My Dog II: Central Bark

The problem with working from home is that you tend to get stuck with the chores. For instance, my girlfriend has all but transferred responsibility for her dogs onto me, meaning that every morning I trudge miserably along the riverside with them, retching as I handle their excrement into a plastic bag, and narrowing my eyes as they gambol.

Dogs are all very well when they're doing something hilarious, but there's nothing funny about sustaining a complex and more or less helpless organism through life. It's little wonder, then, that virtual pets are so popular.

Last year's My Dog was one of the better examples of this breed, and for the past 15 months it's been the alpha pet game in the mobile territory. Central Bark is therefore the inevitable sequel.

For those who didn't play the original, the aim in Central Bark is simply to keep a virtual dog alive and happy. You begin by selecting the colour of puppy you'd like and giving it a name – for simplicity, we'll call it Milhouse.

Once you've got it home, you find yourself with a number of responsibilities. On a basic level Milhouse needs to be fed, watered, and cleaned; but dogs, like men, don't live on bread alone, and so you also need to ensure that Milhouse is having fun and feels loved.

You do all this through an intelligent interface that conscientiously strives never to pull you out of the gameworld into anything as unnatural as a menu screen. When you need to feed Milhouse, for instance, you navigate with '4' and '6' through the three rooms of your apartment till you reach the kitchen and open the fridge, then you choose the food from the shelves inside. In short, you interact with the game by interacting with objects rather than text.

You can also act directly on Milhouse with the cursor by selecting him and choosing to either Pat, Stroke, or Tickle, all of which represent love.

If Milhouse is thirsty, he'll paw at the kitchen tap. For more problematic expressions, like needing to go to the toilet, a thought bubble appears above his head containing, in that instance, a turd.

Then, for the most general requirements and a review of his overall state, you have to go to the study and check your computer, where a line graph describes his happiness, hunger, and so on.

To keep Milhouse going, there's a huge range of foodstuffs, grooming products, and toys on offer in the game's shop, with new items unlocking as you teach Milhouse to perform a repertoire of 21 tricks.

These tricks give Central Bark something like a completist structure, and range from Sit to the rather more impressive Handstand. Each one takes the form of a timing sub-game in which you have to press '5' when a paw symbol aligns with another paw symbol, and while we'd have liked to see more variety, they're a very welcome inclusion.

There's a debate to be had about whether games like Central Bark are games at all, given the lack of concrete goals and grave sense of responsibility they try to instil in the player. And arguably not being a game, Central Bark puts us in the unusual position of having to assess, as the most important factor, how much you end up getting mushy about your pet.

However, if any virtual pet will make you mushy it's this one. Milhouse is little more than a cluster of discs coloured uniformly in pastel tones, but the animators have done an excellent job of imbuing him with life, and you'll almost certainly want to take advantage of the new facility to transfer him into subsequent versions of the game.

Milhouse squirms and tumbles with real personality, and the whole cel-shaded look of the game is both endearing and polished. Strange as it may seem, watching Milhouse skit around the park after a ball or cringing with the pleasure of a tickle is genuinely gratifying, although we'll kill you if you tell anyone we said it.

Being gamers, we'd prefer it if the sub-game elements of Central Bark were more developed, and we'd have liked to see more palpable feedback on Milhouse's condition, watching him grow thinner if unfed, dirtier if unwashed, and more obviously distressed if neglected, so that his bouncing ebullience when doted on signified more than it does.

However, these are the perfectionist musings of battle-hardened critics. If you're looking to adopt a virtual pet, no puppy yaps and paws more winningly than Central Bark.