

In the color option, you select fur color, and then you can add on different colors and patterns in layers. You choose a name, gender, and breed (there are more than 50 dog breeds and more than 30 cat breeds to select from), and then you can customize Kitty or Fido even further. As with the sim creation tools, there's a button that will randomly select a breed and a gender if you're in a hurry, or you can go through the step-by-step process of creating your own cat or dog. The custom creation mode offers you, by far, the most control over what type of animal to create. You can custom-create a cat or dog in the create-a-family mode, just like you can custom-create sims, or you can adopt a stray cat or dog in the game, adopt one using the pet-adoption phone service, or buy one at a community lot that sells pets.Ĭustom-create your own dog or cat to make it look like a real-life pet. The latter two can be added to a sim family in any number of ways. Pets features a variety of pets for your sims to play with, including "wormrats" and birds, but the main focus of the expansion is most definitely on cats and dogs.

With the expansion due out next month, we got our hands on the latest work-in-progress version of Pets to see what being a pet owner in The Sims is like. The first three expansions have let your sims go to college, go to town, and go to work, but Pets focuses more on fleshing out your sims' everyday lives with the presence of animal companions. The virtual world of The Sims 2 will become home to all sorts of animals with the release next month of The Sims 2: Pets, the fourth expansion to EA's popular people simulator.
