Wish in One Hand. . .
10/7/05

. . . Shit in the other, you know how that goes.  >.> But hey, a girl can dream can't she?  And this is my dream.  Petz 6!!

I know it will never happen; Ubisoft has made it abundantly clear that they don't give a shit about petz.  They just bought the copyright so they could make a few quick bucks on shitty P5, and so they could make this new, incredibly stupid dogz game for Game Boy.  And even if they did make another petz game, it would probably be horrible, and I wouldn't even want it to exist, considering what they did to P5.

What I really wish is that Pure Fucking Magic (and yes that's what PF stands for) was still around, and they still owned the copyright.  Because they rocked.  They made Petz originally and they really cared about the game.  You can tell by comparing the quality and the advances from the first 3 petz games, which PFM made, to 4 and 5, which weren't made by PFM and which sucked monkey dick.

I can't help but wish for more.  I've watched petz develop over the years from its humble beginnings to now.  And after the sad attempt of Petz 5, I can't help but feel it's time for something more.  So I wanted to write down my ideas.  Even if I know it'll never happen, I can't help but enjoy the dream.

What I would love to see in a new petz game is this. . .

Fix Existing Bugs

The crazy jumping food bowls
Flowers, nightlights, etc. climbing up the walls
Parts from different toys (paint brush, gift box lit, etc) getting stuck in a room if you put the other part away
The cloning of babies when you age them with petza.  (Yes I know that's a bug caused by a third party modification, but still, the whole reproduction area of the game needs to be reworked)
Petz don't half disappear in the bed basket.  They should be laying on top of the blanket, not be decapitated by it, that looks stupid beyond belief Um, there's more, but that's all I can think of right now.

Tweaks and Changes

I'd like to see lots of tweaks to the way movement and position and such is handled, so that more modified breeds can move well, angled legs are possible without any movement problems, various tail carriages in and out of pose can be achieved, stuff like that.

Changes to the way inheritance is handled, so that things inherit more logically.  Or make them more controllable, so we can better fine tune how different breeds inherit features.

Make all eye colors and eyelid colors, and just all colors in general, inheritable!!!  And make it so that eyelids always inherit with the main color of the head, or with whatever group you set them with.  (I.e., if you have a lot of spots around the eyes, you'd want the eyelids to match that color)

Make odd eyes inheritable!  (I realize this could make a total fucking mess of 2nd gen eye colors, probably why they didn't make it possible in the first place, but if there were some controls on it, i.e. the offspring could only have odd eyes in at least one parent had odd eyes, then maybe it could work)

Make spots mutate-able, and be able to inherit different colors.  (I know this could cause more craziness with 2nd gens, but wouldn't it be fun to have a baby who say… has it's mother's spot pattern with it's father's spot color?  Stuff like that would be cool, and with more controls on inheritance, this could be controlled so it wouldn't get too insane)

The ability to put spots on lines!  Maybe a [paint linez] section.  The co-ordinates would work a little different, but I think is should be do-able.

The whole pose behavior needs to be tweaked, so that the shape and stance isn't so distorted and vastly different from a relaxed stance, so that breeds can look great both in and out of pose, and also get rid of dogs doing that stupid over pose omg I'm road kill thing.

More colors!!!  Don't you think it's about time to get out of the dark ages of 256 colors?  I'm sick of not having a texture-able purple, lavender, or peach.  And we just need a hell of a lot more colors.

Get rid of the damn nursery!!  I can't stand having my nursing mothers stuck in that damn stupid nursery.  (Sure Carolyn has a fix for that, but it's not perfect, it has bugs, just because of the sloppy way that part of the game was coded)  It could be just a regular play scene like all the others that you could go to just like any other, but not be forced into it with mothers with babies.

As I said, the whole mothers and babies bit needs to be reworked, because it was very sloppily done.  Surely there is a better way to code having multiple babies.  And if not, just go back to one baby at a time.  It's not worth the annoying bugs and sloppy code.

Scrap the bloody mini games!  They were fun for about five minutes, when I first bought the game, after that, they were pointless and annoying.  And the stupid characters in the play scenes are fucking annoying!  Get rid of them.

Make findable toys collectable again.  I miss collecting individual sea shells and hairballs (lol, yes hairballs).  And flowers and carrots should be able to be taken out of the scene they are planted in.  What's the point of having a vase to put flowers in if you can't put it anywhere??

Make the profiles accessible from the drop down menu again.  I love being able to access it from the pick a pet button, but I'd also like to be able to get to it when no petz are out, so I want it back in the drop down menu bar again like it was in 3/4.

Put the playpen back.  It's a simple feature, but an important one.  It needs to be there.

New Features

Better weather!  It would be cool if the weather was more interactive, and not so sporadic.  (I.e., you could set seasons, and it would be more likely to rain in the spring, only snow in the winter, etc)  And the weather would be the same across scenes.  I.e. you see it raining out the window in the living room, and you go outside and it's raining in the back yard.  Also, the rain makes the ground wet, and petz get muddy (then you could give them a bath!  A point to the bathtub, woot!)  The snow accumulates on the ground, and makes it cold.  Short haired (or hairless!) petz shiver and don't like the cold, long haired petz love to play in it.

Just more interactive play scenes in general, lights to turn on, cats scratch furniture, all kinds of stuff like that.

Ability to have more than 2 petz out at once.  Okay so we already have that thanks to petza, but I don't understand why this wasn't officially put in the game a long time ago.

A place in the profile to put a show name, and it would show up in the family tree.  Of course that would make the family tree view even more cluttered, and make large file petz even larger, but I still like the idea.

A way to interact on line with other people's petz.  IE like online dog parks, and shows, stuff like that.

Agility and training stuff.  Like agility toys that the dogz actually use properly.  And you can train them to get better over time.  This could tie in to the on line thing, and we could have agility competitions!

More breeds!  Sure we have lots of great hexed breeds, but I'd love to have some more petzy PFM style breeds.  And what we really need are more personalities!

This is something I've wanted since the very first petz game.  Have the petz out on your actual desk top, not just a screen cap of it.  So you can be typing, browsing websites, whatever, and your pet is walking around the screen at the same time.  You can stop to pet it or throw a toy, then go back to what you were doing.  The only thing is you wouldn't be able to call them by double-clicking, because you would be double-clicking on whatever else happened to be open.  But I've always wanted that!  I was disappointed when I first got catz and dogz and that's not what the desktop mode really was.

The ability to import petz backward to previous versions of the game.  That actually might not be possible with all the changes I've suggested to the basic structure of the petz, but oh well.  In a perfect world, this Petz 6 in my head would be so wonderful that everyone would get it, and no one would use the old versions anymore, so that wouldn't be a problem.

A new version of oddballz that's compatible with Catz and Dogz.  So you could have your oddballz acting crazy and exploding and all that nonsense, and also playing with your dogz and catz!!

More games, like Rodentz, horsez, birdz, reptilez, fishez, etc!  That could be combined together in petz, just like Catz and Dogz.  I know we have lots of wonderful hexed breeds of various species, and I love them!  But the problem is they still act like catz and dogz.  With new games specifically for different species, we could have a multitude of behaviors, scenes, and toys made especially for them.  Imagine actually having your ratz sit up and wash their face, or your birdz fly, or your horses graze on grass!  The only draw back to this is we'd lose the ability to make crazy hybrids.  But we could still do that with our wonderful cat and dog based breeds.  Or maybe they could make them inter breed-able, wouldn't that be crazy!

So yeah, those are my ideas.  *sigh* Oh to live in a dream world.