Due to project recovery I haven’t had a lot of extra time to spend on blogging, so I hope today you’ll be content with Dog Online, as linked from Aftermath, a web game in the vein of the Neopets of old and the Kingdom of Loathing of slightly-more-recent. Remember Neopets? It was popular enough to get actual console game spinoffs. A quick aGooglin’ reveals one was released just this year. Huh!
It’s the good and pure kind of web game that used to be much more common. Maybe it’s inevitable that things like this will eventually sell out, like Neopets did, and become a cesspool, so please enjoy it while it lasts.
Dog Online is in open beta, and it’s a little difficult to see how to get started. The Explore link just took me to the homepage until I created an account and adopted a dog. To do that, first you must go to the Dogtown Pound.
There you can pick one of three randomly-chosen pals, like this oddly-colored fellow:
When naming your dog you can’t name it after another dog that already exists in the game, and it took me several tries before I managed to adopt Plurpel.
Once there, you can buy plant seeds with coins (not real money!) from the Farmer’s Market, then plant them at the Farm. You can find tokens to play the Gatchpon Machine. You can buy bait from the Fishing Mart and fish at the Fishing Spot. You can play a couple of puzzle games at the Temple of Dog.
Part of the fun of this kind of website is exploring and finding everything there is to do. There’s a simple action game under the Games menu, Mimi’s Countless Children.
It’s the most fun if you’re a kid, but unlike Neopets Dog Online seems to be here mostly as a simple fun thing to do, without any visible profit motive. Again, it’s always possible that it’ll get ruined some time in the future, and these kinds of things do tend to either disappear or get ruined eventually, so please find as much joy as you can in its transitory nature.
Dog Online (free, browser)
