If you’ve stopped by your local Wendy’s, you may have noticed a familiar logo there. Not the friendly Wendy’s logo, with the red-haired mascot, but the Ubisoft Petz one. For a limited time, various Petz related products are included with a Kid’s Meal. There are five different items – a Crazy 8z card game with animal pictures, a Catz Balancer, a stuffed dog, a Petz Catz PC game and a Petz Dogz PC game. (Note: Both the PC games are rated “Everyone.”)

The toys normally come with a Kid’s Meal, which costs between $2.50 and $3.50. Some stores will sell the toy separately, if you ask nicely. Curious about the quality of Ubisoft’s PC offerings for the promotion, I splurged and paid $1 for a copy of Petz Dogz when picking up some nuggets and a Frosty.

Petz Dogz is surprisingly deep for a Kid’s Meal toy. There are five breeds of dogs to choose from – beagle, border collie, German Shepard, Labrador retriever and pug. Once you pick your dog, you choose whether it is a boy or girl, decide on one of three fur colors/patterns, pick out one of three collars and name him or her. The pet is then plopped into his or her new home…

It seems like a videogame system just hasn’t made it, until it receives its first pet simulation. The latest incarnation of the N-gage has just received its first pet sim, Dogz, thanks to Gameloft. The game is rated for ages 3+ (like a kid would own an N-gage), is a small 1MB download and even has a free trial option. It’s only available in the UK though, and is available for £1.50 for one day, £4 for a week and £6 for unlimited use.

Dogz, like Nintendogs from Nintendo and Petz: Dogz from Ubisoft, lets you raise virtual puppies. There are three different breeds of dogs to pick from, and based on screenshots the breeds appear to be a lab, jack russel and shiba inu. There are also nine different places to explore with your dog and eight mini-games to play. You can also see how your dog ranks compared to other dogs online…

Not all shovelware is completely bad.

Sure, games that fall into the shovelware category, like Chicken Shoot and Elf Bowling, are often designed to purely to generate quick revenue. And yes, the quality of shovelware is more often than not rather atrocious. But that doesn’t mean that the mere existence of it is entirely bad.

Not only is shovelware a videogame tradition but its proliferation is a positive sign for gamers. Below are three important reasons why shovelware games are actually good…