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Catz

Posted January 15th 2007 by Terry Harjanto.

When I first heard about Nintendogs, I felt a little disappointed. What about a Nintencats? Would Nintendo also create a pet simulator for cat lovers? Sure dogs are man's best friend, but some of us prefer to pet things which don't have a tendency to lick their own nether region. Up until recently, us cat lovers had nothing. With the recent release of Catz for the DS, however, we got a little bit of something. As a game, it's a poor comparison to Nintendogs, but Catz does fill in a niche which has been ignored up till now.

In Catz you get to pick a kitten from a choice of five breeds. After making your decision you bring your kitten home and take care of it. The cat has four stats that need to be watched: hunger, energy, grooming, and bond. Food and water will take care of both hunger and energy. Every time your kitten takes a nap, it will also replenish some energy. You can brush your kitten's fur to increase the grooming stat but your kitten will often take care of that on its own. Bond is a measure of the relationship between you and your kitten and is maintained with constant petting with the stylus. Naturally, one should strive to keep these stats raised, but even if you fail as a cat owner and don't take care of its needs, there's no real punishment or negative consequence. Instead, your kitten will just act very needy and run around and meow out loud a lot to get your attention.

In addition to keeping an eye on the status of your kitten you can also play with it by using toys such as balls or pieces of string. Most of these toys, however, aren't very interactive and your kitten will respond to all of them in the same way: by trying to pounce on them. Your kitten is not the only one that you need to take care of as your neighbors, Brandon and Haley, have kittens of their own but apparently not a lot of spare time. Thus, they'll often ask you to come over to cat-sit and give you a special objective such as getting the kitten to eat food or to play with toys. Brandon, Haley, and the kitten adoption center will also hire your camera and photography services to take photos of kittens for a variety of reasons. Taking a photo is as easy as pressing either one of the shoulder buttons and you can store up to ten in your camera. But considering how the game has a fixed camera angle, you're offered very little freedom as a photographer and the photos will often look similar to one another.

Other than taking care of your kitten, performing jobs for others, and decorating your home, there's little else to do in the game. Cat-sitting and taking photos will reward you with either Kitty Cardz or coinz. The collectable Kitty Cardz contain little tidbits of information related to all things feline. Coinz are the currency used in the game to make purchases. From the store, you can buy food, toys, litter boxes, beds, scratching posts, and clothing accessories for your kitten. You can also buy furnishings for your home. Though there is a varied amount of silly hats you can buy for your kitten, there's very little for yourself. Your home in the game is fairly large with a lot of empty space, but there are only five specific parts of the house you can change depending on what you buy. These include: wallpaper, flooring, sofas, tables, and TV/fish tank sets. Even though there are five categories for decorating your home, variety is still limited. You can't have more than one of each type in your home and they are all automatically placed and tied to a specific position in the home.

To move the camera around your home as well as the in-game mens, you can use either the stylus or the D-pad but the stylus is more than enough to get everything done in the game. Not surprisingly, the best and most polished feature of the game is using the stylus to pet your kitten. Though how your kitten responds to your stylus petting is not as deep or complex as it is in Nintendogs, it is still quite realistic and detailed, especially when you use the cuddle camera mode which is a zoomed-in viewing angle placed at the same height as a cat's face.

Your kitten, however, is the only thing that looks good in the game. While the cats are well animated, the rest of the game does not look as great. The default camera angle is an isometric view and only some of the items in your home such as your kitten's scratching post and food bowls are modeled in 3D. Everything else, including the sofas, tables, and TV/fish tanks, are bland and plain looking sprites. The mix of 3D models and sprites unfortunately makes the poor collision detection and odd camera anomalies within the game that much more obvious. More than once I've had a ball get stuck on or in a piece of furniture. The camera centers on your kitten, but if your kitten walks into a certain place in a certain way, it'll cause the nearby pieces of furniture to vibrate and become truncated. I've also seen my kitty somehow walking upright on the wall and then proceed to walk further to the side and off the screen into some black void. Other oddities include collars and hats that disappear if you go to certain parts of the menu and getting the same request from your neighbors twice in a row.

At first, the use of sound creates an impression of quality as the opening song is an interesting piece performed by the mildly successful alternative indie rock group Nada Surf. However, this good impression quickly evaporates when you start the game in the adoption center to browse the available kittens to take home. As you go from one kitten to another, you'll quickly realize that all of the cats share the same set of soundbytes. Further on into the game, you'll also discover that there's practically no use of background music at all and that the overall quality of sound is on par with the rest of the game.

Slight Pulse - Keep that spray bottle of water nearby and handy.

Those who absolutely love cats will appreciate the opportunity to pet a virtual one. That appeal, however, will eventually disappear for those expecting the same depth and level of activity that is in Nintendogs. This game simply feels empty in many ways. Furnishing your home could have been fun if it wasn't so restrictive. Activities would make the game more interesting if they involved more than performing repetitive jobs for your neighbors. The kittens in Catz are quite life-like and natural, but the actual pet-owning experience is poorly emulated. This game will keep you occupied for five minutes as you put down a bowl of food and brush your kitten, but you won't be enticed to play any longer than that in a session unless you're absolutely obsessed with cats.

Posted in: Reviews