| Screen | Monochrome |
| Shell colors | White |
| Manufacturer | Tiger |
| Pet type | Basic |
| Programming | Custom |
| Release year | 1997 |
This particular pet lets you raise a Dalmatian from the eponymous Disney film, and is surprisingly not a simple re-skin of the Digital Doggie that was part of the Giga Pets original line up. It contains (somewhat) unique pixel art and animations from the original, and the functions are slightly different, as well as the icons in the menu. The instructions claim that the pet actually contains 101 different dogs with unique appearances and personalities, which, while sounding far fetched for such a small (and old) toy, has actually been verified by users online; there is an exploit that can be used when restarting the device that lets you choose between any of the 101 included dogs, and I have been able to verify that this trick works (see below).
Menu
There are nine icons on the screen of this pet, though they will not light up when you select them. This pet uses the older method of simply showing an arrow above and below the icon you’re resting on, so it can be difficult to see at times (make sure the batteries are fresh, or they’ll be too faint!). These arrows will also show up when your pet needs something, and will sometimes indicate what your pet nets.
- Food: Healthy meal (kibble) and snack (biscuit)
- Sleep
- Game – There is one game in this pet. A ball will be thrown either to the right or left of the dog, and you must press the corresponding right/left button quickly in order to guide the dog to catch it. This is repeated five times for each game.
- Party – This is found on many of the licensed pets, and basically shows a short animated screen of your pet with another character from the franchise, in this case another puppy. It can provide a slight boost to their fun meter, but otherwise doesn’t serve any function.
- Wash – Unlike many other pets, poop will not show up on the screen when the pet messes itself. Instead, you’ll simply see the arrows blink on the attention icon until you clean the pet. Depending on the severity of the mess, you’ll either see the pet’s happy face, or an animation of the dog getting into a bubbly bath. The bubbly bath screen is probably the most elaborate of the art on this pet, and it’s actually pretty cute!
- Meters – Page 1: Name, Page 2: Score, Page 3: Food and Learning meters, Page 4: Love and Fun meters, Page 5: Age and weight.
- Tricks – There are 3 tricks on this pet, sniff, sit, and run. You can choose the trick you would like to see, and if your pet performs it correctly (which may take several tries), choose Reward, and they will be given a biscuit. One thing to note is that the animations on this pet are very simple, and it can be a little difficult to discern which trick the pet is performing. If it’s “sniffing,” the pet will put its head to the ground and move back and forth across the screen. For “running,” the pet will move back and forth, but its head will be up, and for “sit,” the pet will sit down and bob its head forwards and backwards a little bit.
- Learning – This raises the learning meter. Chose it and an animation showing your pet reading a book will play for a few seconds.
- Alert icon – Unselectable
Gameplay
Like many other original Giga Pets toys, this particular pet is much harder to run than the newer ones. The Food and Learning meters fall quickly, and must be checked at least every other hour, or the pet will most likely die–I lost many Dalmatians before figuring this out! However, if you have the time to devote to it, the pet can be very rewarding, as this particular pet can actually grow and change a slight amount as it ages. The animations are fairly simple, and there is not a lot of movement on screen, but what’s there is cute and well drawn. Unfortunately, the sounds are not as pleasant since there is mainly only one beep, and the pet will beep frequently during idle animations. Mine in particular is very loud, so during my time with this one, I mainly played on silent, which can be done by pressing the “Menu” button, and then the “Left” button so that the bell icon under the clock disappears.
Feeding and care is similar to most other pets–you must feed it when the Food meter is low, and read to it when the Learning meter is low, etc. etc. Fun can be affected by both the Party icon and the Game icon, but they go up very, very slowly, so it is best to stay on top of them. With this particular pet, the Fun meter can drop when the pet is tired or when you lose, so take care when playing with it, and make sure to pay attention to the alert icon. Tricks aren’t absolutely necessary, but they do offer some extra fun. Because they’re no discipline meter on this one, you won’t need to use the tricks frequently unless you really want to.
The Love meter may be new to you if you’ve never played any of the branded Giga Pets, and there’s very little information about it in the instructions. There’s no one action that affects this one directly; rather, the Love meter will increase with each action that you choose while playing with the pet, and it will do so very slowly, about 1-2 points at a time. I suppose the logic behind this is that the more you are interacting with your pet, the closer you with become, and this does make sense, but it certainly adds to the challenge of keeping it happy. Mine seemed to waste away pretty quickly whenever I let this one get too low, so I would suggest interacting with it frequently throughout the day to make sure the pet stays alive.
Cheats
Thanks to user Nyaasu on Tamatalk, there are instructions on line for how to choose any puppy you want on start up. Here is method for doing so:
Hold down the “Enter” button, and hit reset. You’ll hear a strong beep, and the screen will go all black.
-Press “Mode”, and you will go to a screen where you can enter letters. Don’t worry about entering any letters. They don’t mean anything and it won’t effect this “cheat” at all.
-Press “Right”, and you will see text that says “No. 001”.
-By using the right and left buttons, you can scroll through the numbers, from 1 to 101. Each number represents a different puppy!
-When you have selected a number you’d like to try, hit “Enter”, and the game will start as it usually does (setting time/pet’s name). Once you finish that, you can see what that puppy looks like! If you’re not happy with him, you can start this all over again.
I’ve been able to verify with my own device that this does, in fact work. The dogs themselves have very subtle differences when it comes to their appearance, so it may be difficult to notice at first, and I have had some trouble discerning any personality differences, but there are in fact over a hundred to chose from if you want to exercise that option!
Overall, this is a fun pet that took me a little while to figure out before I was able to keep it alive for any amount of time. Currently my record is three days (what can I say; life gets busy some times), which is nothing compared to the multiple weeks I’m able to keep the 2020 line pets going for, but it was fun nonetheless. I definitely wouldn’t recommend this if you’re wanting to try a Giga Pet for the first time, or if you’ve got an especially busy week coming up, but if you’re a collector, they’re relatively easy to find in the used market at the time of publishing, and aren’t too expensive.