nintendogs
a game by nintendo
a review by jordan haywood

I took a hooker to the guitar shop.

Normally I consider guitar shops to be a decent enough place to kill a few minutes while waiting for someone, but for whatever reason I wasn?? really in a guitar browsing kind of mood. Looking over at my companion, I mumbled ??et?? get out of here??and started for the door.

We walked down the street in not-quite-comfortable silence for a minute or two, and I suddenly had an intense desire to just get the hell out of this country. I stopped for a moment to let the feeling pass, and she took the opportunity to ask me where we were going for what must have been the seventh time in the last hour. I bit back the urge to yell and calmly told her once again that I had no particular destination in mind, adding that it was her idea to tag along in the first place, and that she was free to go at any time.

An hour later I was wandering around Kagurazaka, hooker escort still trailing along behind me, when it hit me that I had become really uptight at some point. Being a pretty even-tempered and relaxed kind of guy, this revelation really bothered me. I knew then that I needed to do something that would let me unwind. I knew that I needed to be around a girl that didn?? piss me off while playing video games, watching movies, and eating.

Immediately, I spun around one hundred and eight degrees and started running for the metro station. Ignoring the rapidly fading protests and inquiries from my traveling companion, I was at the station in ten minutes. I rode the subway to Yurakucho, where the best Sofmap in Tokyo is selling PS2 Rez trance vibrators for 480 yen. Once there, I paid a visit to a nice girl who does not piss me off in any way. And because sometimes things work out just the way you want them to, it wasn?? long before we were curled up in her futon watching some Woody Allen movie and eating cereal. Towards the end of the movie, when Woody Allen was most likely saying something neurotic and or related to New York, this very nice girl mentioned that she had bought Nintendogs a few days ago. My eyes lit up and I knew what I was going to be doing for a good remainder of the evening.

Some time later, as I stood up to put my pants back on, I remembered that I had been meaning to try out Nintendogs and see what all the fuss was about.

She was really excited to show me her Corgi. Reaching for the white Nintendo DS on top of her television, she was telling me how the dog would come when she called it, and how she was teaching it to catch a Frisbee. Sure enough, the dog really did come when she called its name (she named it ??). The dog really was learning to catch a Frisbee. She was ptractically jabbing at the screen with her stylus in excitement (Miyamoto suggests playing the DS with a Q-tip because it is less likely to scratch the screen. I suggest not bothering with the DS until they release some games that aren't tech demos or gimmicks). After the demonstration, I began to mess around with the game on my own. I took the dog for a walk, gave him a bath, and so on. Though the game can be played until infinity, theoretically, thirty minutes was time enough for me to make a definitive conclusion.

Nintendogs is not innovative so much as it is kind of lame.

Now if you are thinking about buying Nintendogs, I suggest that you go into your bathroom and look into the mirror. Are you a roughly college-aged white guy? If the answer is yes, then this game is not for you. Nintendogs was made for Japanese girls in tiny little apartments who will never be able to own a dog. It is little more than a key-chain tamagotchi with a few more features. Let me put it another way, if you still want to believe that this game is another example of Nintendo?? thinking-outside-the-boxism like Animal Crossing: Nintendogs is not quirky, nor is it ??I>so Japanese??/b>. This game does not make you a more hardcore gamer; please don?? try to fool yourself into thinking that it does.

From the perspective of a Japanese girl in a tiny apartment, the game does what it is designed to do, and for that I give the game three of four stars. From my perspective as a roughly college-aged white guy, I realize that the game isn?? for me and give it a personal rating of one star. Averaging these two scores together we get two stars, and I can end this review by saying with complete confidence that Nintendogs is a game that deserves two of four stars.

--Jordan Haywood

SCREENSHOTS:


click on the above for a larger picture of this gorgeous little puppy.

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