Monday Musings: What ever Happened to Nintendogs?

You must be sitting there thinking, why does the title say “Monday Musings”? Well, it’s the title of one of my new columns that I want to do weekly but am too lazy too so it will be a rare occurrence, so enjoy them while you can. What I’ll be talking about are rants, general gaming discussions, questions to the community, and a not-so-fanboyish or biased talk. It’s gonna be hard, but I’ll make it through.

Today I’m going to talk about Nintendogs, the oh-so-infamous dog simulator that upon it’s release and success, spawned other fantastic games from other developers. The game came out August 22, 2005 in the US, and VGChartz tells me that the game has sold 23.25 million copies worldwide which is damn good for a new franchise and during a time when the pet simulation wasn’t over-populated and become as whored out as Guitar Hero. There were different SKU’s of the game of course with different dogs that you could start with and get in each one, but all were pretty much the same besides that.

I picked up the game, played it for I would say a month or two, Felix and Daisy became masters at the Frisbee toss, that dog from across the street knew not to fuck with me, but there was one fundamental flaw with the game, once you played it, it got boring. Way, way boring. I mean, you could still earn money and upgrade your house, buy shit for your dog, but I mean it only lasted for so long. After hacking my way to $999,999,999.99, I didn’t have anything else to do. All the dogs were pretentious jerks, the park was being inhabited by the Jets. The Sharks never had a chance.

Via Dual Analaogs

So now the question is, where is the game now? I mean, rumors were out when the Wii was announced and even a couple months after the game initially came out, but literally no word from Nintendo has come about the game coming out or it being in development, and with such a successful start on the DS, and some exceptional reviews and ratings, what’s going on?

I mean you’ve got the Wii, a good 1/2 of the people, maybe 3/4 of the people that have bought the Wii are casual gamers, people that just like to chill and not frag their friends in Call of Duty. And with some of the best games on the Wii being casual and selling great (Wii Fit), wouldn’t it be common sense to put the game out either as an in-store game or like a WiiWare game? Maybe it’s just me.

The thing is though, if the game does ever make a return to whatever hardware it does, a lot of things would have to be changed, because like I said before (and a lot of people have said), is that the game gets boring after awhile. We would need more to do, maybe more places to go, more things to get, and just a little bit more. I really liked the game for a while and I think that a future release could build even more on the success of it’s predecessor with said additions.

What do you guys think? Nintendogs or no Nintendogs? Do you think if it came out it would do well, and what would you guys like added to the game if it did come out?

And that concludes the first edition of the Monday Musings. Enjoy.