One of the new toys we received last month was Nintendogs, an addictive "game" that encourages you to train and take care of some really cute pups. By the way, some of you folks might have noticed the return of a familiar face from my old comic, Aimless. Will her royal highness stick around after dropping in? Will she take over? Who knows?

As I mentioned before, Nintendogs is a fun little dog-training simulation. You train your dog to "sit" and "lie down" like you with a real dog, by teaching it to recognize commands and associate them with a behavior. Unfortunately, you have to reinforce those commands or the dog forgets or confuses it with another command. The part I don't like about the game is that it's a lot like Tamagotchi in the fact that the dogs exist in real time and will get hungry if you forget to turn your DS on for long stretches of time. I could do without that sort of stress!