#petz dogz

[dasicality]

hes halloween ready

[blushdeww]

August loves his new bed!

[chinahako]

pocket dogs for the gba sounds insane

[lowpolyanimals]

Labrador Retriever from Petz: Dogz 2

[petz4]

psychedelic pigz

[monolith-isle]

Yo! I made a little collection of merch based off of Petz 2!

They're all available here, if you're interested!

[never-obsolete]

Petz 5 (2002) Haunted Mansion

[wildbasil]

did anyone else play the petz games growing up?? i accidentally rediscovered petz 4 and wow. ok. the nostalgia is hitting me hard

you can download it for free here!! 🥺🥰💕

they can play on your desktop too

[the-jonestown-holotape]

[magnetictapedatastorage]

Claims to be A-Life... dies anyway

it's wild when you look at old A-Life games that were at times so ridiculously, comically advanced that they barely ran. Artificial life games weren't even particularly aimed at mega nerds! No, they were also aimed at kids who wanted a puppy!

or... some kind of alien thing.

The PC game series of Creatures 1, 2, and 3, Petz 1-4 (unrelated to the later console games series) are prime examples of this genre. Creatures leans more heavily on the science element, but still had a meticulously crafted art style of cute huge googly eyes and big smiles that used pre-rendered sprites. Petz used a very unique 'slap together orbs until you've got a dog' art style.

It's absolutely wild that that genre has withered away. Sure there are tiny indie games that have some similarities, modern petri-dish style games like Gridworld don't quite hit the mark, and it's obvious why:

It's missing the mass appeal. It's missing the googly eyes. This is never in a million years going to pass muster to a kid who asked for a puppy for christmas. This isn't to disparage on the Gridworld dev (singular), it's just a bit odd that the mass-marketed type of A-Life disappeared from the mainstream.

The shallowest argument would be that the dominant art style changed, or that 2D games are no longer popular, but that's not an argument, because it would be possible to make a similarly cartoony animal system in 3D (Spore! Spore has that! but NOTHING EVOLVES IN THAT DISAPPOINTMENT-), and because there are plenty of 2D games still.

I dunno man. Both Creatures and Petz have small, scarily dedicated fanbases wringing absolute miracles out of decades old engines. But what happened to the zietgiest of A-Life? Why, when AI is on the upswing stronger than ever before, is nobody saying "put that shit in a cartoon cat... we'll all be millionaires!" like they used to?

[oldwindowsicons]

Petz II - Dog file

[seasidesprout]

30 days of agere day 18 free day

🧸🤖🐕|🧸🤖🐕|🧸🤖🐕

[maitaitiu]

thinking about the dog island today

[quackshley]

Cloudy :)

[lowpolyanimals]

Ivlet from Petz: Dogz 2 and Petz Catz 2

[petz4]

my funnytime palette