Nintendogs Agility Training and Competition

Agility Training And Competition
The second kind of competition are the agility trials, which focus on your puppy's ability to navigate an obstacle course.
Training Agility
Like disc throwing, you'll need to take your dog for a walk if you want to train it for agility competitions. Instead of heading to a park, though, head to the gym. It's likely going to be a bit further away from your house than the parks are, though, so you may need to wait a little while before you can reach it. The gym is indicated by an icon of a dog jumping over a hurdle.
When you can make it to the gym, it's time to start working on those abdominal pecs and pectoral abs and whatnot. You'll find that the gym is going to be full of obstacles, with a couple showing up initially, and more to follow as the challenges get more and more difficult. Your dog will initially be fairly clumsy when it comes to navigating the obstacles, but it doesn't matter too much when you're in the gym; it's better to be clumsy there than be clumsy when you're in the middle of a competition. You have five primary obstacles to clear here.

Your dog may initially be afraid of hurdles, but they'll get over it soon enough.
Hurdles: Hurdles are basically low poles that your dog has to jump over. To get your dog to jump a hurdle, click on the hurdle, wait for your dog to get close to it, then either drag the arrow to the far side of the hurdle or just click on the ground on the opposite side of the hurdle, and the dog will eventually jump over it. Some dogs are skittish around hurdles when they first encounter them, so you may need a bit of coaxing before your dog will jump. If the dog jumps too soon, it'll likely knock the pole to the ground, or actually land before it even reaches the hurdle, resulting in a miss. Misses will dock your points in a competition, so you'll want to keep your dog running at these hurdles until it feels comfortable with them!
Tunnels: Tunnels are the next kind of obstacle you'll face. These are just, well, long plastic tunnels that your dog will have to crawl through. This is pretty simple to do; just tap the end of the tunnel, wait for your dog to get inside, then drag the arrow through the rest of the tunnel at your dog's walking speed. It shouldn't have any trouble getting through.
Seesaw: Seesaws begin to appear after you win a competition or two. Tap on one end of them to get your dog onto it, then drag or tap the stylus up to the middle of the seesaw to keep it moving. When the seesaw starts tipping to the far side, tap behind your dog to get it to stop, and wait for the far end of the seesaw to hit the ground, then continue moving the dog along. If you don't pause the dog, it's likely to lose its footing and fall off the seesaw.
Double Hurdle: The double hurdle is just two hurdles set close together. If your dog has gotten good at normal hurdles, then your handling of these should be familiar, but you'll need to be sure that your dog approaches from a good angle. If possible, try to get your dog to approach from head on to ensure that it can jump over both of the hurdles without tripping one. These are more difficult than we're making them sound, though, as the longer distance of the jump requires you to really hit these dead on and get a good length of a jump before you're able to clear them.
Slalom: After a hard day in the competition circuit, all a dog really wants is to hit the river in their undersized kayak and try to maneuver through the challenging slalom course that Nintendogs has set up for them. Just be sure your dog doesn't mind getting wet before you attempt a slalom, or they'll have a hard time with this challenge.
Oh, ok, you got us: there's no water involved in this trick, however incredible that might've been. Instead, the slalom is a collection of poles sticking up out of the ground. In order to clear one of these obstacles, you'll need to guide your dog through the poles so it passes one on the left, the next on the right, and so on and so forth. This will require a lot of tapping with your stylus at first, as you'll have to encourage your dog to move through the poles in the proper manner, by tapping on alternating sides of the slalom. As with all of the obstacles, your dog will eventually get better at maneuvering these, and will be able to go through more quickly with less guidance from you.
Agility Competitions
Agility competitions are almost exactly the same as the agility training sessions, save for a few caveats. For one thing, you'll be asked to go through the obstacles in a certain order. For another, you'll be penalized points if you happen to miss an obstacle or mess up the trick associated with it; knocking the pole off of a hurdle, for instance, will net you a five point penalty. Lastly, you'll have a time limit as well; if you go over this limit, you'll be penalized for each second over the limit you go.

The top screen will give you the order in which you have to go through the obstacles, so be sure to follow the line it represents.
In order to score well in agility competitions, you have to pay attention to your top screen for once, as it will display a map of what order you have to take the obstacles in. If you proceed in any order you feel like, you'll rack up faults at a pretty rapid clip. Faults are basically point penalties that accrue when you don't complete an obstacle, make a mistake (such as falling off a seesaw or knocking a pole off a hurdle), or run over the time limit.
You can't actually increase your score in the agility competition, as such; you can really only hurt yourself by messing up. It is possible to run a perfect round by completing all of the obstacles without going over the time limit, in other words. If two dogs both run a perfect round, then the time will be the tiebreaker here; the dog that finished more quickly will be the winner. In general, it's best to go for accuracy instead of speed (if you have to make a compromise); finishing a perfect run a bit more slowly is usually going to be better than a speedy finish with a fault or two. When you get to the higher levels of competition, you won't be able to get away with a slow run or any mistakes, however, so you'll want to take your dog to the gym a number of times until it manages to hit every trick without mistake. Eventually, though, most dogs get really good at running the agility trials and will be able to do some of the simpler tricks with almost no input from you