What's the toy that has been driving parents mad this past week? Nintendogs, one of the sleeper video game hits of the past couple of years. While the TV ads have concentrated on assorted shoot-em-ups and movie spin-offs, this modest little number - which enables you to pretend to own a dog - had racked up 6m sales worldwide even before the Christmas rush.
Think of Nintendogs as Tamagotchis for those with too much disposable income. Or as real dogs for those for whom the real world is a little too, well, real. It enables players to experience all the thrills of owning a real dog - walking, feeding, training, entering dog shows - without the one conceivable benefit of pet ownership: having something to cuddle.
But like your actual slobbering canine, a Nintendog is for life, not just Christmas, as the parents of those who have bought them for their offspring are discovering. The big problem is that the virtual dogs aren't very good at remembering their names. Nintendogs has voice-recognition technology, which means, in theory, that you can shout at the screen and the dog will obey. But the reality is somewhat different.
As a user of the Mumsnet parenting website put it: "I nearly did away with a young girl who had one of these ... 'Lucky ... LUUUUCKY ... LUCKY ... Lucky ... Lucky ... Lucky ... LUUUUCKY ... LUCKY ... Lucky' ... This went on for a full hour ... I swear I was this close to doing something unforgivable."
That parent is discovering something that a lot of games nerds knew already: that Nintendogs can drive you mad. A Google search using the words "Nintendogs" "hate" and "I" brings up 242,000 results, with two clear camps: those who hate the game, and those who hate those who hate the game. There is no Nintendogs middle ground. One blogger writes of "How Nintendogs will ruin the world," another calls it "a cancerous ball of fluffy death".
Is there an answer? Well, if plagued by virtual labradors, there's always a traditional remedy, one rightly frowned on when practised with real dogs nowadays: put your child's Nintendogs disc into a sack, and chuck it in the nearest river.
