Just to confirm what I thought in my initial impressions, it does get better when you’ve played it a bit more. Now I’ve trained Poppy with a few tricks (sit, lay down, roll over, spin, and shake) and won a couple of the obedience trials I’ve got some money to play with, and that opens up more things you can do. I have enough to get a second dog but I’m not going to do that until I’ve pretty much exhausted my opportunies to do things with one.

It’s definitely still no deep and long game but I’m having fun with it. It continues to impress me with how lifelike the dogs are, both in terms of animation and in reactions to whatever you’re doing. If nothing else it’s a very impressive technical showcase for what the DS can do with what could be considered fairly limited hardware – the PSP might have power pushing that of the PS2, but it can’t make dogs that yelp if you poke them up the arse.

Not that I’d do that, of course.