The Sims 2: Apartment Pets is like a hybrid of two other chapters in the universe of The Sims 2, Apartment Life and Pets. Filling your apartment with pets and decorating it isn't the only way to customize your Sim's life here, though. The apartment in question actually belongs to your uncle, who runs a pet spa downstairs. Spiffing the spa up is yet another option, with lots of accoutrements that wouldn't quite fit in an apartment, but work nicely in a small business. The graphics on DS are a nice fit for The Sims because everything is simple, colorful, and not terribly detailed. There aren't lots of cut-scenes or animation to display, and dialogue is limited to the weird babble that The Sims use each time they meet. The pets in the game are rendered extra cute, recalling at times what has appeared before in Nintendogs and other similar pet-care simulations.

The music is a standout, very well executed and varied enough, plus largely driven by your preferences. The radios and boom boxes in the apartment and spa can be turned on or off, and feature some funky tunes that will leave you and your Sim bobbing to the music. The pets are fairly vocal (if a non-human can be vocal...) in their interactions with you, making it more fun to treat them or play with them in your off hours; especially when you don't take good care of a pet, you know it. We all know from experience that hissing cats and barking dogs aren't what pet owners want to hear at the grooming parlor.

Inheriting a pet spa is tough work. You need to be very good with people, sensitive to the needs of both the pet owners and the pets. Treating pets for everything from a rough, tangled coat to a bad flea problem is no picnic, either. Players that sign up for The Sims 2: Apartment Pets should know that this is a bit more than your little brother's Nintendogs done over by EA... In this world, you have to manage your time closely, making sure that your Sim gets the rest, play, and sustenance that he needs. You can't live in a drab pad, so you'll want to make sure the place is somewhat updated before your uncle comes back. Topping it all off is the gig you have now managing the spa. Technically, you can ask your employees to fill in for you, but there's nothing like white-glove service from the owner of a business to get people excited.

Before you get excited about taking care of other people's pets, you have a few things to do in your apartment. Apparently your uncle's reputation as a person that took excellent care of pets has now extended to you, and it's not long before strangers are knocking on your door (riding up your elevator, actually) to ask for your help. Taking care of animals in your apartment is a constant throughout The Sims 2: Apartment Pets, and serves as a good tutorial before you take on the more demanding task of serving customers. You learn the dynamics of pet care through a cat and dog dropped off for you, which will serve you well downstairs in the spa. There are several other animals in the apartment that are permanent residents. Interacting with these animals triggers mini-games that are at least fun distractions and good for scaring up a few extra simoleons. These mini-games take various forms, a rhythm game that you play with a bird or a musical mini-game that allows you to charm a snake. These feel tacked on, for the most part, and don't do much to extend the shelf life of The Sims 2: Apartment Pets.

In the spa, you'll be approached by a series of customers during the day, which you can hand off to an employee or treat personally. Personal treatment is where the big bucks, reputation, and spa upgrades live, so go there frequently. You only have a short list of spots during the day in which to treat pets, so each customer is precious. After examining the customer's animal, you'll see icons depicting the problem. You always have the solution, whether it is brushing the pet, giving a bath, or spraying fragrance. If you can pull off these activities in the right amount of time, you'll earn maximum dollars and improve your rep. Who knows, if you get your reputation up there and maintain a nice spa, you might attract a better quality person and have the opportunity to treat more exotic animals.

There's not a lot in The Sims 2: Apartment Pets that qualifies as "difficult" other than some goofy controls and concepts for the apartment animal mini-games. The core game is very accessible, almost to the point that reading is optional. Having the patience to maintain a routine isn't exactly difficult, but it raises the bar for the type of person that will enjoy the game. Losing customers isn't really possible, since one of your staff will treat them anyway. The treatments are quite challenging, at least a few of them. This isn't the happy-go-lucky game that we saw in Nintendogs, but it isn't in any way built for core gamers. The audience is likely one that is in the 5-8 range, not reading well enough to parse lots of dialogue, and not quite ready for a really complex simulation in any format. The Sims 2: Apartment Pets fills a nice void left between people that like treating animals as if they were in a veterinary practice (complicated) and people that like treating animals like something burdensome and wish they could go back to the good-old bad days when animals were thought of as mindless workers, and traded like currency or used for sport. About the only piece of the game that can be tweaked to adjust for level of experience is the button that changes the speed. More experienced players can use this to cycle through the game quickly and speed up repetitive tasks.

The Sims 2: Apartment Pets isn't the greatest micromanagement simulation, because it provides many small safety nets. First, pets can't expire and you can't get a lawsuit from your customers for poor treatment. In the early stages, anyone observing my animal care technique would have called "911" and run away. There is a lot going on in the game at any one time, but the grooming and care simulation is fairly simple. The game is incredibly picky about how you play certain mini-games like Snake Charming or the brushing care. Other mini-games and actions are more forgiving, but less determined and experienced players may experience a set-back early in the game. The Sims 2: Apartment Pets allows you to use an almost infinite series of repetition to project out decisions made during the game and you can make some educated guesses about the outcome of your decisions. Fail to decorate your spa or provide great care, and you'll be out in some federal penitentiary breaking rocks, plus you won't have opened up special features available through codes and a gameplay commitment. The decorating takes time, but you'll generally have the simoleons to back your purchase. Shopping is an interesting experience, since The Sims 2: Apartment Pets tries to show you what the object will look like in your apartment or in the business. Purchasing the items isn't tricky, and you don't have to spend a lot of time deliberating on where everything goes, so the biggest challenge is just navigating the huge database of objects. An editor would have been incredible, especially if the opportunity to trade clothing or objects online were possible.

EA built a good product here, a way to play The Sims without giving up Fido and Fluffy. Gamers that already love the world of The Sims will see a lot of little touches in The Sims 2: Apartment Pets. Especially if you already have a copy of Nintendogs, you might reconsider buying this one. The variation is impressive, but the mini-games completed as part of your pre-visit analysis (inspecting coat, checking for grime, and looking for fleas) start to blend together after a while. The pets never complain, but once you've trimmed four million toenails, given 80,000 dog baths, and who knows what else, you'll feel like you've hit a rut after the first hour or two. Content for download would have been an immediate improvement, in addition to a few more locations within The Sims 2: Apartment Pets to explore. Those among us that do not "get" the Sims phenomena are advised to steer clear of this game. It is pure Sims, through and through, with simple but busy gaming ideas that revolve around caring for something cute and cuddly. If that's not a great premise for a game, I don't know what is...