So I am giving it another try. Again. Pets, then. What about them? Well, it is an expansion I bought again. Seeing as how I bought this for the sims 2, and the sims 1. And now again, but with added horses.

I have installed Nraas’s mods again as well. Which is a good thing, because now my sims’ inventories don’t clogg up with cars, sims that are stuck in aging get aged up properly and sims that can’t find their routing for mysterious reasons are found and unstuck. By a mod. Which unfucks the game’s fuck-ups. Just sayin’.

It’s a lot of extra work getting pets, as I suspected. More time to spend on keeping pets happy, with too little rewards for it. It is incredibly hard to get to know a stray animal, as they only stick around for a few minutes before buggering off again. Adopting a stray is only an option if you know them well enough, and you just don’t have the time to do that, unless your sim doesn’t go to work. Or has a family. So, basically, it only works if you create a crazy catlady with a large fortune, or a dog collector who doesnt need much else.

The pets do seem to breed easily. Many of the households in the neighbourhood with pets have puppies or kittens. I haven’t discovered a way to neuter pets yet.

All in all, it is much as I expected. But for the first 5 minutes after installing it, it was fun. Fun to see my sim struggle to get on a horse, fun to see that first deer hop by, and fun to see the cats play together. In terms of rewarding gameplay, well, this is the sims 3. There is no rewarding gameplay.