Pets Add New Layers to Your Sims' Lives (apple.com)

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You create a Sim family and watch them grow. Mom and Dad produce a third offspring, adding even more tension between two siblings competing for their parents’ attention. The oldest child, already a teen when the baby arrived, soon becomes a young adult and leaves to attend La Fiesta Tech, happy to be free of the drama.

Mom opens a business out of the house, enabling her to earn Simoleons while watching the baby. The move comes in handy when Dad comes home after long hours at the Crypt O’ Night Club, announcing that he’s fallen in love with The Diva. Devastated, Mom finds a companion of her own: a black kitten named Buttons. The children rejoice. Dad feels a bit jealous. The saga continues.

Can We Keep Him? Can We?

Direct a Sim to pick up the phone and dial the Pet Adoption Service, where they’ll have plenty of cats and dogs to choose from. You can also create your own unique cats and dogs through the Create a Family screen, where size, color, body type, markings, and personalities can be tweaked to your heart’s content. Choose from dozens of pedigreed breeds.

In addition, your Sim might find a stray cat or dog wandering around the house and develop a relationship with it, which will convince the animal to stay around for a while. Eventually, it will become a member of the household. This option is recommended for cheap Sims.

If you have the Open For Business expansion pack, you can buy cats and dogs at a downtown pet store. Pets also allows players with Open For Business to open their own pet shops.

No matter how you obtain them, your pets aren’t just ornaments. Sims interact with them, teaching the furry critters commands and tricks while praising good behavior and punishing bad actions. Pets even develop overall relationships with their masters that are similar to the way Sims build relationships with other Sims.

Your pets also develop relationships with other animals in their household, as well with neighborhood dogs and cats that might wander through. (Depending on its personality, your pet might wander away, but if it’s wearing a collar, another Sim will likely return it when found. If it’s not wearing one, use the Report Lost Pet option on the phone and hope for the best.) Pets with particularly amorous relationships might even mate, producing kittens or puppies that you can keep, give, or sell to another Sim, or find good homes for through the Adoption Service option on the phone.

They’re Just Like Furry Sims

Like their owners, Sim pets come with their own needs and motives, many of which you must help them fulfill. If you don’t, they’ll take care of them on their own, which could result in raiding the garbage for food or going to the bathroom inside the house. Each pet also has a unique personality that affects how it behaves when you interact with it, so it may take more training to get a cat or dog to do what you want, if it’s not very smart or it’s really lazy. Use the Obedience Trainer option on the phone if you’re frustrated with the results.

Well-trained pets can embark on careers in security, show business, or service, clawing their way to the top of their fields while bringing home some much-needed Simoleons. As with their masters, pets’ personalities and skills help determine their success. Your pets leave during the day to perform their jobs, but make sure you stay on top of their training when they return, or that high-flying career could come crashing to earth.

Your pets’ successful careers also accumulate codes that unlock a variety of content you can use while creating new cats and dogs, such as different types of special collars, bandit masks, unique fur colors and patterns, and more. See our sidebar, “Cheat If You Must,” below if you’d like to unlock those items now.

Even More Playthings

If you’d rather not saddle your Sim with a high-maintenance dog or cat, you can always enter Buy Mode and purchase birds, fish, hamsters, and rodent-like Womrats. You don’t need to worry about training them, since they won’t develop relationships with their owners. On the downside, they can’t breed or get jobs. They’re mostly for show.

Of course, this wouldn’t be a Sims 2 expansion pack without plenty of new stuff to buy, and Pets allows you to peruse high-end food and water bowls, the Scratch-O-Matic Scratching Post, pet pillows and houses, and more. In addition, your Sims have new furniture, planters, high-tech telephones, and other goodies to enjoy, along with new building tools and materials for making their homes more comfortable.

The new Collections function lets you organize your favorite items for easier retrieval, and the new Game Tip Encyclopedia contains all of the in-game tips, as well as some notes that don’t appear during play.

Ambitious Sims may want to take their digital lives in new directions by becoming werewolves. Wait for a wolf with glowing yellow eyes to appear on your lot. Treat it well and build a positive relationship with it, using the “Give Love” command as often as possible. Allow the relationship to blossom and the wolf might “nibble” on your Sim one day, transforming it into a werewolf that can train pets faster than regular Sims, turn other Sims into werewolves by fighting with them, and more.

And you thought cute little Buttons was the only new animal to join the household.