Just like with normal Sims, pets can meet, mate and produce offspring. The resulting creatures are a mix of the appearance of their parents and their parents' personalities, allowing a suitably interested player to create whole dynasties of pets, and engage in selective breeding. Workwise a pet can pursue a number of careers, such as rescue animal or movie star. These roles, while without the extent of human Sim jobs of course, nevertheless add a little more complexity to the game and, in the early days at least, can provide a little much-needed cash flow.
While cute, we found these jobs a little ridiculous. However, if ridiculous is your forte then this is yet another attraction to having your family liaising with a furry friend. Apart from the seamless integration with existing households, one of the truly impressive new features is the pet creator. Essentially the developers have copied the existing Sim creator, with all its thousand options, and modified it to produce pets. With it you can mold a pet to look exactly as you want, right down to eye colour, and on top of that an innovative layering system has been built to allow you full control in your pets' fur colourings.
If such complexity is not something you wish to indulge in however, a set number of standard breeds are available to choose from.
Apart from the pets, unfortunately this latest expansion holds nothing new. In this sense it is very specialised, adding nothing to benefit your Sims, although you could argue that the social benefits the pets provide are a definite side effect. Basically Sims 2: Pets adds flavour to your micro world, and warmth to otherwise lonely homes. One advantage it does offer is that it makes one-person houses our preference much more feasible, not only with the money pets can produce but also the companionship they provide to your Sim.
Both positive and negative reinforcement increase the cat's understanding of what you're trying to teach it. This takes time, which is somewhat realistic, since you're trying to teach an animal what the word "sit" means. To display that, the game shows a slowly filling lightbulb for each trick - the more full it is, the more the cat understands it, and the more likely it is to succeed at doing it on command.
This sounds really cool in theory. The problem is, the only way you can access all of these trick commands and the ability to give the cat reinforcement is The menu system in The Sims 2: Pets on GBA is somewhat reminiscent of the menu from The Sims on PC, where, when you click on a Sim you are controlling, you get a menu featuring the Sim's head in the middle, and bubbles around the head naming all the categories of interactions the Sim can currently do, arranged like petals of a daisy.
This makes it look like the Sim is contemplating the possibilities, looking at the "thought bubbles" as your cursor hovers over them. In this way, you can click on the "Romantic Given the immense scope of interactions available at any moment when playing The Sims , this menu is a monumental achievement - it might be a bit intimidating at first, but it is very usable and informative despite its massive scope.
Maxis clearly did a lot of work to make such an intuitive and versatile menu system. Your options are still arranged around a circle, but rather than like petals, they're like on a merry-go-round. The circle is in 3D, so there is a back and a front, and we rotate the circle to unveil the options in the back. We can never really see all the options available at once, but just small portion in detail at a time. If an option is not selected, your only hint is a faraway icon in perspective, with no label.
The icon is usually not helpful in distinguishing your options, because, first of all, whoever picked these icons had very questionable logic, and secondly, many of the choices reuse the same icons. And since the menu needs to be rotated, you can't even use visual memory of a certain option's position in the list to your advantage.
There is no "near the top" or "near the bottom". The best you can remember is that a certain option is next to another option. But by then, you're already one option away from what you were looking for, so that hardly helps.
To access the menu for teaching tricks to our cat, we need to be facing the cat, and press A to bring up the menu. Facing the cat and pressing A sounds like the most basic action, but in this game, somehow, even this is difficult. If Lucy isn't close enough to anything, opening the menu will give us the option to call for our pet.
We accidentally do this all the time, since we are trying to do an action on a target that is generally moving away from us. Wouldn't it have been easier if the function to call for your pet had been assigned to another one of the plentiful unused buttons on the Game Boy Advance?
But anyway, we manage to face our cat and press A. The menu options at this point have the icons of:. It turns out that the correct answer is "Trick". This opens up a menu to let us select the type of trick we want to command our pet to do.
More categories of tricks are unlocked over time, and by the end of our playthrough we had:. Let's have our cat stand on its hind legs.
Hm, what sort of trick was that again? We check under "Basic" and, so far, we have unlocked five "Basic" tricks, all represented by the same dog's head. We cycle around, and no, "Stand on 2" isn't in the Basic list. Let's try looking under the "Cool!
So far, we have unlocked six "Cool! We cycle around probably more than once considering we forgot what trick was showing up initially and realize that is not the right menu either. Okay, is it an "Awesome!!
So far, we have unlocked five "Awesome!! Ah, okay, we finally found "Stand on 2" - we didn't realize that was considered specifically an "Awesome!! Considering that the "Awesome!!
Okay, now we give the command to the cat to "Stand on 2". We watch the cat to see if it performs the trick - there is no visual or auditory cue one way or another; you just need to be familiar with the animation to know if the trick was done correctly.
In some cases, like with jumping, this is easy to tell. In other cases, such as with waving the paw, the animation is hard to see and easily mistakable with offering a paw to shake.
In any case, now that we have determined if the cat has done the trick or not, to make the practice be effective, we need give the cat positive or negative reinforcement. First, we need to face the cat again it might already be walking away , and press A to bring up the menu.
Remember the options from before: "Command", "Pet", "Trick", and "Teach". Which will let us reward our pet for a job well done? You have to hurry, as, if too much time passes, your reinforcement will no longer be effective. It turns out that the correct option is "Teach".
Often, we get confused at this point and select a few other options before finally landing on the right one. In this menu, there is a blue smiley with a tiny thumbs up - "Praise" or a red frowny with a tiny thumbs down - "Scold", and, depending on our inventory, a strange globular mass - "Treat". So, now, we want Wait a minute. Did the cat do the trick right or not? We forgot. This will happen a lot when you're practicing the same trick fifteen times in a row and was it this time or the previous time that the cat did it right?
Once we are trained by the menu system to be able to do this tricky maneuver, we can teach tricks to our cat. By the way, teaching tricks to a cat. We've been glossing over it so far, but it's time to point at it. We don't know about you, but the cats that we're familiar with would never be able to be trained in anything. For example, Rosy's parents' cat Luna is a very intelligent cat -- she is clearly able to understand what you want her to do For example, when it is time for lunch, Rosy's dad gets out the tablecloth to start setting the table.
Luna knows what is going on -- that's why Luna comes running from the other side of the apartment to jump onto the table just as the tablecloth is landing, so that she can be under the tablecloth, and then Rosy's dad needs to shoo her off the table, and this is all just a wonderful game to Luna, which she plays every single day. Luna is smart enough to open zippers with her claw to get into bags that she knows she's not supposed to get to and to eat the bread within.
Luna once ate pizza dough and had to be rushed to the vet; afterwards, rather than seeking it out, Luna was afraid of bread. Luna understood that loaves of bread are related to the dough that nearly killed her. Speaking of eating, Luna has trained the family to know that when she's rattling her food dish, she wants food. If the rattling is ignored for long enough, she will bring the bowl to you and stare expectantly.
All this to say, if Rosy told Luna to sit, and she sat, it would be either an accident or a miracle. If she told Luna to do a backflip as this game expects you to teach your cat , and Luna did it, Rosy would be calling for an exorcist. We strongly, strongly suspect that this game was designed around dogs, and, at some point during development, they just retrofitted cats into the same game. That's might explain why the town is called Barkersville , and why all the icons are of the same dog's head, and why you walk dogs and cats, and why your pet cat follows you all around town, and why you can whistle for your cat to come, and why all the tricks you can teach your pet are relatively reasonable things to teach a dog, but not so much with a cat If we had chosen a dog at the beginning of the game, this would have been all perfectly reasonable and we wouldn't have thought much was amiss.
But considering that we adopted a cat, well, now we can see that this is all very silly. Or we somehow got the most agreeable and obedient cat in existence even though ours was notably advertised as being very naughty, lol. So, anyway, you do all of this to teach your pet how to do tricks on command. But this is all preparation for the animal training competition mini-game. Now, we ripped the trick teaching mechanic a new one, but we do want to give it credit for being a good idea, just very poorly executed.
With the animal training competition, it's a shitty idea with an even shittier execution. When we enter these competitions, we have to select the tricks we want to do as part of our routine, and then to get our cat to perform the tricks we have to do a shitty rhythm game.
We press the arrows as they reach the top of the screen, and based on how well you timed the button presses, the cat does the trick more or less impressively. The cat is graded by our trainer Otis and, apparently, his two identical brothers For the most part, they are just staring blankly at you with their identical bored expressions - understandably. Except the one triplet who really loves watching our cat catch the ball. It looks like he came.
Remember the Guitar Hero -ish mini-game in Bustin' Out? How it was a rhythm game about playing music? And how as you leveled up the game, and played the guitar better, the music got more and more rad?
Well, that doesn't happen in The Sims 2: Pets. There's just this basic, boring, awful beat, like, the most basic of the pre-recorded beats that you can play out of an electric keyboard, and that's it.
It's essentially a metronome. The beat never improves as the game levels up, or as you play more or less well. It just gets faster at higher levels. In some ways, more speed makes the game easier, since the lowest levels are so slow, you might lose because you passed out from boredom before the arrows ever crawl to the top. But anyway, the beat has nothing to do with what the arrows are doing, and a cat doing backflips has nothing to do with rhythm or arrows or anything.
Have you ever seen a real pet competition? One where you have to lead your doggie through some sick obstacle course and have it do all the tasks correctly along the way? This could have been a fun mini-game. Some sort of quick-reflex sort of game, or planning out your combos, or something, anything.
Why could they think of nothing better than rip off Guitar Hero? And every time you do the competition, it has so many rounds. Each round is the same shit over and over. It could have been just one round for all it matters.
Each trick has a preset sequence of arrows, and you don't have that many tricks, so you'll be seeing the same arrows over and over. Rosy can tell you the sequence of arrows for some tricks, and Denise has fallen asleep. This pet training competition is so awful but so featured. You have to play it. Not only is this minigame intended as your primary means of making money, but, sometimes, characters will challenge you in a trick duel.
There are multiple places in the plot where you cannot progress until you get a certain award at a contest or beat a character at a duel. And just playing it is not enough.
You have to win at it so, so many times. Once again: remember how in Bustin' Out sometimes you needed to be at a certain level of one of the mini-games in order to progress with the plot? Remember how it gave you an option to pick the mini-games that you preferred to level up, so that if you hated or were just too bad at one of the mini-games, you were never forced to do well at it?
Yeah, that's the opposite of what is happening here. You need to grind at this training crap so much. And the only way to get better is to grind at training your pet. You need to find more tricks and then spam teaching your pet the trick, and then you can win at the competition so that you can get more tricks to spam teaching your pet and none of this is fun and arrrrgh.
There's so much emphasis on picking your moves for the competition, and Otis advises you all, it's important to stick to your routine. But it doesn't seem to actually matter? Just pick all your best moves and do them. There would seem like there would be more points for a logical progression and like, combos or something. Your pet can only roll over when it is in the lying down position. Your pet can only shake hands if it is in the sitting position. We want to devise a good sequence of moves to boost our score and prevent us from falling asleep Share this?
Sims can share their lives with their new pets and add more fun to the Sims experience. From dogs, cats, caged animals and more, your Sims share new friends to experience life's precious moments.
With so many different animals to choose from, there's no telling what unpredictable experiences could occur. Create-A-Pet: Choose from dozens of dog and cat breeds or customize features for a one-of-a-kind pet. You can even modify your pet's body shape by choosing from specific colors and unique markings. Don't like the way they act? Change their personality - from smart and sweet to silly and sloppy - anyone can create their ideal animal friend in The Sims 2 Pets.
Your Sims can encourage and discipline pets, training them to shake, roll over, play dead, and more. Unruly pets might dig in the yard, claw the sofa, or topple the trash. Thankfully, a little training can go a long way. Create and control digital characters over a lifetime, setting their goals in life from popularity and romance, to fortune and family- their stories are in your hands.
Use special codes to share unlockable pet accessories, fur types or markings with other The Sims 2 Pets players. Your Sims' pets are members of the family and share all of life's great moments - whether it's kids training puppies, teens playing fetch in the park, adults watching TV with their cats, or elders enjoying a sunny day in the park with their long-time companion.
Your Sims pets have genetics, allowing you to create the latest designer pet, including popular hybrid breeds like the Labradoodle, Puggle and Schnoodle! Like what you've created? Register them to appear in Create-A-Pet as a unique pedigree.
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