PETZ CATZ CLAN DS game

And that fact also speaks to the third complaint, which is the overall lack of things to do. It's not enough that you feel restricted in the first few minutes of the game, but even after investing a considerable amount of time and getting multiple cats all playing together at once in your Clan, you'll still feel strained for available activities. You can try to get two compatible cats to like each other and breed to make a baby, which is somewhat novel. But, again, that just produces another virtual animal who'll just end up being bored around your home.

The slow pace is another common fault of virtual pet games, which often try to extend the total number of hours of gameplay in their designs by only very slowly unlocking new features over time. It's true that there is a fair amount of depth to be found here, with several toys, pieces of clothing and unlockable extra cat breeds to ultimately earn -- but each new thing comes along at a snail's pace. I want at least a few toys for my pet to play with from the get-go, you know? Not an empty house containing a toy box with nothing in it.

The control issue is blamable partly on the interface, and partly on the camera. The game's menu icons are confusingly presented, with expected options like "play," "clean" and "feed" absent from those that are available. To complete those normal activities, you instead have to first navigate through the virtual house to get to the appropriate room -- and that's made difficult because the camera angle options are flawed at best. There's a camera icon that you can tap on to change your display from a set of several standard shots, from close-ups on your cats to birds-eye views of the current room. But none of these are intuitive enough, and you'll often be poking and searching around on the touch screen for the right thing to select with your stylus to move on.

Catz Clan is otherwise like any other virtual pet design, with you taking on the role of a new pet owner and selecting your first pet kitten from a handful of available breeds. You then take your new friend home, play with it, feed it and take it out to the park -- the normal virtual pet fare. Unfortunately, though, it also falls into the same traps that so many other virtual pet designs have before -- poor control, a far-too-slow pace, and just a general lack of things to do.

Setting that issue aside for a while, you'll find that the game itself, even with cats taking the place of monkeys, essentially feels the same. You lose a bit of the comedic value that Monkeyz House had, because its 3D-modeled monkeys were more expressive and animated than these cute little kittens, and a few of the activities don't make the transition -- your pet apes could ride a tricycle in Monkeyz House, for example, but that's tougher trick for a quadrupedal creature to pull off.

The difference, though, and the thing that makes this case feel dishonest, is that those other examples have always been upfront about the fact that the games are essentially the same, even shipped in different boxes. These Petz titles don't do that, though. No mention of the games' extreme similarity was announced or promoted. Catz Clan and Monkeyz House were presented as separate products when they were released in time for the 2008 holiday season. It wouldn't be an issue if they'd been called something like Petz Animal House: Monkey Edition and Petz Animal House: Cat Edition, because then the right impression would get across. But they weren't, so it didn't.

Now this is a marketing practice not unheard of, as the Pokemon series popularized the approach years ago -- its series sequels have been shipping in multiple, slightly different editions for over a decade. Capcom's done the same thing, with its various versions of the Mega Man Battle Network and Star Force series. And we've even also seen it before in the DS virtual pet genre, with Ninten's own Nintengs games. So it's not a big surprise.

Petz Catz Clan is the very same game as Petz Monkeyz House. The chimps have been replaced with kittens, yes, but that's the only alteration -- the gameplay, the menus, the extra features and everything else is all copied directly. It's a surprising revelation, and one that seems more than a little bit shady.

PETZ CATZ CLAN DS game

PETZ CATZ CLAN DS game
Petz Catz Clan is the very same game as Petz Monkeyz House. The chimps have been replaced with..........