Memory Card: Nintendogs

Most parents, when making the decision to bring a child into their lives, reckon with the reality that they will lose their evenings previously spent relaxing. They plan for dirty nappies, school dramas and even complete disasters, but I am reasonably confident in my guess that my parents did not anticipate what would turn out to be one of the main time-consumers of weekdays and weekends alike - walking their eight-year-old daughter’s virtual dogs. 

A birthday gift of a Nintendo DSi and Nintendogs: Lab & Friends marked a lot of firsts for me. First console, first game, and, frankly, first real responsibility. I became quickly enamoured by my two golden Labradors - a boy named ‘Spud’ and a girl called ‘Rose’ - and even followed them up by getting a Cocker Spaniel that I named ‘Poofle.’ As the game only allows you to keep three dogs in your house at once, the night I left my DS with my then pug-obsessed sister and she bought me a fourth, unwittingly ousting Poofle to the kennel, proved to be a tense and trying evening. Still, little Jet won my heart as well, and I eventually worked out how to switch them back and forth between the house and the ‘dog hotel.’

The game itself is simplistic and easy to grasp. You need to wash your dogs, feed them, give them water and take them for walks in order to keep all of their traits described with words like ‘full’ rather than ‘famished.’ Incidentally, this game was how I learnt the word famished, as well as the word parched, so maybe there’s some small educational value to it also. You can enter dog shows and train your dogs to be faster and more skilful, as well as upping their endurance. However, in order to build up your dog’s stamina, you need to take them for longer and longer walks, which was in turn what led to my poor Mum having to finish off an oversized romp I had decided it was best to start ten seconds before my bedtime. 

In truth, Nintendogs isn’t really any different from the other thousands upon thousands of pet simulators that now exist in app stores or on Steam. Nothing stands out aside from the slightly pixelated, 2005 graphics and the fact that you play it on a tiny little console instead of your far more convenient phone. But while every dog rearing app I’ve ever downloaded has inevitably been deleted, I have no intention of ever selling my Lab & Friends cartridge. And what’s more, when I booted it up so I could review it for this article, I couldn’t help spending an hour washing, feeding and taking Spud, Rose, Poofle and Jet for a walk, just to hold them over until I next decide to visit.