Fun With Dogs and Puppies

Doggie Daycare (**** out of four) is a simulation game where children take charge of a daycare center for dogs and at the same time have fun with puppies and dogs that stay there.

To begin the game, players assume the role of a person who is running the doggie daycare center. When they arrive at the daycare center they meet Bill, the helper, who can shop for anything needed or help out at any time. Then it’s on to checking out the center, where there are kennels, a storage room, outdoor play areas and all the other facilities needed for caring for dogs.

People start bringing dogs to the center as soon as you arrive, and it’s up to you to accept or reject each dog. There’s a fact sheet for each dog to tell you its name, breed, gender, length of stay and the price you can charge for that dog. If you decide to accept the dog, you’ll need to put it in one of the kennels and then start taking care of it.

The first order of business is to send Bill to shop for all the items you’ll need to take care of the animals. There a list of needed items and a price list for each, so it’s easy to make up a shopping list. When Bill returns with the items, you’ll need to put them in your inventory so you’ll know where the food, treats and play items are kept. After using the supplies to take care of the dog’s food and water needs, you’ll have to take care of the dog’s exercise and grooming needs and, of course, give the dog some playtime and loving care. A variety of breeds come to the center, so players are introduced to Dalmatians, Labradors, retrievers and other dogs and puppies while learning about what it’s like to care for them.

There’s plenty of time while taking care of the dogs for playing fetch, Frisbee, tug of war and more. Also included are fun stories and missions to keep players involved, and the option to teach the dogs tricks and reward them with treats.

The dogs are cute and fun to play with, and the backgrounds and settings in the game are very appealing. The game plays easily and will be fun for children of all ages.

Be forewarned that you’ll need a fast gaming-configured computer with a high end graphics card with extra built-in RAM and lots of system RAM to use Doggie Daycare. The game wouldn’t run at all on our 900MHz Pentium III computer with 256 MB RAM and a middle of the road graphics card and ran slowly even on our 1.8GHz Pentium cor duo with 2MB RAM and middle to high end graphics card. This is all too bad because families with older computers may not be able to enjoy this game.

RescuePro Deluxe 4.0 (*** out of four) is a utility program designed to recover damaged or deleted files from camera or portable music player’s memory cards. The program will also work on other removable storage devices as well. The types of files that can be recovered include most common digital image formats, such as RAW, music, video, documents, mail and more. A special feature is the ability to recover worldwide files of MPEG audio or MPEG video; i.e. those coded for other parts of the world. The program can also work directly with USB or firewire connected devices, such as digital still or video cameras, Palm Pilots or Windows CE devices, to recover files. There are versions of the program for Windows and Mac, and it will run on Linux too.

The program begins by scanning the selected storage media and reporting all recoverable files. A click allows you to view the images or hear the sounds before recovery and select what you want to recover. In many cases, even formatted cards can be rescued as long as they haven’t been over written.

RescuePro Deluxe will automatically save data as it is scanned and includes a utility to create an image of your media for later recovery, when you have more time to deal with it. An image is a piece-by-piece copy of the media card, irrespective of file structure.

We’ve heard many stories from people who have accidentally erased or damaged memory cards and were heartbroken at the prospect of losing irreplaceable photos and other files. This program can make a happy ending to these kinds of experiences that happen all too often.

A Secure Erase utility is also included if you want to permanently delete selected files, or for files that for whatever reason you don’t want to see again or want anybody else to see for that matter. This secure erase works not just for image files, but any file.

RescuePro Deluxe is the kind of utility you hope you never have to use but are glad you have it if you need it.