Disaster Report: Dogz (GBA)

Do not let the doe-eyed puppy dogs on the game’s box fool you. Just like with real life pet shops and pounds, these adorable animals are renowned for the powerful pull of their stares, many a cute creature working its way into a family’s home only for the owners to realize they can’t care for them, but with Dogz, the deception is that you will own a game you won’t care about.

 

A pet game for kids may appear innocuous, but that deception is what MTO and Ubisoft are counting on. The standards for what we give our kids are incredibly low. If it occupies their time, it is deemed an acceptable product in many parents’ eyes. But the quality does not even seem to be a consideration, something children have sort of gotten themselves into admittedly. The fact a child can be amused by something as simple as a stick, leaf, or a clump of dirt that stays together well enough means their standards are even lower despite their infamous fickleness. A young child is entertained by moving lights and changing sounds, and the novelty of a new experience often trumps the quality of it, thus building some of the most deceptive forms of nostalgia where a kid becomes fond for things they liked in youth and are blinded from the issues upon a revisit.

 

You may give your child Dogz and see them laugh and giggle. There is a dog on screen after all. And it moves too, what a treat! But if you were to take that Game Boy Advance for a bit and see what is making your child smile, you’ll see the video game junk food you’ve fed them.

 

This is not a condemnation of games designed exclusive for a very young audience. I’ve come across a few games that are good for kids and adults like Kirby, games that are only good for kids like The Land Before Time: Into the Mysterious Beyond, and ones that straddle the edge a bit like Pajama Sam. There are plenty of activity center games and iPhone apps that are simple and straightforward experiences that I’d have no issue with. Of course a grown man can’t see the appeal of iphone game where you drag colorful food into a cat’s mouth over and over, but it ticks the right boxes for stimulating a kid with something harmless. It is a game, and it is in being a game that Dogz fails utterly.

 

Before we kick things off, it is important to note: this is the Game Boy Advance version of Dogz. It is not the DS version, it is not a PC version, and it is not one of the improved sequels or other animal spin-offs, although if you thought this might have been Horsez, you might have a similar issue to Google, where Googling Catz GBA will have the search engine recommend the equine game in its sidebar instead. This also has nothing to do with the quality of the Petz games released before this, and for anyone trying to sort out the grander series of animal games with a Z, I salute you for taking on such a thankless task. As far as I can tell though, Dogz for the Game Boy Advance is uniquely bad, a brand slapped on a potentially unrelated Japanese game Kawaii Konu: Wonderful to quickly rush the game out around the time Nintendogs was showing people what a good pet game looked like on better hardware. Dogz, no matter the language you play it in, is a very good reference point for the things you shouldn’t do with a virtual pet simulator, so let’s begin.

 

IN THE BEGINNING… THERE WAS ONLY DOGZ

Once your child has been gifted this Trojan Horse of a terrible game, they won’t see the issues immediately. There is a fairly cheeky card during the opening with the developers patting their own back, saying “Everybody Loves MTO”. From there, a cute stampede of puppies run across the screen, and it certainly got down a fairly gentle and charming visual design. The brown toy poodle looks a bit like fried chicken and the golden retrievers proportions make it stick out aesthetically, but everything is adorable and a kid is bound to be enraptured by the mere sight of so many dogs, as well as a fairly detailed image plastered over the starting screen of a random dog breed.

 

Once the game begins, you will be asked to design a third grader, choosing either a boy or girl and picking a dominant color for their clothes. Taking control of a third grader of your own creation, you set off to a pet shop with mom and dad, but apparently purchasing a pup can’t be allowed to be simple. The game asks you to take a quiz to help determine the perfect puppy for you! Choose a preferred gender for the dog, whether you want a relaxed or energetic pup, and what size you wish for it to be. No matter what you put in here though, once you enter the store, you’ll see all the dogs (Dogz?) and notice quite quickly that they just sort of put a bunch out in front of you with no rhyme or reason. Big breeds and small breeds, boys and girls, and hardly any way to check their temperament. If you don’t like the selection you can go to other pet shops to get a new random set, but if you came for a specific breed and gender, you’ve got 18 possible breeds that can pop up and a coin flip for the other traits.

 

On the quiz, I chose a relaxed, small, female dog, hoping for something manageable but loving. I walked out of the pet shop with an energetic male dalmatian.

While hilariously true to life for many quests to adopt a pet, its also a weird barrier to getting the pet you want and a pretense to finding a perfect match that doesn’t line up with the reality of the situation. Once you do settle for a pup or find one that wins you over, it’s time to name that dog. I ended up settling on Chrome, because every name entry field in this game has a max of six characters and my better name ideas all were seven or more. Despite the odd barriers and limitations though, the puppy will finally be within your ownership, you take it home, and you begin teaching it it’s name by yelling it repeatedly.

 

After a day of shouting at your puppy until it responds, you go to bed, and things were certainly rocky to start with, but the game looks promising. You’ve got some tutorials coming up with notes on how to interact with the game world, how to take care of your puppy and train it, but after a while, the game gets going for real.

 

And falls into the most boring, stagnant, hardly interactive loop you could make out of dog ownership.

 

THE DOGZ DAYS OF SUMMER

Your daily schedule in Dogz comes into play fairly early, only a few days after our pet has entered the home. This schedule is what kills any potential enjoyment of Dogz, dictates your entire life in it, and ultimately leads to the unusual ending that arbitrarily occurs three weeks into ownership. In some ways, Dogz ends its masquerade as a pet simulator and appears to be a life simulator, but even in games like The Sims or even your most basic member of the genre, you have some control over the course of your character’s life and the events they participate in. Here, every action you must take is forced on you daily, almost all of it presented as a cutscene with no interactivity beyond pressing A to see the next text box.

 

Your day starts with your child waking up in their room. Overnight, your house has been populated by garbage from unknown sources, and for some reason your parents rely on you to vacuum up every bit of it, the garbage changing places every time you reenter a room. If you don’t clean it up, your dog eats it and gets sick, but the morning isn’t really the time to do it. The time you have after just waking up is just the game toying with you, as most every action you take in Dogz will burn time. Walking into a room eats up 5 minutes of game world time, and performing actions like vacuuming, grooming your dog, playing with it, feeding it, and so on take up even more time. You essentially have the time for two actions in the morning, and unless you have something to do in your room (which you likely won’t until your dog moves in there a bit before you hit the three week limit) then that first action is walking out. Whatever you choose for your valuable second act will end and your mother will call you to breakfast, the game playing a canned scene that has no purpose or meaningful changes throughout the course of the game. Sometimes though, your dad may instead want you to go outside and fetch the paper, a task with no obvious reward that burns through the clock even more.

After breakfast, you are given a brief window with which you’re meant to feed your dog, and then the game does one of its biggest missteps. In this game world of escapism, your child will be unable to escape the interruptions of daily life, as if it’s a week day, they must head off to school. School is not part of the game really though. You arrive, say hi to people, the screen shows the transition of time, you say bye, and you go home, most of the day gone due to this diversion. Segmenting the game into days is not a bad idea even though the puppy doesn’t really grow up at all, but for some reason most of your time in this game is spent seeing pointless cutscenes of your child’s daily life. You eat breakfast, you go to school, once you get home, you’re gonna be abruptly forced into dinner after a brief period of free time as well. During dinner, your dad will come home from work, ringing the doorbell as if he was a stranger before coming in. Your only interaction with any of these scenes is hammering the A button to get through them and they have barely any variation. Sometimes, your child may speak up during dinner, excited to tell your dad what you did today… only for the screen to go white and flashing forward to the end of dinner so that the game doesn’t have to include more content. After dinner is likely your biggest window for play time, but soon your mother swings in around 9 pm and admonishes you for being up past your bed time, your character forced to sleep and begin the cycle all over again the next day.

You’ll notice your day doesn’t involve the dog much, and it certainly feels that way. Your care for your puppy must be squeezed in through a bevy of annoying interruptions and menial tasks, and on some days, the game won’t even give you that. One day, my child returned home from school only to see the neighbor’s cat Mitch on the sofa, and the whole day was taken from me under the pretense that we spent all day playing with that cat. Dogz does not value the player’s time, and for some reason attempts to capture the most mundane features of dog ownership, those being all the things you need to do during regular life besides interact with your animal.

 

Most of your time with your pet is squeaked in through all the interruptions, as if you had to sneak off to perform some forbidden act. Sure, you’re playing with your puppy out in front of mom and dad in the living room, but they’re clearly waiting for the clock to tick over so they can railroad you into eating, sleeping, or going to school. The weekends, funnily enough, have that same appeal as real life, where you can finally have a lot of free time to do as you please, and surprisingly your family does not have a lunch to interrupt you with. When you do have all that time with your dog, you might realize something though…

 

You don’t really have much to do with them.

 

DOGZ DAY AFTERNOON

If there is any semblance of a goal for your time spent with your dog, it is the task of training them in a set of tricks. These tricks are only performed for amusement, so there is no contest to win, no way to show your pup off, and no obvious reward for mastering a skill. Just across the three weeks you have this dog, you are told you must train them to do tricks and that is meant to be its own reward.

 

Admittedly, Dogz’s puppies are pretty cute as they perform. When my child held the dog, or it rolled on the carpet, or it did a little rabbit hop, they were all adorable, albeit these were not tricks it was learning, just idle animations or basic interactions. What you can teach your dog are some standard staples of dog training like sit, stay, lay down, and shake hands, although there are also skills to learn like potty training, going to its bed, and behaving on walks. To get anywhere with this training requires constant repetition, and that is done by pressing B to access a trick menu and picking the one you want to train. At first, your dog doesn’t know what the command means, and every time you try is, success or not, someone has to comment on it, the child usually praising the pup or showing frustration. If you try to teach a trick too many times in a day though, your mother’s voice magically reaches you to say it doesn’t want to train anymore, and that’s the big issue with the weekends. Most tricks have to be learned in order, so on a free day where you can find the time to get in as many attempts at training as possible, you eventually hit a barrier that means the pup won’t listen to that command until tomorrow.

 

Here you might say, “well if I can’t train my puppy, I’ll play with them instead!”. Good suggestion, one MTO wasn’t interested in. You may pet your dog, brush its fur, or play with toys you get as gifts or from walks around the neighborhood. The toys, however, come in two forms. The first are just games for you to play, the default, oddly, being Reversi you play against the computer, the others including things like a simple dog race game that comes closest to feeling like a real game and then a puppy quiz game. For things you can interact with your puppy with, you’ll be very disappointed with how it goes. If it’s a toy, you can shake it in their face and your puppy will have music notes appear overhead to indicate that it liked it. Whether it’s a puppet, tug-of-war rope, or stuffed animal, this is all you can expect here, although you do eventually get a remote controlled robot bear that your dog can ignore.  The other type of toy is one you can throw, like a frisbee or ball, and after tossing it, your dog will run over to it, bark in place, and the screen goes white, teleporting the object back to your hand so you can throw it and have your dog bark at it again. The game all about interacting with a puppy puts more effort into setting up meal situations than giving cute or interesting animations to your dog when you’re playing with it!

I mentioned walks earlier, but you aren’t going to be able to walk your dog right out of the gate. First, the puppy must master the arts of sitting and staying, and I mean master literally. Every skill has a meter you can see on the stats screen, and once it hits full bars, it no longer becomes an issue. Trying to squeak in training at all times may have you with both skills mastered about a week in, but that’s not quite enough yet. You must now have your puppy go visit the vet to get its shots. The vet, with her surprisingly purple hair, will tell you your puppy’s temperament, how much it loves you, and its stress levels, and you must visit her once a week regardless of the pup’s health and might have to drop by if your dog gets sick. Once you have the booster shots, you can take it for a walk (but only between 4 and 6 pm, further tightening the schedule), but it mostly exists as a way of training your dog to go on walks. If it’s a male, it may stop to pee on telephone poles, but otherwise you just scold it every time it tries to break away and drop by the shops to get one free item per day. You can get new food, bedding, and a different litter box for your dog, and before we continue, yes. Litter box. Perhaps knowing they wanted to make a cat game some day or getting lazy and not wanting people to have to take their dogs out to poop, your dog gets a litter box in the living room it goes in. Or, well, it should go in, as despite training my dog incessantly every day, it was never fully potty-trained as the only way to train it for that is get mad at it when it poops in the wrong place.

 

Sometimes before you take a walk, your mom asks you to do an errand, which involves going to the right place and talking. You don’t really get to know what you’re getting and your mom dodges the question, but it’s not build up to anything, the writers probably just didn’t care. There is a dog park to visit on walks as well, which is essentially just like home but you can do even less with your dog so it has little purpose.

 

Once you’re home and accepted your fate as training your dog as much as you can, you’ll get into a boring rhythm. Press B to open menu, choose order to give to dog. Maybe it will do it, and if it did you praise it. Meter gets a new bar in it. Repeat until trick is mastered. The Sit command opens up a tree though, as after that you can teach your dog to Shake, but this makes sitting and shaking your hand two separate actions, something that means it eats more time off the clock. If you have the patience to master Shake, you finally get Switch, where the dog uses its other paw to shake yours. A third step in an already time-consuming task, but the worst part is, if you hit any of the games many time barriers, you will not get to praise the dog in time for the trick performance to stick. Mom might call you to dinner right as the dog switches paws, and this crops up constantly during training unless you watch the clock like a hawk. At least pooping in the wrong place causes everything to come to a halt as you are teleported into the living room to watch your dog take a dump on its bed and you get to scold it before time starts back up.

 

Fighting a schedule to get in dog training is an exhausting experience, but it’s not what makes Dogz as terrible as it is. For you see, almost everything in Dogz boils down to the blandest sequence of button presses, the player required to hammer A to get through so much needless dialogue, pointless events, and even the ones you might want to be involved in. Training is B, directional arrows, A, A, A, repeat A until trick text boxes are gone. Do that again a couple times in a row until the clock hits a certain time, press A to get through all of that meaningless schlock, back to the dog. B, directional arrows, A, A, A, repeat A until next barrier. Maybe it’s food time. Go to the cabinet, food choice has an artificial illusion of importance, even the shops have meals that please all breeds to simplify it further. A to get through the training prompts of Stay and Okay.

 

It’s A all the way in Dogz, all of it while the minute long House Theme that loops incessantly plays, most of the game about using A to get to more opportunities to hammer A. It’s easy enough for a kid to understand but not engaging in any way. It’s moving through text boxes and menus for minimal reward, a reward many virtual pet games are willing to give up for free. Your dog hardly does anything interesting on its own, playing with it hardly looks like play, tricks are boring to teach it and repetitive. It’s the stick, the leaf, the clump of dirt in game form. It exists, so it entertains a mind that hasn’t developed anything close to taste or preference. And it’s easy too, because all the kid has to do is press one button over and over even though the results are not going to come to the impatient and they’ll instead likely reach that 21st day and get bowled over by the sudden notice that their time with the dog has come to an end.

 

LET SLIP THE DOGZ OF WAR

After many days of solid repetition, of hammering A to get between moments that require more A presses, you will find that your time with your dog ends. The game reflects that you’ve spent a good amount of time with your dog, and if you’ve somehow mastered the tricks you suddenly win a dog show you don’t actually get to get involved in, but there isn’t really a reason for this ending besides to have an ending before you might wonder why your puppy never changes or grows. I’ve heard many a tale of a child crying over the end of Dogz, with their parents claiming the dog straight up died at this point, but I will not make the journey to verify this possibility as it would require fostering another puppy for 21 days and deliberately mistreating it to see if I got a different result than the one I did. My child and Chrome had reached a fairly good level of mutual affection, so the puppy continues to live with the family and the game asks me to save a cleared game file.

 

GameFAQs says you need the “best ending” to unlock the Always Together Mode after the ending even though my dog didn’t get the contest ending and I got it anyway. In this mode, you can take a puppy and play with them in a setting finally free of the woes of the schedule, of the requirements like sleeping and eating… and yet it feels oddly hollow to boot up this mode. Start now only brings up an option to exit the mode, meaning you can’t see your puppy’s stats anymore. Training it is a thankless task as you can’t track it, and your other options of stuff to do with it hardly qualify as play. You’re essentially locked in a timeless dimension with your dog where you have limited ways of interacting, the phrase “Always Together” seeming almost sinister in this oddly empty follow-up to the hectic time balancing and populated story mode.

 

Random events certainly won’t happen here as they are exempt from time and reality, but during the main game sometimes you found yourself with more interruptions, like phone calls, doorbells, and weird statements from your mother about gifts from your aunt or products bought online that I couldn’t for the life of me find. I never found the phone to answer it either, nor was I there for any doorbell that wasn’t my father. In a way, it captures the child-like confusion of being in a world that you think is centered around you but actually has more moving pieces and unknowable events than your tiny mind can grasp, but at the same time… why would a kid want to play a game that reminds them of the worst parts of being a kid? Why would an adult want to give a game to a kid that will only make them resent their daily chores, the confusion of youth, and interruptions even more?

 

LET SLEEPING DOGZ LIE

Once you come out the other end of Dogz, the reality sinks in. A game of solitaire is more interactive and thoughtful, a child playing with a box is more creative and open to change, and no matter what would happen if you went to a pet shop and impulse bought a pup, it could not match the forgettable mundanity of this virtual version of the experience.

 

Dogz pretends to be a virtual pet game where you get to play with your puppy and teach it tricks, but really, it’s a game about pressing the A button to get through menus and text boxes. There are actual games that are just menus and spreadsheets and yet you have to think about where to press a button and why you are doing it. Here, the goal is always to get through the latest interruption so that you can finally do something that resembles gameplay, but most often that will be doing a chore, saying the same command to your dog, or walking through a neighborhood with little of note to see or do.

 

It’s a game all about dog ownership that seems designed specifically for the purpose of making kids not want to adopt a dog. It makes it a robotic task that you barely have the time for, but it doesn’t capture any of the charm of owning a dog. Your dog in Dogz is a distraction from being forced into dinner conversations or the loop of a school week. This is meant to be a game that can stand-in for dog ownership, to sate a child who wants a puppy but mommy and daddy know that it would be too much of a responsibility. The virtual dog is cute, but that’s the only box it will check, as everything else is hidden behind walls of mashing the A button.

 

And unsurprisingly, we come back to Nintendogs. Near every review of Dogz for Game Boy Advance online acknowledges the huge shadow of the superior DS pet game, and for good reason. Nintendogs is better in every way. Dogz tried to scrape up children whose parents would not buy them a new game console but would give them the knock-off dog game to shut them up. The thing about Nintendogs is… it tries to be the virtual pet game that Dogz seems to be avoiding intentionally. You can play with your Nintendog, every toy having different animations and new ways to play. You can bathe your Nintendog and it’s a little minigame, but in Dogz you shampoo your dog offscreen and only when your mom suggests it. You can own multiple dogs in Nintendogs that you can easily pick, whereas Dogz you have to hope the grab bag is in your favor. Training is gradual in Nintendogs instead of marks on a meter, and it can be done whenever you pick the game up.

 

Nintendogs is not the perfect virtual pet game, it would be weird to say something like that exists, but it is one a kid or adult can enjoy. It captures the appeal of owning a pet, gives you things to do with your pet, and doesn’t waste the player’s time with pointless chores and weird human interactions that don’t have any effect on play. It is a game about owning a puppy, but Dogz is a game that happens to have a puppy that is interrupting all your chores and robotically parroted conversations. That puppy is there so the game designers can cycle you through the game without making you realize you’re on a very dull ride. The little kiddie coasters with very small ups and downs are more exciting than this. This is like a flat loop, everyone else in the kiddie coaster saying the same thing to you over and over but sometimes, you get to pass a picture of a cute animal!

 

We cannot just give the game design a pass because children will swallow it. Kids will eat bugs and mud if you let them, and while not every mud-eater will grow into someone bad, it does seem like something that should be stopped instead of lazily accepted. If we let kids games like Dogz go uncriticized, if we think being adults means we can’t say something made for kids is poor in quality, then we hold them back from better experiences that could put them on better paths. Feed the mud kid some food from different cultures, build a palette for them even if every option doesn’t stick, and for games, find the ones that can stimulate them in meaningful ways. Teach them how games work with the Game Boy Advance Land Before Time game, develop their reflexes and problem solving with a soft Kirby title like Kirby’s Epic Yarn, or even put them on the easiest options in things like Super Mario Odyssey. It’s shocking how many stories I’ve heard of kids aged 4 or 5 beating Super Mario Odyssey or doing well on Mario Kart 8 Deluxe because of the extremely kid-friendly modes and options these games have added without sacrificing challenge and interactivity entirely.

 

Your child does not have to look at their library of games from their youth as garbage to pawn off at Gamestop. Gaming is huge, one of the biggest entertainment industries, and there are high quality experiences for children, apps for the youngest of the young, and so many games out there that your kid would love if they got the trust from mom and dad that they can handle a game that challenges them a little. When you look at a game for a kid, don’t shrug and say “this wasn’t made for me, but a brainless child might enjoy flashing lights and dog images.” We exist in a world where being picky is easier than ever, and it’s not like Dogz released in an age where it was the only option. It was low quality then, but we were permissive. We thought of every possible condition we could to exempt ourselves from saying a game for children was bad because it feels like picking on a weak target, or an area of expertise in low demand and one most people knew would reflect poorly on them for claiming to have.

 

But you don’t need to be an expert to see Dogz for what it is. Even at its release, it was like scrounging for reasons to recommend floating on driftwood as the better form of sea travel than a proper ship. It technically works, it does what is required of it, but its flimsy and unenjoyable and if you do make it to the end of your journey, it wasn’t worth the trials you faced or obstacles to completion. There are so many better pet games, there have been since before Dogz, and there will always be more, some even within the same Petz series.

 

Still, despite knowing all that, it is with a sense of dread that I consider what other Petz games might be like. They clearly learned their lesson at some point, and brief visuals and game descriptions leads me to believe that Dogz gets better on newer system and in later installments…

 

But the worst fear Dogz inspires in me is that when I look over at my shelf, I see Catz sitting right next to it.

 

Released half a year after Dogz… Dogz itself having weird suggestions of felines like the litterbox and Mitch the cat dropping by…

 

Could MTO really be that brazen? Do they think they can recycle the same trash but replace canines with felines?

 

…Rest assured. From a brief look at what Catz has to offer, it is a different game, with much more to do. Perhaps still flawed in many ways on closer investigation, Catz isn’t just an animal swap… but surprisingly, looking at Dogz 2 for GBA… it’s almost the same exact game. A few different visuals, but almost everything else is a carbon copy. Menus, the annoying interruptions, your family still has dinner with the same dialog, your dad still rings the doorbell like he’s just a visitor to your house, the stats, the opening, the characters, it’s all the same all over again! And you know why it worked? Because we didn’t uphold any standards for children’s games, because we weren’t watching closely enough to see that a company was selling us the same garbage twice because five year olds wouldn’t notice a repackaged product if a 2 is placed after it.

 

If you see those sappy puppy eyes looking at you from the shelf of a used game store or a webpage, turn away knowing that there are many more puppy games out there that will treat you right. Because while there may be no such thing as bad dogs, there are certainly very bad Dogz.