did was select a room layout and then had fun changing the colors of the walls and placing the couch and table we found in our inventory with a simple click and drag. We also found that a right-click rotates the items. We went into the other two rooms to find a blank trophy wall and an empty games room. Can we get more things? Sure we can. Let's go adventure.

It didn't take the children long before they found that you couldn't just walk into any building. But if they switched to the Funkey that looked like the others wandering around outside the building, it was likely that they could enter that building. After a bit of squabbling over who would handle putting the Funkey on U.B. and almost falling out of the chair, I placed U.B. between them. They would take turns. Scratch gave them access to one of the buildings in Funkeystown, but his game of Guitar Hero-like hitting of keys to match beats was totally beyond them (Aunty Carol didn't do too well either).

There are two things you can do within a building. One is to play a mini-game; the other is to purchase items. They quickly found that you simply had to stand on the center pad on the platform to activate a game, or stand right in front of the guy at the counter to access the shop.

Umm ... no, my two little blood-thirsty heathens. You don't kill things in Funkeystown. You play games. So we wandered around some more and played the mini-games in the various buildings we had access to and found a couple of games they could play. A Funkey version of Mah-jongg in the park and Museum Mask Mayhem in the Terrapina Museum, where you clicked on matching masks and cleared them from the screen.

We encountered the Master Lox's evil henchman when we left the first building, our pockets jingling with coin. Ack! There's no out-running him, we found over the course of several evenings. You see him coming and avoid him, or he catches you and shakes you down. You have to click your mouse button as fast as you can on the window that pops up to minimize the amount of coin he shakes out of you. He doesn't shake too many at a time, though — the maximum being 20 — and he doesn't re-shake you down if you don't leave fast enough.

We spent the next few evenings and weeks exploring Funkeystown, playing mini-games and running away from the henchman. The kids dubbed him the "Trashcan man" as he resembles a garbage can in their eyes, or alternatively, the "bad man who steals money."

We also discovered the portals. According to lore, many portals were destroyed, and Funkeystown is always in the process of rebuilding them. What that means is that at various intervals, more portals may become active. By trial and error, we discovered which Funkey could activate a portal and found ourselves in different "theme park" areas. The watery, underwater area of Kelpy Basin was opened by Twinx, and we found wrecks of pirate ships, walking fishy Funkeys and Twinx Haven, where we threw shooting stars at ever-descending rows of rainbows, suns and clouds by mashing on the spacebar. We also found that some structures may be interacted with and played a tune on the organs scattered around Kelpy Basin.

From the other Funkeys walking around once we accessed these areas, it was obvious that the portals may be accessed by more than one type of Funkey. For example, Glub (the fishy Funkey) and Tiki (the purple bug-eyed Funkey) also would have been able to access the portal to Kelpy Basin.

We soon found out what they meant by more portals becoming active, because one evening, we found the Magma Gorge portal. It was accessible by Deuce. That was a good guess by my nephew as there were other Funkeys that looked like him walking around. It was a land of bubbling lava and volcanoes. We went to the Double Deuce Diner and shot records out of the air by firing with our pitch forks (clicking on the records flying across the screen). The longer you let them fly across the screen — that is, the farther away from the source they are — the more points you got for hitting them. Through lucky coincidence, we found that when you hit two with one shot, you got 500 points on the second target. At each level, you had to hit more records, and they flew faster, and more were tossed in the same amount of time. Seven levels later, we had amassed a large number of points and won a volcano tub for our crib!

In Magma Gorge, we also found a lava fountain you could play with, and to the children's utter excitement, we found "something sticking up from the ground," which turned out to be a dinosaur bone. We didn't leave Magma Gorge until we found every single bone and created a skeleton sculpture for our crib.

Given what they found there, we had to go poke around the other area. Vroom opened up the Laputa Space Station with spaceships that the children were disappointed they could not enter and a bowling game that required a little more control than either kid could handle — although they surely tried.

They looked around really hard, investigated a twinkle on the ground and found treasure! It was a Hoodwink. A decoy to fool the evil henchman when he next caught you. The henchman will make off with the Hoodwink rather than shake you down for your coins. If that wasn't sweet enough, they next found junk. High-tech junk, though, as they managed to put together a laser cannon with it.

Once we had plenty of money in our pockets, we went shopping! Besides the specific themed shops in Funkey access buildings, each "theme park" had a few shops, and in Funkeystown, there's a whole shopping mall with shops that sold just about everything — from furniture, to plants, to pets. We bought lamps, tables, chairs and pets, and we decorated. We changed the colors of the walls again, moved furniture and discovered we had trophies in the trophy room.

"Wow! Trophies!" I wondered if my 4-year-old nephew even knew what the word meant. Probably not, but he was more excited about the games room, where we found that our prowess with various games did not just mean winning trophies and prizes for the crib, but also meant that we could now play those games there. He did decide later that it was more fun to travel to the portal, switch to the correct Funkey to activate it and go through the land to play the game as well as change his mind a few more times while we played.

U.B. Funkeys is targeted toward 8- to 12-year-olds, and the user interface is suitably simple. The patch message tells you to hold on while the program checks to see if there is anything new in Terrapina and then tells you in a large font and simple language to wait while it puts it in the right place.

The interface resides on the four corners of the screen and is clean and intuitive. The world icon on the bottom right opens your world map, which shows your position on it but is grayed out until you've explored an area. The house icon takes you to your crib from anywhere in Terrapina; the bag icon on your bottom left opens up your inventory. On the top left of the screen, the icon shows the Funkey that is active, and the parchment icon accesses your menu options. On the top right, the amount of coins you have is listed, and an icon of a loudspeaker bullhorn accesses your sound options.

All the icons are simple and graphically representative enough that the children could click through a shop's items, buy things, exit, travel to the crib and click through the games in the games room or move items around in the crib. My niece did scare herself when she cleared the crib, "Aunty Carol!" my nephew had yelled, "My sister threw away everything!" but that simply moved all items into your inventory and sets the crib back to its original state. That day, she learned the value of listening to instructions about clicking buttons that had words on them she did not understand — my nephew is not about to let her forget that — and how she cleared his "bouncy ball game" on my DS.

The crib can be accessed from anywhere in the world, and we enjoyed earning or buying something and then going directly to the crib to place it before returning to where we were. However, no matter where in the world you are when you log out or exit the game, you log in at the same point, outside Grand Funkeys Station in Funkeystown. None of this logging in and finding out that your sibling had left your character in some place you've never seen before!

In decorating our crib, there were a couple things I would have liked to see. One was the ability to put something back into inventory; the other is the ability to page through the categories with a single click, since I sometimes had no idea what a particular item could be categorized under. Instead, you have to access the categories menu and then scroll up or down to select a category to access the items there. The categories run from Paint to Couches, from Seating to Sculpture, from Treasure to "Other Stuff." The Volcano tub I won in Deuce's Diner was found under "Liquids." I guess!

I kept to the four Funkeys we had for the review, but as we explored, they saw different Funkeys walking around and knew that they wouldn't be able to enter the buildings without them. They've already asked if they could get a new Funkey each if they were a good boy and a good girl. My niece wants the Panda, the Flower, the Fish ... my nephew wants the Ninja and the Bones. They waved the Toys R Us flyer at me where U.B. Funkeys was advertised. "On sale!" They told me, and indeed they were. The starter kit was going for $14.99 instead of the usual $19.99. Each additional Funkey retails for $4.99 with the "rare" Funkeys already selling for $9.99 and up on Amazon and eBay. We'll see kids; we'll see. You'll have to earn them. That is, if I can resist them myself.