Reviewed: November 29, 2005
Reviewed by: Ken Hutchinson

Publisher
Ubisoft

Developer
MTO

Released: November 17, 2005
Genre: Simulation
Players: 1-2
ESRB: Everyone

7
6
7
8
7.3

Supported Features:

  • Cartridge Save
  • GBA Link Cable

    		•
    Finally, Game Boy Advance owners can join in on the fun that Nintendo DS owners have been experiencing for months with Nintendogs. Dogz, by developer MTO, comes to the Advance to give gamers the joy of raising a new puppy.

    Part of the Petz line, which also includes Catz 5 and Dogz 5 on the PC, Ubisoft gives gamers the chance to care for a Beagle, Golden Retriever, Chihuahua, Dalmatian, Labrador Retriever, or a wide variety of other puppies. With 18 breeds to choose from, you’ll get to teach your puppy to sit, stay, and shake as you form a loving bond with it.

    Dogz brings back the days of the Tamagotchi, the little keychain game where you raised a virtual pet. Dogz just gives you the chance to raise man’s best friend. Pet sims always seem to have a niche in the gaming industry for the younger crowd and even older games that have a liking for the respective animals in real life. Gamers get a chance to form an affectionate bond with their pet without the real life costs or hassles.

    Dogz offers the following features:

    • Adopt and raise a puppy of your own!
    • Features 49 different dogs across 18 popular breeds.
    • Control a main character in the game for more direct interaction with your puppy.
    • More places to hang out with your puppy, including the living room, yard, kitchen and bedroom-even take your puppy for a walk on a leash!
    • Game includes 3 mini games: Puppy Run, Puppy Reversi and Puppy Quiz.
    • Game Link cable allows your puppy to go visit your friends’ houses.
    • Always Together Mode: After players complete the game, up to three puppies’ data are saved through an included backup feature. In Always Together mode, players can load the data of one of their previous puppies and play with it anytime.
    To start off, you’ll give the game a little info about yourself, such as your name and gender, and the type of dog you prefer. Afterwards, you’re taken to a pet store where you’ll get the chance to pick out a pet based on the preferences that you previously established. Don’t be discouraged by the initial selection if you don’t see the puppy of your choice. You can always go to a different shop where you’ll have a different range of choices.

    Once you pick out your puppy, you’ll go back home. Here is nearly everything goes on. You can feed your puppy, teach it tricks, let it sleep, or let it use the restroom here. The tasks are all straightforward enough for practically any gamer to get a hold of. If your puppy does what you want, you praise it. If it does something it shouldn’t, then you scold it.

    Teaching the puppy anything will take time. You’ll need to repeat the command over and over again, give the appropriate reaction, and after a while the lesson will have been learned. You’ll start by teaching the puppy its name. Then you progress to teaching it how to sit, shake, switch, lie down, go to bed, stay, and where to relieve itself.

    The whole game isn’t just about teaching commands, though. To build any type of bond with your puppy, you’ll have to care for it. This means you need to keep it fed, entertained, and keep its living area clean. After some training, you’ll be able to take it for a walk and go to the park, vet, and local pet stores. You can buy new toys, a new leash, bed, food, and some other things. Once you buy something, you’ll have an unlimited supply of that item for the rest of the game. So you don’t have to constantly buy food. You are limited, however, to purchasing one item a day.

    I took my puppy to the park everyday and played with it using a ball or Frisbee. I also experimented with different types of food and drink to see what it would like. I really didn’t seem to be able to make a bad choice, seeing as how my puppy liked practically anything.

    One irritating part of the game is how rapidly time goes by. It takes about 5 minutes of the game time to go from one room to the next. Cleaning and teaching commands take nearly 20 minutes each time. You could easily spend nearly two hours trying to get your puppy to shake. On top of that, you constantly have interruptions. You’ll spend five tries getting your puppy to sit, and then once it finally does, you don’t get time the chance to praise it because your mom tells you to help her with dinner or to go to school. Meals and school just became so repetitive, since there was no interaction with the environment. Plus, the text is roughly the same day in and day out, with slight changes.

    You can spend leisure time with your puppy as well, if you tire of teaching it commands and grooming it. You can listen to music, watch TV, read it a book, or play with toys. A status screen shows you where the puppy’s level of training, grooming, mood, walking status stand.

    After three weeks, roughly 5-6 hours in real time, you finish the game with the puppy you have. At this point, you can save your puppy, up to three, in the Always Together, unless you raised it poorly. You can’t change its condition from here. So you need to do a good job of raising it within the first three of having it. I’m not sure why they chose such a small allotment of time, but it possible to do a lot within those three weeks. It is still disheartening to not be able to continue to raise your puppy after such a short time.

    If another friend has an Advance and Dogz, you can link up to each other and have your puppies meet each other. It isn’t as entertaining as interaction between puppies on Nintendogs, but it is still a nice aspect of the game.

    If you want a change from all the raising, you can play one of the mini-games included on Dogz. Puppy Reversi, which is just a game of Reversi, is a game where you’ll try to have the most pieces of your color on the board. Run Puppy Run! has your puppy running through an obstacle course. Finally, Puppy Quiz tests your knowledge about dogs by asking you a series of questions. Get four wrong and the game is over. The Puppy Quiz can be informative, and the other give you chance to pass time away from the norm.

    The main controls of the game consist of the A and B button. As you approach different objects, the A button will perform a different action, and the B button lets you run. The action for the A button will appear on the display. You can always check the status screens with the Start button to see what needs to be taught and then go about the lesson.

    If you’ve played Nintendogs, you might be disappointed with Dogz. It’s hard to the DS presentation on an Advance, though. MTO still gives the puppies that adorable look. You can still see the “look” by some of the puppies. The rest of the game doesn’t seem to have received much attention. Surprisingly, though, it seems like some of the cars received more detail than anything else.

    I really didn’t notice the music too much; it sort of fell into the background, as I played the game. You can listen to a few musical pieces through the CD player when you receive the CD’s from your mom. But they aren’t anything really worth the time.

    The sound effects do a nice job of imitating the sounds a puppy. You’ll hear it whimper when you scold it, or bark when it’s happy. These help to build the virtual attachment between you and your puppy. You can’t help but feel good about yourself knowing your puppy is happy when it barks.

    Priced at $29.99, it is quite a bit heftier in price than a Tamagotchi. It is, however, the first puppy sim for the Game Boy Advance. Plus, you can do more with your puppy than you could with a Tamagotchi.

    I know that 5-6 hours of playing time seems rather short. But Dogz offers a lot of replayability in being able to raise another puppy. Many people like many types of dogs. Gamers may raise a French Bulldog and then raise a Toy Poodle the second time around. I would have liked to raise the puppy to full maturity, but developers are limited to the amount of space of the cartridge. This makes a great game for kids and pet lovers that are looking for a virtual pet to create a bond with.

    Having a pet is very satisfying for most of the time. Dogs prove to be very loyal companions in many instances. However, they do come at a sizeable cost and with many chores. Some places, like certain apartments or condos, don’t allow pets. The next best thing to a real puppy is a virtual one. Dogz can help fill that void. If you have DS, I’d suggest Nintendogs. But if you have an Advance, Dogz makes a good runner-up.