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For those of you who don't play a whole lot of video games, here's one of those funky non-games to keep you occupied - for a while anyways.

Nintendogs is a virtual pet simulator for the Nintendo DS along the lines of Tamogotchi, Pokemon, or Neopets. The basic premise of the game is not at all different from other virtual pet games. You get a cute and cuddly anime character of some variety of another. Your job is to feed it, play with it and raise it to be the best cute-and-cuddly-anime-thing it can be. Nintendogs is no exception to these rules, however it adds enough to the mix to make it a whole new ball game for the virtual pet genre.

Let's get through the good stuff first. This game takes full advantage of almost all of the DS's varied capabilities. As you might expect, rubbing the screen to pet your dog and also teaching it tricks is one of the primary uses for this. For example, when your dog does a trick correctly you can rub on any number of spots on his body to indicate approval. The more often you reinforce tricks like this, the longer your dog can keep up a trick (more on why this is important later). You can also use the stylus to control a variety of toys for entertaining your dog. Perhaps the funnest (is that a word) one is the time-honored frisbee. When you select the frisbee out of your toy box, it appears in front of you. You then grab it with your stylus and fling it across the room. Your dog will then automatically chase it down and even sometimes snatch it out of the air. Then she brings it back to you and, after a bit of wrestling, lets it go. You also use the stylus to walk your dog. Walking your dog gets him some excercise, a chance to piss, and the opportunity to make friends with other dogs. While you're walking your dog, he'll occasionally run by items or piles of garbage and he'll annoyingly pass right by the gifts and head straight for the garbage. It's your job to guide him to the former and away from the latter. It's also your job to pick up his poop. Ahh, the rigors of animal ownership.

Nintendogs also uses the built in microphone to great effect. When the game first starts you adopt your first puppy. Of course, the first thing you'll want to do is name your puppy. This is done by speaking its name into the DS mic repeatedly until the DS picks up on the unique waveforms that make up your dogs name. In other words, "Until he learns it." Needless to say, it doesn't work perfectly all the time. My first dog learned his name in the Unholy Din that is the Tri-County Mall food court at lunch time. He never understood it outside the food court though, so I had to delete him and start over. The same kind of things happen when training your dog to do a trick. Whenever your dog does a trick, a little microphone icon appears on the screen. You punch it to activate your dog's voice learning. You then get five seconds to speak the name for the trick into the screen. You then make him do the trick a few more times until he learns it. From then on out, you can make him perform the trick by calling him over to you and speaking the name of the trick.

You can also use the mic to record a voice greeting to other Nintendogs players. One of the more interesting applications of the DS's wireless technology is called Bark Mode. When you put your Nintendogs on Bark Mode, you can close your DS up and carry it with you. Whenever your DS comes within range of another DS running Bark Mode, both DSs will bark and when opened, your custom voice greeting will play on the other end. You can even send along a random gift to your random person. Your dog hands the other owner the gift and then you get to interact with each other's dogs. If you meet enough people, you can unlock more dogs as well.

Each version of the game comes with only a handful of dogs available at the get-go. However, you can unlock more dogs by meeting people in Bark Mode and by completing competitions with your dog. There are three competitions: Disc, Agility and Obedience. In the disc competition your dog is judged by how many catches it can complete in a given timespan. In agility competition, you use the touch screen to guide your dog through a series of obstacles. And finally, in the time honored obedience competition, your dog is judged by whether or not it can do the required tricks and hold certain tricks for a given amount of time. All of these competitions take time and practice with your dog to beat the Master level of each one. Winning them gives you a cash prize to take home and do whatever you like with: buy food/water, get some new toys, get a new dog or even renovate your apartment.

As you might expect from a Nintendo game, Nintendogs is the most polished game to come out of the DS gate yet. All the graphics are clean looking and fit the DSs capabilities like a glove. Backgrounds are sharp and good looking (though sparse) and menus are well laid out. The interface never gets in the way. On the contrary, it's the reason the game is so much fun. The dogs are animated and textured well. They have a somewhat surrealistic appearance that still manages to charm the fuck out of you. I've handed this game to people and they've started talking to the DS like it was a real dog. It cannot be stressed enough how charming this game is. If you're willing to open your mind and play the game, you'll find that these lovable puppies will soon burrow a hole into your hollow, empty heart and make a nice cozy home for themselves. But how long will they stay there?

Nintendogs, for all its revolutionary design ideas, isn't a game that will keep your interest for long. In fact, its designed specifically so that it can't keep your interest for long. For example, your dog is limited to learning only a handful of tricks each day. You can only take him out for walks once every hour or so. You can only enter each dog into three competitions a day. For those hardcore gamers like me all this adds up to not enough to do. You can keep one DS game and one GBA game in the system at once. So once I'm done playing my dogs out for the day, what then? I play my GBA game or nothing. For thirty bucks, I'd expect a game that has much more longevity and content than this. But this might also be considered a strong point. You're left to do nothing else except play with your dogs.

Nintendogs is definitly a neat concept but in my humble opinion, it needed more fleshing out. There just isn't enough for the hardcore gamer to do. This is just my opinion, however. I can definitly see this game being interesting to ladies, The Sims crowd or folks without a whole lot of time on their hands to sit down and play video games. It was, after all, designed for a Japanese audience and translated into english. For those of you that don't know, pets aren't allowed in most apartments in Japan, so owning a dog there is something of a novelty.