Remember the Monster Rancher series of games? If you weren’t around for the glory days of the original Playstation, the gist amounted acquiring and raising monsters which you then used to compete in various battles. Sounds familiar, right? The catch is, the original Monster Rancher, at least in the North American market, pre-dated the first release of Pokemon by nearly a year. What made Monster Rancher super cool was generating monsters was by inserting random CD’s into your Playstation. The game would read the disc, and utilize the data on it as a seed to create a monster in game.

This had me raiding any CD collection I could get my hands on to try to see what monsters I could find, and better yet, a basic breeding mechanic allowed for combining of monsters to get even better monsters. Subsequent sequels expanded on this, and for systems that could read DVD media, you could even generate monsters based on DVD movies you tossed in the drive. This might not sound very amazing now, but I assure you, back in the day, it was incredible.

Mobage’s My Monster Rancher (Free) just hit the App Store, and while it’s nice to see a Monster Rancher game on iOS devices, it’s sad to see what it has become. Basically, everything that was cool about the original series has either been replaced or augmented with social friend systems and IAP currency. There’s still training and battle elements, along with a few familiar faces for Monster Rancher fans, but, man, I’d love a straight port of one of the older Monster Rancher titles instead.