Ryan

My Nintendo rep came in today, and left me some goodies.

We got a new Gamecube demo disc that only had one playable demo, for Mario Baseball. Mario Baseball is fun. The odd-shaped fields are a thrill

Also on that disc was a trailer for Twilight Princess. I stared at it so long someone asked if I was retarded. It looks fucking fantastic.

Finally, she brought in a playable demo of Nintendogs.

In the demo, you're in a little backyard area, and there are three dogs, a medium-sized lab, a little dachshund, and the tiny chihuahua. They play and romp around together and you can watch them. You can also select indivisual dogs (I love the chihuahua ) and pet them, scratch their ears... make them sneeze by petting their nose, and give them enough loving that they turn on their back and let you at their belly.

There are also toys you can play with, pull ropes, jump ropes, frisbees, soccer balls, you can dress them in collars, ribbons, a ten-gallon cowboy hat, a bow and a rose. You can feed them and groom them too.

Now, on the outside this looks rather pedestrian, but I have to say, it's not fun in the traditional sense that a videogame is, but it is fun because you're playing with dogs! I was totally enthralled just petting and scratching the chiwawa puppy... it's so terribly cute... and the behaviors of the dogs are so realistic. If you show one of them attention, the others may leap at you to share the love. If you sit idle, they'll wrestle each other or chase each other. You can throw them the soccer ball and they'll bounce it around, sometimes off of their heads.

It's hard to understand just what the draw is without playing it, so look around in stores and find yourself a demo and prepare to lose track of time.

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big guy

Ryan is offically a woman.

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All the kids black and white, together we are dynamite.

Ryan

That is the power of Nintendogs!!!

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haha

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Great Rumbler

600,000+ Japanese people can't all be wrong! On the other hand, quite a few of them also bought "DS Training For Adults: Work Your Brain" and "Gentle Brain Exercises". But...if Ryan says it's tons of fun, well then it must be!

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Dark Jaguar

What you just described is EXACTLY what the Petz series has always been. Same features, except there are also cats.

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lazyfatbum

It's nothing like Petz.

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Great Rumbler

I did a little research on Petz and the only conclusion I can come to is that not only is it not very similar to Nintendogs [for various reasons] and it also sucks mightily.

From Findusedcds.com:

Petz:



Nintendogs:

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Lucille: I don't know what that is nor do I care to find out.

Ryan

You have to play it. Trust me, you will see minutes disappear and you won't know why.

The nicest thing about it is both how nice the graphics are, and how realistically the dogs move and play.

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Smoke

Pink DS + Nintendogs pack in = $$$

A Black Falcon

We own Catz (the first one I think, and not Dogz -- just the demo of it that came with Catz)... from quite a few years ago... it was fun. Simple, and I didn't like it nearly as much as some other family members did (my sister especially (though if you're looking at "games girls play", she didn't just play stuff like that... she spent a lot of time playing the first two Baldur's Gate games too, for instance. ), if I remember correctly), but decent... Tamagochi for PC really, just like this. Hence my lack of interest, while acknowleding that it's surely a good game within its field...

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Great Rumbler

ABF = hates playing with animals

No PETA for you!

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Dark Jaguar

Um GR, that was hardly an informed review. They only said "it sucked". I would imagine they would also hate Nintendogs.

Seriously, this does have graphics all over the latest in the Petz series (to the best of my knowledge), but in what way is this different? Describe to me, in no uncertain terms, how this is a totally different game.

ABF, Tamagotchi is actually even simpler. You don't even get to pet or play directly with the animals.

Petz has every single feature Ryan just listed. You have a playroom where the animals run around and romp about here and there. You have a large number of toys. You can interact directly with the animals. You have to feed them too, and train them to obey.

Okay, now I may be wrong on this. Maybe Nintendogs will truly trump Dogz in every single way and Ryan just didn't describe the truly great stuff.

But there is an easy way to test that.

Ryan, download the Dogz (or Catz if you prefer, whatever) demo. It's free and you can just ditch it when you are done.

http://petz.ubi.com/

That's right, it's an ubisoft game. That should tell you the quality to expect.

Now let me make something clear. When I first started playing around with Dogz and Catz 2 (I got it as a bundle so combining both into "Petz" was easy, you can let the dogs and catz play with each other), I got addicted. I played with those things for weeks on end, and from what I understand, the sequels would all update your petz so you wouldn't have to abandon them. This was when tamagotchi was around, so when I had the choice of carrying around a little egg that I could barely do anything with, and a game where I could pet the animal, pick it up by the scruff and shake it around (um, no, I didn't do that!), play with it, see what it wanted, let it run around and play while I worked on stuff (running around on the desktop isn't that much, but when you are addicted to the game, it's fun to see the little AI you are attached to suddenly start tearing up the icons). I could even mess with the cats using the catnip tree. What was really fun was seeing how they reacted to each other. Some of them really hated each other, or one seemed to like the other but it hated the first, and after some time, the second started to get used to the first and at least tolerate it.

Now, that all said, the graphics certainly aren't that great. Nintendogs has impressed me on graphics. For some reason, I thought they had already released Petz 6 which I had heard had the same kind of realism, so I wasn't that impressed at first, but now I am seeing as how that's not the case.

As for movements, with greater realism comes better movement, but the old petz had some pretty nice movement of their own, if a bit cartoony. The feeling Ryan gets of playing with an actual animal is exactly what I felt back then.

So basically I'm saying I'd like Ryan to give one of those demos a try and see how that compares with the demo he's already played.

Oops: Seems they have yet to make any demos for Petz 5, and so they probably never will. I guess we'll just be waiting for Petz 6.

All I can say is, eventually Petz "got old" for me. You can only play with fake animals for so long before you say "you don't have a SOUL!" and get totally bored with the whole thing. Last I remember, I gave away the two games to a relative (this was back when I still made that 'stanank). I may get back into it, but Nintendo screwed up by claiming this to be some entirely new concept. Relative to Tamagotchi and a world without Petz? Yes! But, since Petz HAS been made, though Nintendo is totally unaware of it, I must say this is nothing more than what appears to be the next step in "the series".

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Smoke

Could say the same thing about a real animal but that's a whole other debate.

A Black Falcon

Yeah, that's a pretty bad review... Catz/Dogz are not games. They are software toys. Expect what you're getting and they are perfectly good and, indeed, addictive for a short time (or more, for some people)... and yes, this definitely looks like a very similar game. I guess the question is if they knew about Petz or if they were just going on Tamagochi-like things...

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N-Man

Oh man, puke. Both games sound like really awesome tricked-out screensavers.

Dark Jaguar

To Smoke-X: You could say that, but when all the evidence points to most vertebrates having some sort of self awareness (about how one defines a soul, everything else the brain is responsible for so that's pretty much all that's left) and none says they don't, then well, you go where the evidence points.

Now on the other hand, no evidence saying these e-animals are aware of themselves in any way. Some day, we may actually feel guilty turning off our computers, that'll be the day self awareness has been reached.

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Lord Shockwave

I was thinking you were gay myself.

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Laser Link

Ryan, just give me the disc with the Zelda trailer and the Mario Baseball demo and I won't call you any names.

And maybe I'll post a picture of my hot pink extremely limited run Relient K record that I bought for $5 2 years ago and have never listened to cause I don't even own a record player.. Maybe.

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Dark Jaguar

A re...cord?

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lazyfatbum

I think it's a cord or tie you can use over and over.

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Dark Jaguar

Well that's a relief!

Hey double L, wouldn't someone sorta make fun of you for wearing something like that?

LL: What?

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