Aw come on. We already had an 'I hate Pets' deluge with the 'which Expansion could you live without' thread. And someone said that they couldn't think of a single good thing it came with ... What about pets!

Freetime, no doubt about it. Hobbies were poorly made, which ruins it for me. It has some good items, but the main point of the EP is lost for me. That's the only EP I actively dislike. All the others are great, and there it'd just be a question of what I'd miss least.

Yeah, dogs and cats have their charms, they're good for satisfying the Social need (which is why my lonely Sims are so big on messing around with the neighborhood strays) and they can be useful sources of income too. Plus, we just plain need to have animals in our Simmy neighborhoods.

Up until recently, I worked as a prison guard at a prison here in Texas. There are stray cats all over that prison, and it's amazing how many of these inmates form bonds with those cats, giving them places in their cells for the cats to sleep, feeding the cats with their commissary food, making little shoulder harness leashes out of strings so they can let the cats out of their cells, and all that. One of the inmates in my charge was in the wing where we kept all of the Mexican Mafia guys, and we actually found this guy breeding cats in his cell. He had names for all of the kittens, too. Another inmate in there was an old guy serving his 30th year (give or take) of a life sentence for sexual assault (so it must have been a really bad sexual assault), his family had abandoned him a long time ago, he had no friends in the free world, the guards don't get paid to be his friends (and we wouldn't want to be his friends anyway) and none of the other inmates wanted anything to do with him, so he kept a cat in his cell and he would actually fight us if we tried to take the cat away. Because that cat was pretty much all he had left. We kept making sure that the cat was okay (and unmolested), of course, and she was. That old inmate just really wanted someone to talk to, even if that someone was just a cat.

So if real life recognizes that dogs and cats work wonders at filling the Social needs of people everywhere--from mulimillionaire hotel heiresses with pedigreed chihuahas in their handbags, all the way down to convicted felons with muttly stray cats in their cells--and have been doing so for thousands of years, then doesn't it make sense that the Sims games should have Social-satisfying dogs and cats too? We need the Pets expansion, even if some of us don't realize that.


Well, I agree that Science and Sports need lots of work (as I already ranted about in one of my own topics). But the rest are okay. Nature and Arts & Crafts definitely rule the roost, though.

Yeah, I personally hated the "Fury" thing they added. Sure, it's realistic, but it's annoying as hell when it interferes with the way I want them to live their lives. It just happened yesterday! I had this couple all ready to get married and the male sim chickened out and left the girl at the alter, causing fury between them. Now they went from best friends and lovers to acquaintances! It's gonna take forever to repair that relationship...

It's also kind of why the emotions aspect of TS4 is making me nervous. I really don't need anymore of the "I'm too depressed to do that." shit from TS1.

@Pizzatron: Yeah, I don't think people should underestimate the value of the Pets EP in terms of the pets raising the owners' social needs. In my neighborhoods, I have a number of hermit Sims. Some of them are religious, some are just really shy Sims whose wants don't direct them to interact with the world. They live on small isolated lots where walkbys are banned, they have prisoner tokens in their inventories so they never show up on community lots, and they don't own phones or computers so they never have contact with other Sims. Because they don't want it. Each of them, however, before walkbys are completely banned, interacts with a stray pet until they can have that pet move in. Pet and owner then become deeply bonded, relying solely on each other for their social needs, and it's actually wonderful to watch those relationships develop. Much better than the hermit constantly being visited by the Social Bunny.

I'm not as big on having families with pets because my families tend to be large and I feel like the pets get neglected. (By me, I mean, because with really large families, a pet is just one more Sim to try to keep track of and, like toddlers, they're Sims who require the help of others. They aren't completely self-sufficient.) Sometimes large families will have a cat but usually not a dog because cats, like real cats, don't require as much hands-on care as dogs do. My (few) smaller families will get pets, sometimes more than one, because the kid-and-pet interactions are adorable. But all of my always-single Sims get a pet if they roll a want for one (and most do), and I love watching the interactions and training the pets and all that. And, like I said, I like the caged birds because I really don't like the building-Charisma-by-talking-to-mirrors thing. I mean, who does that IRL? I don't understand why just talking to OTHER SIMS doesn't (very slowly) build Charisma. :p

Also, your story about inmates and cats reminded me of something. I used to do prison ministry, and this one nearby prison had a program where inmates whose crime/sentence and behavior qualified them to do so trained dogs that had been taken from places where dogs were bred/trained to fight. Most of them were pit bulls but there were some other "aggressive" breeds, like Rottweilers, as well. The inmates were instructed by volunteer dog trainers and then, initially with assistance from the actual trainer, they trained dogs -- Everything from housebreaking to obedience training to tricks -- so that the dogs, when they "graduated" from the program, could be adopted by an outside family or, if the inmate was close enough to release, by the inmate himself. It was a wonderful program because it was broken dogs and broken people helping each other to heal. The inmate had to be responsible for every bit of the dog's care and had to share space with the dog in his cell and had to stay on good behavior or else they'd lose their dog and their eligibility for the program (and they didn't want that because they became very closely bonded with their dogs), AND they learned a skill that they could eventually take "outside." And the dogs got homes instead of being sent to a shelter or, worse, euthanized. It was awesome.

So yeah, one should never underestimate the healing power of pets, pixel ones or real ones.

This has nothing to do with Sims but. This story kind of breaks my heart. That cat must mean the absolute world to this old man. Augh.

@iCad: Our prison had a program similar to that one too, now that you mention it. I got to work the trusty camp a few times; the trusty camp is just a stone's toss from the kennels where they keep the dogs that are used to track down and tackle fugitives in the event of an escape. And generally speaking, the trustees are the inmates who have proven that they have the good sense to not try to escape, and most of them are in there for minor felonies and/or they're getting so close to release that escaping would cause them more trouble than good. So a number of the trustees help out at the kennel, caring for the dogs, teaching them obedience and whatnot. There's also the attack training, where the dogs get trained to pursue escapees and take them down efficiently and without undue injury to the fugitive, so someone has to wear the padded sleeve or the padded suit and go out in front of the dogs; sometimes the guy in the pads is a guard, sometimes it's a qualified trustee. And if the guy in the pads knows the dog coming at him, he'll be egging the dog on too. "Come on, Bandit! Get me! Right here over my elbow, like I showed you!" and all.

So like you said, there's definitely some bonding going on there; I got to chat with some of those trustees, and they'll talk on and on about those dogs like they were talking about regular people. "Oh, Rusty and Samson are arguing again, so we had to separate them. I think it's something to do with that mouse who got in there with them. Nando really likes that new sergeant who just transferred in. And Marge did something to her right foreleg, so we're helping her stay off of it till it heals up." Inmates tend to be pretty good at reading people, so it makes sense that they'd be good at reading dogs too.

As I recall, the Windham School District also has courses so the inmates can get jobs as veterinarians, animal trainers, kennel workers and such after they're released. I wonder how many of those trustees working the prison kennels are enrolled in those courses too. It seems like the kennel work would give them a head start on courses like those.


(Now that I think about it, werewolves get along better with dogs and wolves, and I have four or five werewolves getting this close to graduating from college. I think I'll get them into that dog-training, dog-selling and puppy-breeding business that I was talking about somewhere. How can it fail? )

@rinarunine: It's a really sad story, to be sure. A lot of those inmates have some pretty sad stories to them, and it can really get to a guard just from having to work around all that misery. You just have to keep reminding yourself that every one of those guys is in there for a reason; they're not angels, they did something too far wrong and this is what they've earned from that.

...well, aside from the occasional wrongful conviction, I suppose. But I have enough faith in our state's justice system to believe that wrongful convictions are pretty rare, and that there aren't nearly enough of them to outweigh the majority who, beyond all doubt, have earned their sentences and deserve to be separated from society.

But man...being rejected by your own family must feel pretty cold. The rest of us should count our blessings.

Pets for sure. I'd safely say that it is the weakest of all three pet packs as well, as Unleashed added a crapton to the game and TS3 Pets just felt better to me. Maybe because of the shiny, new horses. Sometime a little more shiny than others.

Probably Bon Voyage. I was very excited when I played it for the first time and thought it was absolutely beautiful, but now I can hardly ever be bothered to send my sims on vacations - in my current almost 2 years old Strangetown I have not even attached any vacation subhoods yet!

You should at least attach Three Lakes to Strangetown. What's better than trying to spot aliens roaming around your neighborhood? Trying to spot aliens and Bigfoot roaming around your neighborhood. I'm not sure how much a Bigfoot would like giving up the forests to go live in a desert, but all of your parapsychologists and conspiracy theorists from the lunatic fringe would have a field day.

Plus, you can stay at Three Lakes for free, you don't age a day for as long as a week, you can learn how to slap dance and you can come home with a truckload of fishes, and that means tons of sparkly food. The spa even has a bookshelf, so you can brush up on Parenting and Fire Safety while you're supposed to be relaxing. What's not to love?

(By the way, I like your avatar too. )

You are right - Big Foot in Strangetown definitely sounds like an interesting idea. I think the Beakers especially would enjoy to have him as a new kind of test subject (my Nervous "escaped" a long time ago)!

(And thanks - the cat from my avatar is my favorite stray Kobe, who Aldric Davis and DJ Vers recently adopted. )

Aww, it's nice to see that Kobe found a home. And it's nice to see DJ Verse getting some playtime too. I'm still afraid to make her graduate because that would weaken the Tri-Fruhm sorority, but she and Sarah Love are still running a toy shop together. Sarah makes the toys, DJ sells them. Theirs is an enduring friendship.

I can live without university to be honest. The whole university experience just seemed tedious and lasted way to long (I'm sure there are mods to shorten it). The only thing I liked about that ep was the new career options and rewards, but I have more fun with seasons and freetime.