Hands on with The Sims 2 Apartment Pets on DS
Don't expect to get your deposit back
If you liked managing bathroom breaks for a Sim, you'll love picking up puppy poop in The Sims 2 Apartment Pets. You'll find all the glamour of owning a pet – from the misbehaviour to the cuddling – in this feature-rich port of the PC expansion pack. Amazingly enough, Electronic Arts has packed in more features and new content for the game's DS outing. While we question whether there's enough new here worth unleashing the game for a second run, as it were, it's looking decent enough.
Before you can start caring for a pet, you'll need to create a Sim. The game begins with character creation involving full customization from the basics like sex and name to more detailed attributes such as hair colour and gait. Once you're finished defining your avatar, you're able to situate yourself in an apartment with pets. You have complete freedom to decorate your pad, although renovations come at a cost. Money earned from well-played mini-games goes towards buying new stuff and caring for your pals.
Through the course of The Sims 2 Apartment Pets you'll come across seven different creatures from a tropical bird to a cute kitty and even a snake. Only the cat and dog are allowed free reign of your apartment, with the other pets confined to cages. Pets, just like your Sim, possess motives that need to be monitored to ensure health and happiness. For example, you'll need to keep an eye on hunger and a bathroom motives to ensure that your animals don't starve or make a mess.
Giving attention to your pets is vital to their happiness, another crucial indicator of their well being. After all, a pet's mood affects behaviour: an unhappy pooch is also an unruly one. The quickest means of calming an upset pup is to simply pet it. Playing certainly does the trick as well. Toys, such as balls and stuffed animals, are ideal for turning around a sour snake's mood or getting a bird to brighten up a bad attitude. Our personal favourite has to be watching a puppy ravage a toy monkey.
Mini-games work too, not to mention unlock special items and earn you a spot of cash. There's a small collection, one of which we played entitled 'Bird Dancing'. Tapping directional icons on the touchscreen to the rhythm of music instructed our pretty little bird to bust a move. It's awfully simple and a tad on the cheesy side, but the rewards are worth the effort.
Most items unlocked from mini-game play relate to pet customization, whether it be a cool new collar for your dog or a coloured ribbon to tie around your cat's tail. Dozens of items allow you to personalize your pets from hats to miniature outfits for dogs and cats to fancy cages to funky accessories. Thanks to a handy zoom function, you can move the camera in close to get a good look at your animals in all their customized cuteness.
Although The Sims 2 Apartment Pets doesn't bring anything exactly new to The Sims series that we haven't seen before, it'll be the first opportunity to access pets on a handheld. The new features being added for this DS translation should justify the standalone package, particularly if you've never experienced any of the previous games. We'd be keen to see some form of wireless item sharing supported, but in its current state it's a passable trick worthy of a treat.
