Things start to get clever with the fact that you can do all of the playing with a ball for free, in an ‘adoption kit’ which is rather more than a demo and provides a good proportion of the full game’s features.

It’s not the artificial intelligence that makes Dogz so ahead of its time. “I just got a Dogz.” “My new Dogz is brown.” As if the ‘z’ wasn’t bad enough already.) Magic decided that the plural should be Dogz and the singular should be… Dogz. This is a decision I can relate to, because within the game PF. (As an aside, it’s amusing to me how Susan Kuchinskas in Wired there goes out of her way to avoid talking about any one of the pet characters in isolation even though you can only play with one at a time. Add a bit of a learning and training mechanism and Dogz was set up to get tech coverage as “a baby step towards PC-based life”, too. There is not a lot required of you as a player to start getting something enjoyable back.

You can pick up your new pet with a click and place them somewhere else, you can give them a ball to play with and they might chase it, or do something unexpected and charming like balance on it. Put all of that in a cartoon package with a straightforward interface, and you have an appealing desktop distraction.

The idea that there was even any more significant a divide between the people playing Dogz and the people playing Doom than between either and the people playing, say, Panzer Dragoon is a questionable one.ĭogz is a triumph of the simple. Alongside sports and TV tie-ins and fighting games, a Windows-based pet simulator had its equal place. Enough to put those games at the top of the charts even when at a disadvantage in sales measures. Magic’s Dogz, for good or bad.īefore getting onto its cutting edge elements, Dogz is another reminder, like I went into with Trivial Pursuit a decade earlier, that people playing more ‘casual’ games were not only around already in the past, but in big numbers. What was the most ahead of its time bestselling game of 1996? The one that most looks like it belongs in a later world? Tomb Raider? Super Mario 64 (not that that one was even 1996 here)? No, from all the games I’ve encountered it can only be PF.

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