Hello, pet lovers! The Sims console team has worked hard on The Sims 3 Pets. We can hardly wait for you to see how fun and cute the cats and dogs are and how they enrich the lives of your Sims. You can take them around town, train them, breed them, raise them from puppies and kittens, and teach them to hunt for treasure. You can even play directly as a cat or dog, so it\'s up to you on whether you want to bring joy, wealth, and adventure into your Sims\' lives or terrorize the neighborhood!

We have more than a hundred breeds to choose from between cats and dogs. Dogs range from the ever-popular Labrador Retrievers, German Shepherds, and Beagles to the more exotic Kuvasz guard dog from Hungary and the tri-color Appenzeller Sennenhund from the Swiss Alps. As for cats, we have everything from the pervasive domestic shorthair cat (that\'s what I have in real life!).

If you play on Xbox 360 and have Kinect, you can select breeds as easily as saying, \"Switch to <your favorite breed>\". It\'s a fun way to sample the variety of options. You can also use Kinect to jump between different portions of Create a Pet and Create a Sim. This feature enables you to wield your imagination even more quickly! You can modify all of the breeds to your heart\'s desire and even create your own breeds! I am very much looking forward to seeing the awesome, creative pets you all share on The Exchange!

The Xbox 360 and PS3 limited editions of the game get you started with some rare, off-the-wall breeds. My personal favorites are the Husky with tiger stripes, the Mabari War Terrier (a pint-sized version of a hound you might recognize from another EA game), and the black cat with the stark white skeleton! There\'s nothing quite like asking your Robo Dane to bring in the morning paper or stalking prey as a crazy-colored Aztec cat!

Next time, we\'ll tell you about the adventures that you can go on with your pets and the mysteries behind the history of the town that you can solve. Or would you rather hear more about how you can use Kinect voice commands in the game? Let us know! Thanks for reading and playing!

Here is a community blog entry from lead designer Neil Melville:

\"As Lead Designer for The Sims 3 Pets on the 3DS, I try to put myself in the role of advocate for the player. I want to understand what you, our intended audience for the game, will want from this game.  So, in our team\'s efforts to bring the best possible pet content and gameplay to The Sims 3 Pets on the 3DS, we had  two main goals: \"Usability\" and \"Pets are Sims.\"

Usability

The word usability is kind of a funny word that means \"easy to use\"--and the word itself seems to fail at it. I think that usability should be a goal of every game, but it can be hard to make a game like The Sims as deep and robust as users want, but still easy to play.  So we spent a lot of effort designing The Sims 3 Pets  on 3DS to make its complexity as clear and easy to play as possible.

To do that, we focused on users playing with the top screen as their primary focus. The interaction menu and other frequently accessed items appear on the top screen, and all the controls you need for basic gameplay are mapped to buttons so you can stay focused on that top screen. This setup allows you to hold the 3DS stable with both hands, and achieve maximum enjoyment of the stereoscopic 3D functionality of the top screen. We even went so far as to make the interface on the touch screen totally thumb friendly--the stylus is completely optional!

We also really wanted to take advantage of the 3DS\u2019 Pedometer feature, so players who exercise with their 3DS are rewarded with Play Coins to spend within our game. At the same time, we thought that it would be great if the Karma Powers were as easy to access as possible.  So now you can buy the specific Karma Power you want in the game with the Play Coins you have earned. When my little boy discovered this feature, he promptly put the game in his pocket and rode his bike around the block a dozen times. He was thrilled that he was able to unleash a toilet-breaking inferno on his Sims, just by riding his bike!

Pets are Sims

When we say \u201Cpets are Sims\u201D, we mean that they are not just NPCs that you can interact with, but fully controllable, just like the Sim people in the Sim world. They have needs, moods, traits, skills, wishes, and relationships, just like their human Sim counterparts. We knew that making pets as fun to play with as the other Sims was a big undertaking, especially on a handheld platform. In fact, Ben Bell (our executive producer) bet me a burger that we could not make pets feel like full-on Sims. Well, I love me a good burger, so now I had that extra incentive to make pets as fun as possible.

Your first encounter with these alleged full-on Sim pets is in Create-A-Pet . Not only will you find many breeds and fur patterns, colors and markings, but you will find many options for accessories unique to the 3DS, including costume hats and horns, angel and devil wings , and even a monkey and miniature cowboy for the pet\'s back. We really wanted you to be able to create good-looking pets with a lot of personality.

A lot of your Sim\'s daily wishes and experiences are influenced by the Traits and Lifetime Wish you select for your Sim. So we gave pets a variety of Lifetime Wishes based around building relationships, improving skills, and earning a living. Wait, did I say that pets can earn a living? Oh yes, I most certainly did. And I meant it. These Sim pets can join any of their household humans in any career, and actually help earn promotions based on their traits and skills. And speaking of skills, pets have their very own skills of hunting, digging, tricks, and acrobatics that can directly lead to adding funds to your Sim\'s household.

Pets can even eke out a life completely independent of having a human in the family. The 3DS version of the game allows you to start or continue your game without any human Sims. Pets can beg and scrounge for food, wash themselves in sprinklers, and improve their skills on special park toys unique to the 3DS version of the game. And if life without a human in the family is not to your pet\u2019s tastes, it can befriend and adopt a stray person and bring them home. \u201CCan we keep him?\u201D takes on all new meaning!

There is a lot more that we added to The Sims 3 Pets on 3DS to make it fun (and easy) to play with life, but perhaps I should just let you discover the rest for yourself. Give the game a try and let me know if you think Ben owes me that burger.