Nick Arcade Pet Care Game

Hey there! Just made an account because I knew exaclty what you were talking about.
This game was called Nick Pals: Can I Keep ‘Em? and there is barely any info on it online beyond these links:
- A (very short) article on the Invader Zim wiki (GIR being one of the characters you could choose);
-This website in chinese with information/a review on the game; seems to be the most detailed source on it though I don’t speak chinese and just have to rely on shoddy Google Translate to understand it
- This blog post that claims to have the game avaliable to download (haven’t tested it and if you do use a virtual machine, no clue if it’s legit) and some screenshots.
There are some other blog posts that parrot the same description and screenshots as this post and also feature download links, but I hesitate to try them out.

From this info we can see the avaliable pets were;
-Gary the snail and Mystery the seahorse, from Spongebob,
-Appa the sky-bison and Momo the winged lemur, from Avatar,
-Señor Chapi the parrot, who I don’t recognize but is from El Tigre (funny this show comes up for me just after i beat Black Velvetopia in my current Psychonauts playthrough lol)
-Goddard, the dog-robot from Jimmy Neutron,
-GIR, the non-dog-robot from my personal favourite show on this list, Invader Zim,
And one unlockable/hidden pet I can’t see in any screenshots. Likely from one of the shows already featured but I couldn’t tell you what/who it might be off thhe top of my head.

Gameplay seems to be a mix between typical tamagotchi/pet sim stuff like feeding the pet, petting them, playing with them, etc, and “training” minigames so your pet can compete in competitions. The article/review in chinese describes these; a maze minigame and one that google translate describes as “similar to sports”. Wish i could get a better translation of that article, it’d help a lot.

The game was playable in 3D like most Nick Aracde titles I’ve seen and each pet had their own environment, toys, and such. Screenshots of these I can find only display Mystery’s (a barn or stable sort of building), Gary’s (Spongebob’s house), GIR’s (Zim’s house), and Señor Chapi’s (not familiar at all with El Tigre so I can’t comment on this but you can find it on the third link). The only other information I’d like to mention here is the Invader Zim wiki mentions it “was only released in mostly Asian countries” but it has no source so take it with a grain of salt.

I’ve wanted to play/find this game for a while because I love weird 2000s computer stuff, 2000s Nick cartoons, and Tamagotchi-type games, but never got around to searching for it. Let me know if I can do anything else to help!

Huh, don't know how I missed that. It seems to be the real deal, but the button to play the half-hour trial mode seems to be missing, and the installer gets stuck on a 2005 C++ redistributable it seems to need to run. Gonna have to set up a virtual machine later it looks like.
Imgur post of what the game looks like when I try to run it.

YOOOOOOO! THANKS SO MUCH!

The article greatauk mentioned claims it came out exclusively in asian regions but I've never lived outside the US and don't remember downloading it off anywhere foreign (I was 4 when I first played this).