The folks at GamePro have put together a pretty interesting feature listing their picks for the top 52 most important games ever. These aren't necessarily the best games, or the best-selling games, but their choices for those titles that have been the most influential on gaming as a whole. And while we're sure many of their picks will be questioned and debated to the point of exhaustion, we're really only interested in one small part of the list -- that is, the only DS title to make the cut. Nintendogs weighs in at #44. Does this mean it's the most influential of all DS games? Since it's the only one on the list, it would seem so, and while we agree that Nintendogs certainly advanced gaming, we might argue that since the franchise draws heavily on both Animal Crossing and the digital pet phenomenon, it's hard to see Nintendogs as a "focusing lens" that forever changed gaming. Does that mean Nintendogs did nothing new? Of course it did. But the idea of a needy digipet existed long before Nintendo popularized the portable pooches with their array of titles. GamePro says "first" doesn't matter -- it's being the folks that do it right that matters -- Nintendogs certainly did a lot of things right, but is it the most important game on the DS? It's an interesting question.And we have a question of our own -- where's Brain Age? The game that started the training phenomenon is easily equally influential, or perhaps even more so. But we won't argue; rather, we admire the effort that goes into such a list, and after skimming the comments on the article, we don't envy the flood of angry e-mails that are surely flowing into the mailboxes of the writers.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
4-25-2007 @ 4:09PM
CD said...
I can see why they'd choose Nintendogs as the most important DS game. It was the first game to use all of the DSes functions (though it used WiFi in a very limited way) and in a way that appealed to a lot of people and gave them an experience that couldn't be quite duplicated on any other game system. It was (and might still be) the most popular, best selling non-game which has become Nintendo's bread and butter for expanding the gaming market. Nintendogs was the reason a lot of people bought a DS, myself included even though when I first heard about it I thought it was the dumbest idea for a game ever, lol.
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4-25-2007 @ 4:11PM
Silver R. Wolfe said...
Yes, Nintendogs is the best game ever. It should've been on the top of the list. Forget Zelda and GTAIII, those games are for teh kiddies. Nintendogs is hardcore. Its off the hizzle graphics puts Gears of War to shame.
It's totally ABAP baby. The only thing that would make it better would be if it was on the Virtual Boy baby, real frickin' 3D, not any of this TV crap. ABAP!
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4-25-2007 @ 4:20PM
phanboy_iv said...
Nintendogs has no business being on that list.
But I'm not inclined to give much credence to a list that ranks GTA3 as number one. Shame,too,as most of the rest of the list I agree with.
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4-25-2007 @ 6:41PM
Matt said...
I haven't played it; I've only seen it played, and I would agree. It definitely is a crucial game, as it brought new possibilities to portable gaming where others had either tried and failed, or not tried enough before. Granted, there are other games that show off the DS's features, but none quite captured audiences the way Nintendogs did. (and for some, still does)
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4-25-2007 @ 6:49PM
Alex said...
I stopped playing Nintendogs a week after buying it. Not my type of game, but I give it credit for reintroducing and popularizing virtual world games based on pets, real pets and not stuff like Tomagochi. As for it being the most influentual DS game, that's absurd; Phoenix Wright, Brain Age and even Cooking Mama are way more intriguing than the game
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4-25-2007 @ 7:25PM
Alisha Karabinus said...
I think it belongs on the list -- it fits the 'focusing lens' criteria they put forth, but I don't think it should have been the ONLY DS game. But with any list like that, of course, we're all going to disagree!
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4-25-2007 @ 11:03PM
Vinh said...
Although Nintendogs isn't my first choice as most influential DS game, I can agree with Gamepro without reading what their stance was. Personally, I would've picked Brain Age too, but if I were to imagine why Nintendogs was chose, it had to be Nintendo's marketing plan. With both the DS and the Wii, they made it quite obvious that they were targeting new gamers outside the bubble of pre-teen to 20-something males demographic. They wanted to pull in non-gamers, namely females of all age groups. How are you going to do that? Port over another Final Fantasy? You've got to attract them with games that are potentially appealling. Grab them with the bait, pull them in with the hook.
I remember when the original DS came out, a lot of people were skeptical and already writing it off as a failure because of competition from the PSP. Do I even have to explain what has happened with DS sales since then?
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4-26-2007 @ 9:31AM
Karga said...
Nintendogs had great graphics and good AI, but yeah, it lost me after a couple months. What can I say, I'm a cat person. I would agree that Phoenix Wright, Brain Age and even Wario Ware should have been included. Mini games for the DS was genius.
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4-26-2007 @ 5:26PM
G-T3K said...
I can't say Nintendogs was my favorite game... I lost interest in it pretty quickly, actually. I really wanted to see the dog grow and evolve a little more than it did. On the other hand, I do think it deserves to be on such a list for its innovate use of the DS's controls to interact with the dog. "Petting" it, coaxing it into learning new tricks, the voice commands... I haven't seen a DS title since that lives up to the potential of the system. I'd like developers to have learned something from Nintendogs, but I don't think many did.
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4-26-2007 @ 10:45PM
james said...
I think Nintendogs was the turning point for the DS in Japan, where the focus of "non-gamers" suddenly became a profitable reality. It started the avalanche that hasn't stopped yet, and for that reason I can easily see why it's one of the most influential games. It proved that casual games work (extraordinarily well) financially.
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