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."

Comments

no thanks

[Ender Ryan]

Whether it IS more than just another stupid tamagotchi-style game or not is irrelevent to me for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that I won't buy a DS until / if ever there is a game lineup I feel is more worth my time.

Secondly, whether it's more than a gimmicky fad of a game or not, whether it's a bit RPG-ish or not... I hate fads and gimmicks, and there are tons of highly acclaimed RPGs that I still haven't had a chance to play yet.

My time is precious, and as I said there's tons of great games that I haven't played yet, so if you want to pique my interest enough to get me to invest a little of my time in your product, skip the BS and the gimmicks. They worked when I was a kid, but as an adult I just don't have time to check out every stupid little bullshit fad.

I am sick of Nintendo rehashes! I loved Nintendo since the NES, the SNES was my favorite system of all time, but these days Nintendo seems to release more versions of its handhelds than they do original games to play on them! Frankly, I find it disturbing that so many people get so excited about being able to get a GBA in their favorite color, so much so that they'll drop another $70 on a new GBA when they ALREADY HAVE ONE! And, not that graphics are that important to me, but a lot of their damn rehashes appear to use the same sprites as the original NES versions.

</rant>

Sorry, I didn't mean for this to turn into a rant. But since it has, I'm going to go ahead and post it and hope to see some interesting viewpoints from others.

OTOH, I am really excited about the upcoming Gamecube titles, to say the least. So it's not all news for me as far as Nintendo is concerned.

Review

[atarrri]

I just played it a bit and I have to say I'm not impressed. It's nice to see people making games for free but there just really isn't very much to this game. Don't be fooled by the graphics and sound, this plays nothing like a Mario game, basically it's a Jetpac clone with ripped off graphics and sound from Mario. The gameplay is very repetitive and though fun for a few games it quickly loses its charm. There are plenty of better freeware games that don't get slashdotted because they use original ideas. For an example of a very fun original freeware platform game that involves a jetpack check out Cave Story: http://agtp.romhack.net/doukutsu.html