Iguanas and Turtles and Dogs, Oh My!
As the old saying goes, dogs are people’s best friends. And now they — and a host of other animals — are the Sims’ best friends in The Sims: Unleashed, Aspyr Media’s fifth expansion pack in the best-selling Sims series.
In addition to a variety of dogs, cats, fish, birds, lizards and other pets, Unleashed offers over 120 new objects — including several to use with your new animal companions — and 5 new career paths, such as animal care and fashion. This expansion pack also increases the size of your neighborhoods and allows you to zone the new lots for residential or commercial; the latter means that you can now have shops near your Sims’ homes, instead of only in the Downtown area included in the Hot Date expansion pack.
New Members of Your Sim Family
The neighborhood shops that populate your new commercial lots comprise what is known as Old Town. In addition to pet stores, you’ll find a hip little café, various shops, a farmers market where you can buy and sell produce (Unleashed allows your Sims to grow their own vegetables, which they can eat or sell, if they’d like to become farmers) and new non-player characters (NPCs). Miss Lucielle, for example, will read your Sims’ palms or even revive the ones turned into zombies by the Grim Reaper (available in the Livin’ Large expansion pack).
Pets are the main focus of Unleashed, though, and once you get one home you’ll discover that they’re a lot like your Sims. You need to tend to their needs, such as food and attention, and they all have their own personalities. If you pick up opposite-sex animals from the same species, you can even breed them and keep or sell the babies.
If your Sims already have a large family and you’re worried about finding the time to take care of a dog or a cat, try fish or other low-maintenance pets. They won’t satisfy your Sims’ social needs the way a dog or cat will, but they cost less to feed and don’t require constant monitoring. Just make sure you don’t mix a cat with birds or fish; the result could be traumatic for the pets at the wrong end of the food chain, to say nothing of any Sim children who might witness the carnage.
Add a couple virtual pets to your Sim family in The Sims: Unleashed.
System Requirements:
 | Full version of The Sims required to play |
| Mac OS X version 10.1 or higher |
| 233MHz PowerPC G3 processor or better (450MHz recommended) |
| 320MB of RAM |
| 2MB of VRAM (8MB Recommended) |
| 750MB of free hard disk space |
There are a couple ways to bring a pet into your Sims’ lives: you can feed one of the stray animals that wander around the neighborhood (rabbits in particular are attracted to gardens) and hope that it sticks around, or you can go to Old Town and purchase one from the pet shop. Remember that each Sim family can’t have more than eight members and that dogs and cats count as part of the family. So you could create a crazy cat lady Sim, but she can’t have more than seven cats.
