50 Years of Video Games: Nintendogs: Chihuahua & Friends (DS)

Nintendo had a powerful one-two punch in the mid-2000s that helped it go from lagging behind its competitors to producing two of the best selling game consoles of all time, the first blow dealt with the touch screen gaming device known as the Nintendo DS. Introduced at the tail end of 2004, the system’s easy to understand touch interface meant it could appeal to the type of player who struggled to remember the placement and names of a game console’s buttons, this system allowing Nintendo to reel in the virtually untapped numbers of the casual gamer market. Casual gamers had existed in the background for quite a while, but most people accepted they were off playing hidden object games or broadly popular games like Tetris that also appealed to the usual gaming audience as well. Casual gamers were about to embrace the DS in droves though, but not only because touch gaming was an accessible gateway even for people who hadn’t played a video game before, but because the console would get a showcase for what the system could provide with 2005’s pet simulation game Nintendogs.

Nintendogs comes in many different versions, the one covered here being Chihuahua & Friends specifically but the differences between them are very small and eventually practically irrelevant. Whether you’re playing Chihuahua & Friends, Lab & Friends, Dachshund & Friends, the special edition Best Friends edition, the later released Dalmatian & Friends, or the Japanese exclusive Shiba & Friends which is just the Lab & Friends version with a different headlining dog, the only major changes will be which dog breeds are available for adoption at the start and a few version specific items available. Through playing the game you will eventually unlock the ability to adopt the breeds featured in the other versions and the items can be traded between games with another player, so in essence the game choice is going to be about which type of puppy you want at the start, although you can get multiples and you can “Donate a Dog” later if you no longer wish to own it. In total there are 19 available dog breeds with some differentiation in the color and patterns of their coats as well, the Dalmatian a special unlockable in most versions but the default breeds include many of the expected types of dogs. Beyond the headlining breeds you can get things like Beagles, German Shepherds, Toy Poodles, Pugs, and Yorkshire Terriers, most of them popular picks although you won’t find anything like a Rottweiler or Bulldog among their ranks. These puppies will stay puppies no matter how long you play though, never running away or dying as Nintendogs is generally a rather lenient pet sim when it comes to what’s asked of the player.

Once you have picked a Nintendog to live with you’ll be transported to a living room where most of your interaction with the puppy will take place. Your puppy has three core needs you’ll need to take care of, the dog of course needing to eat and drink after a while or after doing something that might wear it out like going for a walk or playing at length. Food and drink can both be bought for cheap, the player granted a generous amount of money to start so they can both afford the first puppy adoption and get a good amount of essential items to take care of the dog with. You can eventually have up to three puppies at a time and they will interact and play with each other in the living room, but the money system makes sure you don’t dive in too quickly and end up with a trio of rambunctious puppies and nothing to feed them. The last need to keep watch of is the dog’s cleanliness, and while hunger and thirst will make your dog lethargic and less willing to play, letting them get dirty will cause visible fleas to bounce off of them and other dog owners will begin chastising you when you encounter them during walks. Cleaning them can be done quickly with a brush, but a more thorough wash with shampoo and a shower provides a small interactive segment with a bubbly tune to accompany the activity.

Your dogs aren’t particularly needy so these care activities are not only quickly completed but not very intrusive when they become a necessity. Instead, Nintendogs gives you a lot of freedom to interact with your puppy in small but entertaining ways. The dogs are adorable and energetic little pets, always happy to see you and bounding up to play if you whistle or call out the name you gave them. The touch screen allows you actually pet the dogs, the animal reacting differently based on where you’re petting it and having areas they both like to be pet and ones they get upset if you touch. Most of the game won’t allow you to actually harm the puppy and the whimpering noise when you do accidentally poke them can be a little heartbreaking, but seeing them eager to play, leaning into your pet, or closing their eyes as you find just the right spot is more likely to happen and definitely makes the dog feel more alive for having such a range of reactions.

If you pet your dog a certain way, you can start to encourage them to do tricks as well. By helping them sit, roll over, or even do more involved tricks like shake your “hand”, you can gradually implant the idea of the trick in their mind, but the DS microphone allows this to be more interactive as you need to speak the trick aloud to cement in their mind the command they’ll need to reply to later. Raw repetition is the main factor in teaching them here so it’s not as difficult as real obedience training, and while certain tricks take longer to teach and you can’t just blitz through them all since they won’t retain too much in a single real world day, you can gradually teach them a good selection of different actions and responses that give you both the satisfaction of completing a task and a closer connection to your virtual pet.

There are quite a few activities you can engage with involving your dog, the living room activities starting off simple but as you do more in the game and buy or find more items, the options for play expand. A simple game of fetch with toys is a natural way to play, but you can start finding items with unique and variable responses. You can drive a remote control car around for your dog to chase, play music the animal reacts to, and even get a jump rope where one dog will help you hold it while your other two puppies can try and jump it. The dogs won’t always take to new toys right off the bat, but you can acclimate them to something like blowing bubbles in the same way you might a real dog, the right approach required to help them overcome their skittishness. Sadly, while there are many dress up options for your dog, you can’t have them wear more than one at a time. It makes sense you can’t attach multiple collars of course, but if you’re going to pop a ribbon in their hair or have them wear something silly like a cowboy hat, the game removes any other accessories despite being worn on different parts of the body. The overall range of the toys can feel a bit limited at times too, there being a lot of different types of frisbees and some items are almost more like jokes to drop in front of your dog like a gold bar but the unique play opportunities aren’t as rich as one might hope, especially since finding new items can take quite a while.

Besides going to a shop to just buy whatever is on offer, most of your items will be acquired either by random gifts the puppies very rarely find or by finding things while out on walks. Every 30 minutes in real time you can take a puppy for a walk around the neighborhood, the player given a map to draw their intended route for a round trip. When a puppy starts off they can’t go very far, but beyond just being a way to spend time with the dog and for them to do their business, these walks are actually vital to many of the long term goals of Nintendogs. First are the question mark squares you’ll want to hit as these can either provide a random new item (with duplicates unfortunately possible but the items can be sold) or an encounter with someone else walking their dog. The person can give you a quick tip or comment while the puppies play, and before you can get a full house of your own it can be sweet to see your puppy interact with others despite there being no real extrinsic reward for doing so. It can be a little bothersome when you’re trying to get more items and you just keep finding people though, but Nintendogs is meant to be played across multiple days in small bursts rather than being a chase to some clear end goal.

However, there are a few things to shoot for, that being the three types of competitions. Walks actually help you train for two of these, your puppy needing to practice at the gym with its obstacle courses to get ready for agility trials and the park is the only place that really gives you the space required to train up for the disc throwing competition. Disc throwing is the more straightforward of those two contests, the puppy needing to snap a disc out of the air to earn points with the distance from where you threw it determining their score. Agility trials are more complex, the puppy having to learn different obstacles like jumping hurdles, running through plastic tunnels, and weaving between pylons consistently to earn points in the competition courses. Along with the obedience trial that asks you to perform specific tricks, each of the competitions has five different ranks to progress through and placing in the top three will reward you some prize money. You can drop ranks by doing too poorly and can climb to the next tier without getting first place, but this is your primary place to earn cash and provides the most direct challenges to the player’s ability to raise their pup. The competitions also have a bit of character to them as well thanks to a pair of commentators, Ted Rumsworth keeping his attention on important details but his quirky co-commentator Archie Hubbs often chimes in with a joke or some unusual observation or anecdote to make things a bit lighter. A puppy can only do three competitions a day as another limiter to keep you playing over multiple days instead of trying to find some end point that doesn’t truly exist, but the low pressure play does mean it’s not a hard game to pick up for a few minutes to do a walk, compete, or just play with your puppy some more.

THE VERDICT: While some of the limitations on daily activities might make you wish for more things to do around the house with your dogs, Nintendogs: Chihuahua & Friends and the other versions of Nintendogs all provide many of the expected activities you might want to do with a puppy without many of the real world concerns that come with them. Training achieves a good balance of being quick but not too easy with the competitions a good way to put that work to the test while simple care like feeding and bathing the dog is quick and simple so it’s not distracting while also not entirely absent. The puppies themselves have a bit of personality and variety in reactions that make them feel more like they’re alive, the reliance on the touch screen and microphone definitely making your time with your virtual pet feel more involved than if they were just an animal you fed and had perform tricks.

And so, I give Nintendogs: Chihuahua & Friends for Nintendo DS…

A GOOD rating. While the simplicity is certainly part of the incredible appeal the game had towards casual gamers, the design focusing on daily play does limit in a few ways. Making you wait to take a dog on walks for a while or having a set amount of competitions a pup can do in a day make sense, but the item rollout relying so heavily on random chance can make the living room play start to stagnate over time, especially when so many of the toys elicit the same reactions from your pets. There are some very creative inclusions like the jump rope though, and playing with your puppy even without toys can be fun thanks to how responsive they are and the option to train them to perform tricks while in the living room. Nintendogs still mostly works as something you play for a small bit to do a few tasks, the competitions giving things a bit more direction without demanding you pay attention to them if you would rather keep your play casual. Nintendogs does walk that line of perhaps being a bit too simple in parts, there are only three options for dog food and two treat types for example, but I could still see many of the things I like about owning real dogs in the little puppies on screen without the pressures of things like worrying about their health or needing to work your schedule around them. It’s hardly a full on simulation of dog ownership because it makes the care part so easy, but it’s more of an embrace of the fantasy of dog ownership, able to keep the pet a puppy forever where they’re always happy to see you and ready to play and cleaning up their mess during a walk just requires tapping the touch screen once. The experience could definitely benefit from fleshing out some portions more if it’s going to boil down dog care to its essentials, but that’s mostly a matter of content amount rather than content quality, the game as it is still providing a well-built pet sim.

Nintendogs, when all its versions are counted as one, became the second best selling game on the DS, which is currently the second best selling game system of all time at the time of writing. The appeal of being able to turn a system on and having a pet there waiting for you was incredibly strong and certainly cheaper than dog ownership and Nintendogs definitely put a lot of work into making that animal on the other side of the screen seem alive with how it behaves. Being a bit lean in some areas definitely didn’t diminish its broad appeal, and no doubt many of those DS systems sold did so off the back of this simple but effective pet sim. Sometimes you do just want a cute puppy to play with for a half an hour without all the worries that would come with needing to really take care of one, and whether you want a Chihuahua, Labrador, Dachshund, or Dalmatian for that quick bit of play time, Nintendogs knows how to make its virtual pets easy to love and fun to return to no matter how long you spent away from them.