The Non-Game That Barks Like A Game

Well thought out games blog Lost Garden has a design analysis of Nintendogs. In his estimation, gamers who are shrugging this off as "another Nintendo toy" are doing themselves a disservice. From the article: "There is nothing on that market that compares to Nintendogs. If you dig into the game mechanics at an abstract level, it has surprisingly more in common with a RPG than most virtual pet games. Yet hardcore gamers make a snap judgement and instantly assume it must be a Tamagotchi-style game. This is an unfortunate mistake that limits our understanding of the game design."

Re:Neat but not original

[pnice]

I am excited about Nintendogs although I agree that the game isn't exactly original. You listed some good examples but one game that no one seems to mention when it comes to Nintendogs (or at least no one mentions it on slashdot) is Dogstation for the PS2.

I've played Dogstation and it was pretty fun at the time (I really like obscure, non-mainstream games...the crazier the better) and although this game had a Tamagotchi like feel to it you still had to teach the dog to poop and pee, walk it, raise it, breed it, play with it, feed it and play mini games with it. I'm curious how close Nintendogs will be to Dogstation. I mean, even the name Nintendogs (part Nintendo / part dogs) is like a direct rip from Dogstation (part Playstation part dogs) Look at these pictures from the official dogstation webpage and compare them to Nintendogs.

http://www.konami.co.jp/am/dog/index.html [konami.co.jp]
http://www.konami.jp/am/dogstation-dx/index.html [konami.jp]

Actually, I'm going to see if the author of the story (that says there is nothing on the market like Nintendogs) and see if he has played this game and what he thought of it.