I hate - no, I loathe virtual pet sites. Their prolification and inexplicable popularity makes searching for ACTUAL virtual pets practically impossible. Or virtually impossible, you might say.
Many times over the long years have I attempted to indulge my inner AI fascination, hunting down obscure Creatures-esques programs, experiments, or fully-fledged projects. "Google," I say, "show me your finest selection of simulated life. Dazzle me with the beauty and complexity of digital life that can act and think and feel and fear."
But instead of finding examples of autonomous living animals and advanced AI agents that broaden the horizons of simulation technology, I'm instead bombarded with page after page of shitty "virtual pet" templated websites, filled with shitty art of ponies and dragons and tiger-whale-mammoth hybrids, that you "take care of" by buying shitty pictures of plastic hairbrushes and teddybear toys that, somehow, keep them "happy", while exploring a shitty picture of a "world map" consisting of shitty pictures of inexplicably magic fountains that give you free bars of chocolate, and post offices staffed by tie-wearing unicorns, so you can play shitty Flash puzzle games that look like they belong on Facebook in order to win fake gold coins that you spend buying auctions of pixie dust to transform your shitty starter pet into a demonic fiery behemoth with smoke and flames billowing around its portrait, which of course makes no difference to its stats which are mainly put to use in shitty "arena" battles with other users who've spent over $9000 real life money buying stat-boosting items and turning their pets into game breaking demi-gods. And this is apparently what the WHOLE INTERNET thinks of as "virtual pets" because I'll be damned if I have ever found more than a HANDFUL of real, actual websites concerning actual virtual pets that aren't fucking tamagotchis.
I spit on these damned sites and I hope they all burn and suffer hardware failure, and that everyone who's ever built one gets their hands severed by spinning =steel large serrated disks=.
So yeah, that's what I think.