Smile : Today is the tomorrow you worried about yesterday...
Smile : Today is the tomorrow you worried about yesterday...
Member since:16.09.2001
Reviews:30
Members who trust:44
Oh poo. Well not quite, little Timmy didn't quite make it to the bathroom on time and peed all over the floor. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to Timmy, his mum is having extra maritals with Michael from down the road, and his sister's just been carted off to military school. Dad is off working...well, if you can really define theft as a career....
The Sims. A highly addictive god game where you are put in control of people. But this time its up close and personal. No longer are you controlling large cities, looking down from afar. Here, you are in direct control of your little sim people, and what happens to them is entirely up to you.
*First off, creating a family*
This may only consist of one person, or may be an entire brood (I would suggest to beginners that taking on a household of only two occupants would be beneficial). You can select the gender and looks of your sims, give them a name, and even select their personality traits. This process is very easy to accomplish, the interface being very simple and easy to deal with. Plus, nothing is more fun than trying to recreate yourself, or your friends, or maybe your worst enemy if you're feeling particularly mean...
*Next up, finding your sims a home..*
This can be done one of two ways. You go into the neighbourhood screen (showing all of the houses and empty plots in the game), and buy a house that's already there (you are given 20,000 simoleans to begin with to set yourself up), or buy an empty plot, which will be cheaper than a house, and build your own from scratch. Building your own home can be cheaper than buying (for instance, you can cut down on costs by determining your own size, and foregoing such luxuries as wallpaper), but is naturally more complicated. Beginners may find the building process a little difficult to judge correctly, so until you have a feel for the game, and the kind of requirements your sims need, its probably best just to go for a ready made house.
For the shoppers among you, you're going to love the next bit...
*Furnishing your home..*
Yep, your sims need stuff. They need beds. They need lamps. They need cookers and fridges. They need places to sit. They need toilets and showers. They need everything. And you have to buy it.
After house buying/building, you'll probably find that you don't have quite as many simoleans as you'd like. Ah yes, your new-born sims are really quite poor, no shopping in Habitat for them just yet. Luckily, there is a wide selection of goods on offer, from the cheap and not so cheerful, to the shiny, new and disgustingly expensive. Each product has a name, amusing description and price, so take your time drooling over the things you can't afford (the line between sim and real life is ever so blurry sometimes...) One piece of advice - there are
a few essential items that I would encourage everyone to buy straight away. A fire alarm (when cooking goes wrong), a burglar alarm (no one said the sim world was perfect) and a telephone (to call the authorities when you set the cooker on fire and get burgled).
So, you've bought the essentials...they have food, they have beds, they have light and they have bathroom facilities...
But real life ain't that easy. We aren't animals, and neither are the sims, there are higher needs to address...
* Sims have feelings too...*
Some of these, as mentioned, cover the basic bodily functions - sleep, eat, pee etc, however, they also want to have fun, they want to socialise, they want to feel comfortable, they want to be surrounded by nice things, they want to be clean. The trick is, you've got to try and satisfy all these needs at once, and if you have more than a couple of people in a household, you can see how that would be something of a challenge.
Your sims needs are shown in the form of bars. If the bar is full and green, then that need is being fulfilled, if it is low and red, then they won't be happy, and you need to do something about it. For instance, your sim (lets say Timmy) is really uncomfortable, so you sit him down on the couch to improve that, but while his comfort level rises, his hunger, bladder, fun and social happiness decreases. You could sit Timmy down on the couch (increasing comfort), while watching tv (pushing up fun) with another person (meeting social needs).....but trying to accomplish that with everything else that is going on is certainly a juggling act.
As you can see, in my example of the couch, items in your home can be used and interacted with, with either a positive or negative effect, and they can also have many different uses. The couch can be used for sitting on, and watching TV from, but you can also have a nap on it. A telephone can be used to call police, fire dept, gardener, maid, other sims, or even a pizza. You can use the toilet or clean it. All of this is accomplished by merely selecting a sim and then using a point and click interface, and you can even queue up actions, so that you don't have to hover over each sim every second of their day.
But how do they live after your initial spending spree? Well, they have to find a job.
Jobs can be found either through reading the paper (which gets delivered every morning), or by surfing the net (provided you have bought your sim home a computer). There are several different career paths, all of which have different working hours and pay. This is where you will get the money for your sims to live on (although there are occasional windfalls throughout the game). Don't be late for work...if you are tardy two days in a row you'll find yourself sacked. Getting a promotion will probably mean a change in hours, but will come with a pay rise. The more bacon you bring home, the better items you can buy. The better the item, the more it fulfills your sims needs.
But how to get that all-so-elusive promotion? You have to work at it..
*It really is who you know darling...*
Different jobs have different criteria you must meet before you can get a promotion, and you can look at this from the main screen. Your sims can develop skills - in everything from cooking to charisma, and you will usually need to gain enough skill points in one or more categories to gain promotion. Skills points are earned through interacting with certain objects....you can read up on cooking by reading books from the book shelf, you can develop your charisma by practicing speeches in a mirror etc.. These things take time, and are yet something else you have to fit into your schedule, but the hardest part is yet to come...
*...Contacts sweetie!*
You want that promotion? Well, we feel that we're looking for a likeable sort, the kind of person that people in the community trust and respect. You need to get you some family friends...
Socialising is not just for fun in the sim world. The more friends you have in the neighbourhood, the more likely you are to get a promotion. Your sims can converse with other sims (albeit it in sim-speak, which sounds like a version of all the european languages put into a blender together), and slowly, the more you converse, usually the more that person will like you and vice-versa. When you get to a certain point, that person will become a friend of the family. In promotion terms, you'll probably need a certain number of family friends before being offered that new job and the big fat juicy bonus...
*Friends are for life, not just for promotion*
Your sims can interact in a lot of ways with other sims in the neighbourhood. Apart from talking, they can dance, joke, compliment, hug and buy each other presents. And, if a mutual appreciation society starts to develop between two sims, they can even fall in love (all together now - "awwwww...") and even have a big old fashioned snog. This can happen between any mix of genders, so the game is open to all preferences, but remember, if you are not particularly at ease with a certain kind of lifestyle, then nothing is being pushed in your face, you are in control of every aspect of the game. However...it does make for some interesting love triangles ;)
When two people are in love, then they can either get hitched (male/female couples) or move in together (m/m, f/f couples). Then, after some time, the m/f couples may find that they have a baby, and the m/m, f/f couples may be offered the chance of adoption. Babies are a complete nightmare, and stay in infant form for three sim days. Give me a real baby any day!! If you fail to take care of any child adequatley, it will be taken away from you by social services. After three days in hell, your baby turns into a child (note : children never become adults unfortunately...mind you they never become teenagers either...thankfully). Children can also make friends with other sims, and attend school instead of a job. If their grades slip too much, they will be whisked off to military school. Any child being taken away makes your adult sims very unhappy....although it may be a blessed relief to you ;)
Love always has a flipside though, and even the sim world can't escape the green eyed monster. Your sims theoretically have the ability to fall in love with the entire neighbourhood, but if one sim finds his sweetheart with another, expect shouting, arguing, and possibly even a punch up. If you're going to weave a tangled web of desire throughout your town, try and make sure you can co-ordinate it ;)
So what's left? You've got the house, the job, the friends, the most expensive TV, and you even managed to keep from killing the baby.
*Nothing is perfect*
Life is never simple, it never stops. Just when you think you're doing fine, the law of sod comes into play. You may be burgled, you may burn half the house down, you may accidentally kill your sim and end up watching all your other sims mourning over their gravestone or urn (yes really). You may even see their ghost come back and haunt the place for a bit.
Or of course, you may be the sod of that law, and intentionally be mean to your sims. Being mean, is well, wrong, but this is a computer game, and if your aggression has to be taken out on defenceless little sim people, better there than out in the real world. You could take away their fridge, or their toilet. You could even take away their house (I only did it once as an experiment!...little Timmy was left all alone with only the pizza delivery man as a lifeline...).
The point is, is that The Sims is an open-ended game, and the only limit on it is what you want to achieve. Do you want the biggest house on hill? Do you want to have a huge family and try and manage them all? Is all you want a pool table? Or a second floor to the house? Or do you want to be sadistic as hell, just, well, because you're god and you can?
The game is incredibly addictive, and I have gone through phases of playing it to death for weeks at a time. But the joy of it is that I can always come back to it at a later date. With the add-on packs that are available, the game extends even further, adding more craziness, more humour, more opportunites, and a lot more weird and truly bizarre items.
The game includes a tutorial which quickly gets you used to the controls, and a fairly comprehensive manual comes with. The only real limitations of this game are your goals. If you are happy to play it a different way every time, then I could imagine that this game would last you a very long while. Don't expect the expansion packs to revolutionise the game though, they are just what they say, expansions. Some of the items and programs that come in the expansions are available to download from the official sims site - you'll need to register, so you'll need your Sims box handy, but they are free.
The most fun I've had so far though, had to be from looking up sim sites online and finding out I could download 'skins' for my characters. People around the world have made new faces, bodies, outfits etc, mostly of famous people, and made them available to download and put into your sim game. Want to control all the characters from 'Friends'?? You can do it. Korn fan? You're catered for too. Although I do admit, not all of them are exact doubles...Brad Pitt ain't what he used to be...
In summary, the game is really good fun, completely addictive, at least for a while, and has the option of being extended through downloads and add-on packs. It combines an easy to use interface with decent graphics, and a lot of humour. If you're into micro-management style games, then I'm sure you'll find some enjoyment here.
Anyway, I'd better run off.......Timmy's fallen in a heap of exhaustion, Dad and Michael are having a punch up, and Mum's eyeing up that new guy from number 9...;)
How helpful would this review be to a person making a buying decision? Rating guidelines
I enjoye your all reviews, you have a great style.
Sundancegirl 30.05.2003 05:02
I agree with your "disadvantage". It's a great game, but definetly gets samey after a while. And you're right regarding the longevity too. It doesn't go on for ever, you get bored. A few months is probably about right, unless you have long breaks from it and go back to it obviously, but even then it becomes a little tiresome and unoriginal. Still, that's what the expansion packs are for right!? More money spent then....Sunny xx
Sticks 14.03.2003 17:43
Fantastic Opinion! You have a great style! I've been thinking about buying this for ages and now that my new computer is arriving on Thursday and having read you op, I shall invest!
Thanks for all the detail, extremely helpfull and well written!
Vicky! :+)
Sep 30th, 2001
very helpful by (100%):
