"This game makes me feel like a neglectful owner"

Most people have heard about this game by now. If you haven't, you probably don't own a Nintendo DS. Which is fine. If you DO own a DS, this may be one of the reasons you bought it.

Nintendogs is, for lack of a better term, a virtual pet simulator. You start the game with a limited supply of cash with which you purchase a puppy, and then go about training and caring for it. Interaction with the game is largely mediated via the touch screen and a stylus, but the built-in microphone plays an essential role as well.

I give the developers top marks for thinking outside the box on this one. They took an idea, a new piece of hardware, and just ran with it. And it works very well, for a little while. You see, the real bothersome thing about the game, the one thing that prevents me from giving it higher marks, is the *commitment* required to play it.

There are a number of things you can do with your dog. Primarily, you can touch it, you can teach it to do tricks (which are based on voice training), take it for walks, and enter it in competitions. But you also have to feed it, give it water, bathe it, and take it for walks so it can *ahem* use the facilities. So, pretty much like having a real dog, only it can't wake you up at night or poo in your shoes.

What it CAN do is make you feel badly about ignoring it. Whatever puppy you pick, doesn't matter, you have to perform these essential functions every day. If you don't, your dog gets status ratings such as "famished" and "parched" and "filthy". If you neglect it for too long, it will run away, though it is supposed to come back after a while.

However, I never actually found out how this happens, because my personality lends itself to anthropomorphic identification. In other words, I tend to attribute "feelings" or "personality" to inanimate objects. Lots of people do this - ever feel bad about throwing out a childhood toy? Did a Disney animated feature ever make you weepy? Do you develop special attachments to other inanimate objects, like your car or your house?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, you may share my personality quirk, and if you do, I'm warning you, do not play this game unless you are ready to own a slightly easier version of a dog. I found it very difficult to just let it lie - I would schedule time around trying to feed and bathe and walk this little digitized thing. I literally played it every day for almost four months. I don't eat as regularly as I played this game.

And what makes it worse is that you cannot cheat. Once, I tried to "trick" the game when I had missed a day and a half of playing with my pup by changing the time setting on my DS. But *the game didn't buy it!* I don't know how it works, but the game knew how much time had passed since I last booted it up, so there was my poor pup, looking sad and dejected, filthy and starving and in dire need of a pit-stop.

And it gets worse! Say you want a break from all the feeding and training and playing. There is a nice doggy hotel that essentially puts dogs in suspended animation - it won't get any better at tricks or learn anything, but it will remain happy and fed. Except, wouldn't you know, you can't put your only dog in it. So if you do want a break (like you want to actually play something else long-term on your DS without having to devote an hour a day to your dog), you have to buy a sacrificial dog. That's right, buy a new puppy, put your "good" dog in the kennel, and leave the new pup to its own devices. If you've got that "I feel bad about neglecting a pixellated pooch" thing going, this really bums you out!

I just wanted to let you know what you're getting yourself into. As far as the game goes, it's pretty good. You can unlock every dog in every version, so don't worry about the pokemon-like different retail versions. Aside from the required commitment, it is kind of a bummer that there's not much to do in the game once the nuance wears off - as you interact with your dog, your trainer points go up, and you unlock more stuff. You get cash by winning tournaments, and then you can buy new house designs. But after a while it does start to feel kind of aimless. There's only so many tricks available for learning (and a given dog has a max limit of tricks it can memorize), only so many items you can hunt for on walks, and only so many rooms you can buy. Once you've gotten your dog where you want it to in these areas, and have lots of cash to make sure it never runs out of food, you're pretty much at the end of the game. You can try training up to three dogs at once, but there's not much difference between them beyond how well they perform in different competitions and how well they get along with other dogs. However, there is no end, and you have to sacrifice a dog just so you can stop playing. So sad.

As a game, it's innovative and quite fun. As entertainment, it's a chore. There should have been a better way to effectively pause the game world. I now have a pug and a husky in the kennel, and a german shepherd running around somewhere, starving and lonely.

Farewell, unnamed Shepherd. I barely knew ye.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 04/12/06