virtual pet sites in 2023
Feb 26th 2023
Recently I joined two new pet sites, so I decided that’s what I wanna talk about this week!
Back when I first started using the internet as a wee child in like… 2001? pet sites are what kept me hooked. I would spend days taking care of my neopets, playing the onsite games, and working on my custom petpages. It was neopets that got me into html coding and digital art, and it connected me with the online art community!
Over 20 years later I’m still playing on pet sites, not neopets anymore but different ones. It has been so interesting seeing pet sites grow and evolve over time, and now there are so many different kinds. There’s still neopets and the hundreds of neopets clones, but there are also games that focus more on collecting or breeding, or roleplay, or simulation, or some other specific aspect. Let’s go through some of the games I’ve been playing!
Flight Rising is one that focuses on collecting and breeding dragons. It has many different breeds of dragons with many different markings (called genes) and many different colors, so breeding two different dragons gives players unique offspring! What do you then do with all these dragons? You can use them to fight in the colosseum, roleplay with the community, or exalt them to your flight’s deity. Exalting them removes them from your lair in exchange for treasure, and is basically a way to free up space on the site’s server (because everyone breeding dragons and generating new images takes up a lot of space in a short amount of time!) Exalting is further incentivized by flight dominance, a weekly competition to see which flight can exalt the most dragons!
My personal favorite thing to do is collect fan dragons via breeding projects. Fan dragons are dragons who try to look like a fictional character, like Skull Kid from Majora’s Mask or Noivern from Pokemon. You can check out my profile here! :)
This is one of the pet sites I joined recently. Pixel Cat’s End is a fresh game that is still in beta and so it has closed-registration, but I was able to join during on open registration weekend.
While PCE also has collecting and breeding, I’d say it focuses a lot more on roleplay. When you join, you get to read a bit of lore followed by creating your custom cat. You then get a bit more lore along with 5 starter cats. Your cats then get to interact with each other through daily scenarios and gather resources depending on what jobs you give them! They can also participate in adventures, which is like a strategy roleplaying game with dungeons and dragons mechanics. Through all the features on the site, your cats can become friends, rivals, or partners! Partners can then have kittens together (lovingly referred to as beans), and those family relationships show up on their profile.
I don’t usually dive too deep into roleplay on pet sites, but I’ve been having a blast writing up my cats’ profiles and developing my village! You can check out my profile here~
The last pet site I want to talk about is also the other site I joined recently. Poppy Seed Pets used to be PsyPets, which closed because the developer wanted to use modern tools and better game design practices. Both PsyPets and Poppy Seed Pets are based on psychology, in which your pets have basic needs (food, safety, affection, and esteem) and if all those needs are met, your pets will perform actions every hour. These actions can range from gathering resources, fighting creatures, crafting new items from materials in your house, or a plethora of other actions! It’s a very casual game which can feel reallllly slow in the beginning, but once you get more pets and unlock more activities it’s really fun to see what your pets do. Plus I love the style of the simply drawn creatures which come in all kinds of different colors~
You can see my profile here!
I’ve tried many different pet sites over the years, but these three are the ones I’m currently active on. I love that each one feels unique instead of being a clone of one another. So what makes pet sites so fun? Especially ones that don’t have a lot of games outside of taking care of your pets? I think these types of sites appeal to people who are very creative; it’s fun to imagine these little creatures having their own adventures and forming bonds with other creatures! I think that’s why these sites appeal to both kids and adults.
Anyway that’s enough rambling for today. Feel free to comment why you like or dislike pet sites, or share any pet sites you enjoy! See you in a while crocodile~
tags: web, gaming