Review: Nintendogs: Labrador and friends (DS)
Score: 87
Nintendogs
Who could resist the cute antics of fabulously rendered and animated puppies, your very own virtual pet in your game console? And the floor never needs to get weed on...
Nintendogs, coming in various versions, plays essentially at two levels. Firstly, it's a cute virtual pet - this is the level my daughter bought it for. It does well enough in this mode, you can take your pet for walks, teach it tricks, and so on, and there's a genuine sense of interaction, especially on the gorgeous DS Lite screen.
The problem comes a few weeks in when it becomes apparent that in order to progress very far in Nintendogs as a game, you need to get your head around some serious training. As you get more and more into Nintendo's model of dog ownership, it starts to feel more and more like a simulation/game and less of a virtual pet - which may lose the interest of your small children - it did with my six year old, when faced with screen after screen of instructions and tips.
Still, there's still a lot of fun here for adults who like simulations, especially if you're a dog lover as well. A few hours invested in the vocal training needed to get anywhere in the competitions (apart from the trivially easy frisbee one) and who knows, your six year old might just start taking an interest again, especially as the better you do, the more money you'll amass.
And more money means more puppy-buying ability at the kennels, so you get the fun of training another dog, all over again, and so on. The artificial 'intelligence' and general appearance of the dogs is an order of magnitude above your typical Tamagotchi-style virtual pet and is consistently impressive.
Nintendogs, in any of its breed versions, is a quality game and deserves all the success it has (apparently) been getting.