Benjy the Puppy

Dogs and humans have gone hand in paw for thousands of years. A three-in-one companion, guardian and hot water bottle, dogs are often considered to be part of the family by their owners, though they're a lot more difficult to train than Barbara Woodhouse would have us believe.

Sadly, many people are unable to experience the joys of such a companion due to the constraints of modern life. Owning a dog is a huge responsibility, which today's lifestyles can often make impossible, leading to mistreated or abandoned pets. If that sounds like your life, Benjy the Puppy might well be the ideal solution.

Billed as a 'next-generation mobile pet' and starring one of the cutest characters in gaming history, Benjy the Puppy is a strangely satisfying blend of mini-games and entry-level resource management. Adopting your virtual pet couldn't be simpler, either: just give your puppy a name, pick its gender and you're ready for walkies.

Looking after your adopted dog is managed via an easy to navigate menu system. From this menu you can choose to feed or play with your pet, give it some exercise or even discipline it by throwing buckets of water over its head (which seems a little harsh, but maybe that's an RSPCA-approved procedure). Each of these options leads to a mini-game that will affect your puppy's stats according to how well you do.

Viewing your pet info (the top option in the menu) brings up a status screen, with a selection of bars that represent your pet's Happiness, Strength, Training and Health. This screen also tells you when your dog is hungry, and keeps track of how much money you have.

Game number one is Feeding Time. Your pet stands on top of a 4x4 grid of squares, each of which is either empty or contains a bone. You get five seconds to remember the location of all the bones before they disappear, leaving you to move your pup around the grid and dig them all up. Play continues until you've found all the bones or made three mistakes.

Next comes Walkies, a game designed to exercise your pet and improve its happiness. Walkies is essentially a simplified obstacle course, where you must time your keystrokes to make your pet either jump or duck to avoid the incoming hazards.

Your success here is measured by distance. After every 50 metres your pet starts running faster and faster, giving you less time to react to each mushroom, barrel, tree stump or tunnel that whizzes onto the screen and blocks your path.

Game number three is Exercise Time, which ironically doesn't affect your pet's fitness. It's possibly the best of the four mini-games, though. The challenge is to throw a ball as close to your puppy as you can. You're given a target distance, which remains the same through each attempt, and you throw the ball by the age-old method of selecting your power and angle using a fairly intuitive gauge.

Last and definitely least is Discipline. Your pup's head appears from a 3x3 grid of holes, and you can tip water over its head by pressing the appropriate number key on your phone in a similar style to the vermin-bashing antics of the fairground favourite whack-a-mole. This challenge doesn't punish you for making mistakes, so the easiest way to complete it is to constantly mash every key on the pad during the 30 seconds of play.

Disciplining your pet improves the Training stat, but lowers its happiness. Happiness might prove to be a luxury you can do without, though, as this is the easiest game to make money from, which you can subsequently spend at the in-game shop. (It's also the game most likely to break your phone as a result of the enthusiastic key-mashing.)

Aside from improving the stats of your pet, each time you finish a game you're awarded with some money to spend on toys and food at the pet shop. On offer are pies, cakes and sweets (amongst other, less questionable forms of dog food) and a variety of happiness-boosting balls and brushes. There are also a couple of upgrade items (a sports lead, for instance), which aid you during the mini-games.

A slightly bizarre feature is the option to have your pet communicate with you via an SMS. Using this option, you can input your phone number and have your pet send you a text message, detailing its aspirations and offering you advice on how to raise it better. This text is charged at the standard rates, and is an unnecessary gimmick that adds little to the Benjy experience.

The key factor in all of this is the charm and personality of your pet pup. Without the almost overly-cute graphics and sound effects, this would just be a collection of fairly average games. Benjy is that rare breed of game, where a lack of depth is overcome by character, which almost mirrors the traits of his real-world counterparts.

There's the benefit, too, of Benjy being very low maintenance. Try as you might, it doesn't seem to be possible to kill your pet through neglect, although this has the unfortunate secondary effect of rendering all your efforts meaningless. What's the point in feeding a hungry animal if the worst that can happen is it'll refuse to play with you?

In the end the appeal of this title comes down to Benjy himself. If cute, cuddly baby animals aren't your thing, then it will all become tedious rather quickly. For the rest of us, Benjy the Puppy has a hypnotic and loveable charm that is hard to turn your back on. It isn't the most challenging of games, and it's all fairly shallow, but Benjy has a universal appeal which will captivate young and old alike, much like any other pup.