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A Pet In The House
Arnie & Wolfgang

For the first part of this section, we have the help of Arnold Schwarzenegger, who chose to remain on in Regras Gorge after being evicted from the Sim Brother 4 house.

"Hello, everyone. Thankyou for inviting me and Wolfgang to help you. Wolfgang is a little dog that I adopted. I rang up the adoption service, looked through the dogs that they had and chose this cute little doggie named Cymorial. I did not like the name so I changed it to Wolfgang. Once I had paid, the car came a few minutes later and dropped Wolfgang off. A very efficient service.

"I could have paid more for other dogs who knew different commands and had been trained in certain ways. However, I wanted to be able to show Wolfgang how to behave and to teach him certain commands myself.

"I wanted Wolfgang to become as famous as me. I looked in the newspaper and found him a job in Showbusiness. Perhaps they were remaking 'Simmy Simmy Bang Bang' and needed a thousand dogs as extras for the scenes in the candy factory. Either way, he got a job as an extra. A town car came for him the next day and because he already knew certain commands, he came home with a promotion to the job of understudy to one of the star pooches.

"With Wolfgang settled in his career, I had to see that he was a good dog around the house. I praise him if he does the right thing and I scold him if he does the wrong thing.

"Also, I like my sofa from the Astro Collection ©. It is very comfortable. I have had to tell him off for destroying furniture and I also wanted to stop him chewing what he shouldn't. To stop him, I got him a blue rubber bone and he loves to chew that instead of the sofa. Also, he loves to play fetch in the garden or down the park. I will say goodbye, now, as I am going to talk him walkies."

Thankyou, Arnold & Wolfgang. We will be coming back to Arnie later in this review.

Jobs for The Pets

There are three career tracks for pets. Show Business, Security and Service. A starting-level job is always available in the newspaper. If you have a working family, sending your pets to work as well gives them less time to tear the house apart. As you cannot directly control your Pets without using a cheat, it can be somewhat frustrating to see what your Pets are doing to your §3,000 bed when you are at work.

Commanding Your Pets

To advance in Pet careers requires knowledge of commands. These range from "Come Here" through to "Roll Over", "Play Dead" and "Speak", although with the last one, I'm sure "sausages" might be the extent of their vocabulary. Still with me? No? Good. It can take some time to teach a pet commands and if the pet is in a bad mood, they do not want to learn.

Behavioural Modification

When it comes to a Pet's behaviour, you can encourage them to continue doing it by praising them or discourage them from doing it by scolding them. You decide how your pet is going to behave. In the same way that we can make our sims wickedly malicious, with proper reinforcement, you can have a dog who is so set in its ways that peeing against the furniture, digging holes and chasing visitors is the only way of life it knows and that its owner encourages.

Pleasing Your Pets

There are a lot of new objects to help you with your pets. These range from chew toys and scratching posts to feeding bowls to pet baskets and other homes. Finicky pets may not eat from cheap bowls and pet homes are essential if you want to breed Pets. The prospective happy couple would like some privacy if they are going to get intimate.

Pets do like attention. They can be shown love in different ways and played with. Also, taking your Pet for a walk helps with various of their needs and improves your sim's relationship with their Pet. In a similar same way that you took your car for a spin in "Nightlife", you and your Pet just disappear off the lot and come back shortly afterwards. One small criticism of taking your pet for a walk is that if you have more than one pet, you can't take them all out at once. Now, if a sim walks past your house, if they have a pet, the pet goes with them too.

Written at 20:55 on Sunday 29 October 2006 by Andy.

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