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This thread has been linked to the game 'The Sims'.
Well, the mighty behemoth that is The Sims bandwagon is about to start rolling along again like a nasty case of SARS in a poor Eastern country. The Sims 2 arrives in shops today, and this post is a kind of tribute I guess, to one of the most enjoyable, innovative and accessible games series around.
The Sims is without a doubt one of the biggest franchises in gaming history now, and even though it is a much derided game amongst the snobbish hardcore gaming elite, who see it as a pointless casual gamers virtual dollhouse which the evil suits at EA use to squeeze their loyal fans for mucho greenbacks, I love it. I’m now going to cast my mind back to the very beginning of The Sims, what makes it so great and why I love it, even though there is plenty of cynicism and resentment regarding this franchise.
When I bought the first Sims title, it was back in the day when PC games came in those needlessly large cardboard boxes, even though the actual games were only house in regular CD cases (I never really found out why that was).
I was already a huge fan of developer Maxis’ previous work with the Sim City series, having enjoyed the original SNES version and Sim City 2000 on the PSone, and the idea behind The Sims sounded intriguing; you control a virtual person/family, and do everyday normal stuff. The premise sounded, and still does sound, highly boring to some people, but the monotony of everyday normal life was something not really seen in a video game before. We’ve controlled giant fighting robots defending the galaxy, we’ve even controlled ninjas and beefy street fighters, but normal people doing normal stuff at home? I’d never work…would it?
I strolled into my crappy local branch of Dixons (the only local place I could buy games at the time without having to travel to a different town) and bought The Sims and the first expansion pack Livin’ it up in a double pack offer.
I took it home, installed it and when starting to play found that I was being eagerly watched by my younger siblings, after all, it was a game they were also very interested in, because of the family friendly nature of the title.
I started off by having a look at the tutorial mode, and then decided to make a copy of myself and let him live his virtual life, with me being the voyeuristic god watching on. I would eventually play this character from the very beginning of my Sims life right until I eventually stopped playing the original series.
One of the most enjoyable aspects of The Sims is without a doubt the ability to design your house, both exterior and interiors, and though it seems fairly unsophisticated and restrictive now compared to The Sims 2, it was fantastic fun at the time. When you eventually built up enough cash (without using dirty underhand cheats) to design and build your own little virtual dream house. My character had slaved away hard in his virtual life, finding time to converse with friends and neighbours, doing plenty of bodybuilding and having a career in the medical sector, working his way up from humble low level hospital jobs to being the very top of the medical profession, and over time I also went from business mailroom clerk to CEO, humble waiter to superstar, security guard to Captain Hero and even a pickpocket to a criminal mastermind.
After working hard in various different sectors, I convinced my beefy neighbour friend Julius Benedict (named after Arnie’s character in Twins because he looked like Arnie) to move in with me, in a purely financial arrangement of course. We eventually moved from my original house to the best mansion in neighbourhood 1. I changed it quite radically, turning it into the ultimate dream home, with elegant interiors that would make Larry Llewelyn-Bowen weep into his overly large shirt cuffs and a beautiful landscaped garden with large pool. Julius and I lived like kings in our mansion, lording it over all the other neighbours.
I eventually had an affair with beardy Bob Newbie’s wife Betty, married her and spend lots of my time being a part-time bum, part-time gnome maker. At night I’d snuggle up to the hottest chick in the neighbourhood and occasional bag myself a burglar. After seeing the trouble that the kids were in other houses, I decided against bothering with having a kid of my own.
Eventually, EA kindly decided to provide us with extra Sims content in the form of expansion packs; there was House Party, which added loads of new items but also gave extra scope for having fun parties. Hot Date allowed your Sims to go downtown and find lurve. On Holiday let you go…on holiday, to parks, beach resorts or snow-covered lands. Unleashed let you own a variety of pets and gave you exciting extra gardening-based gameplay. Superstar introduced celebrities into the game, and let you become a superstar yourself. Lastly, starting to scrape the barrel, we had Makin’ Magic, which introduced a whole load of weird, wonderful and macabre magical stuff.
There were a lot of expansion packs for this game, that is undeniable, and they did start to lose freshness after a while, but the first few add-on packs were tremendous fun, letting your Sims do a huge amount of extra stuff, and giving you extra scope in your house designing plans. They weaved a few extra threads in this tapestry of gaming fun.
For all the fun and enjoyment The Sims was for me, it wasn’t all good. Characters had to go to the toilet a bit too often for my liking, and maintaining friendships got a little tedious after a while (if you got your friendship rating up to 100 it should have stayed at 100 forever, meaning your friendship is solid and unbreakable). The time spent relieving your bladder, washing your hands, preparing and eating food, and waiting for friends to come by was rather tiresome and it did take some of the fun out of the game. Your character would wake up in the morning, he’d have a pooh, have a shower, prepare breakfast, eat breakfast, then have to leave half his breakfast because the carpool had arrived, then he’d be off to work for many hours, get home and be too tired to do anything else. Repeat for a few days and you can see where the critics are coming from.
Despite the downsides, The Sims didn’t just provide fun for me, no, it provided a lot of fun for other people in my household as well; my brothers and sisters enjoyed the game immensely, my elder brother sitting up to ungodly hours playing with his family and their gaudy house which looked like it came straight from one of those obscure American sitcoms. My youngest sister annoyed everyone else by constantly creating new households and using cheats all the time, but she has had lots of fun on The Sims, and has been awaiting the release of the sequel like the coming of a new messiah. She is proof of how accessible The Sims really is; she was in the infant school stage when playing The Sims for the first time, and gradually became better at the game and has been a fan of it ever since.
So why do people love The Sims so much? How has it lasted for so long? It’s an endearing game that’s for sure, as unlike most other games, it is a highly personal game, with you controlling the destiny of your own virtual self. You could play the game as you saw fit, play it your way. Your Sims could be a mirror for your own personality, or it could be the exact opposite, and you also don’t really need any gaming skill to enjoy it, it’s not overly complicated or mentally demanding.
The house designing element was fun, and I also enjoyed the humour to the game, the Simlish speaking and singing, and the various character interactions (juggling, cheering up sad people with a glove puppet, fighting, rough-house etc etc).
It has been a very Marmite-esque title as people would say; people who hate The Sims hate it with a cynical passion, but those who love The Sims really enjoy the game. I was pleased to be part of The Sims experience from nearly the very beginning, seeing my own Sim family grow and develop, and seeing a franchise grow and develop also.
So, congratulations EA and Maxis I raise a glass to you in celebration of a fine venture, and I hope The Sims 2 can live up to expectations, and give as much pleasure and enjoyment as the first Sims series did (and I hope that I’ll be able to play it this weekend if I can manage to prise my younger sister off of the game).
The Sims is without a doubt one of the biggest franchises in gaming history now, and even though it is a much derided game amongst the snobbish hardcore gaming elite, who see it as a pointless casual gamers virtual dollhouse which the evil suits at EA use to squeeze their loyal fans for mucho greenbacks, I love it. I’m now going to cast my mind back to the very beginning of The Sims, what makes it so great and why I love it, even though there is plenty of cynicism and resentment regarding this franchise.
When I bought the first Sims title, it was back in the day when PC games came in those needlessly large cardboard boxes, even though the actual games were only house in regular CD cases (I never really found out why that was).
I was already a huge fan of developer Maxis’ previous work with the Sim City series, having enjoyed the original SNES version and Sim City 2000 on the PSone, and the idea behind The Sims sounded intriguing; you control a virtual person/family, and do everyday normal stuff. The premise sounded, and still does sound, highly boring to some people, but the monotony of everyday normal life was something not really seen in a video game before. We’ve controlled giant fighting robots defending the galaxy, we’ve even controlled ninjas and beefy street fighters, but normal people doing normal stuff at home? I’d never work…would it?
I strolled into my crappy local branch of Dixons (the only local place I could buy games at the time without having to travel to a different town) and bought The Sims and the first expansion pack Livin’ it up in a double pack offer.
I took it home, installed it and when starting to play found that I was being eagerly watched by my younger siblings, after all, it was a game they were also very interested in, because of the family friendly nature of the title.
I started off by having a look at the tutorial mode, and then decided to make a copy of myself and let him live his virtual life, with me being the voyeuristic god watching on. I would eventually play this character from the very beginning of my Sims life right until I eventually stopped playing the original series.
One of the most enjoyable aspects of The Sims is without a doubt the ability to design your house, both exterior and interiors, and though it seems fairly unsophisticated and restrictive now compared to The Sims 2, it was fantastic fun at the time. When you eventually built up enough cash (without using dirty underhand cheats) to design and build your own little virtual dream house. My character had slaved away hard in his virtual life, finding time to converse with friends and neighbours, doing plenty of bodybuilding and having a career in the medical sector, working his way up from humble low level hospital jobs to being the very top of the medical profession, and over time I also went from business mailroom clerk to CEO, humble waiter to superstar, security guard to Captain Hero and even a pickpocket to a criminal mastermind.
After working hard in various different sectors, I convinced my beefy neighbour friend Julius Benedict (named after Arnie’s character in Twins because he looked like Arnie) to move in with me, in a purely financial arrangement of course. We eventually moved from my original house to the best mansion in neighbourhood 1. I changed it quite radically, turning it into the ultimate dream home, with elegant interiors that would make Larry Llewelyn-Bowen weep into his overly large shirt cuffs and a beautiful landscaped garden with large pool. Julius and I lived like kings in our mansion, lording it over all the other neighbours.
I eventually had an affair with beardy Bob Newbie’s wife Betty, married her and spend lots of my time being a part-time bum, part-time gnome maker. At night I’d snuggle up to the hottest chick in the neighbourhood and occasional bag myself a burglar. After seeing the trouble that the kids were in other houses, I decided against bothering with having a kid of my own.
Eventually, EA kindly decided to provide us with extra Sims content in the form of expansion packs; there was House Party, which added loads of new items but also gave extra scope for having fun parties. Hot Date allowed your Sims to go downtown and find lurve. On Holiday let you go…on holiday, to parks, beach resorts or snow-covered lands. Unleashed let you own a variety of pets and gave you exciting extra gardening-based gameplay. Superstar introduced celebrities into the game, and let you become a superstar yourself. Lastly, starting to scrape the barrel, we had Makin’ Magic, which introduced a whole load of weird, wonderful and macabre magical stuff.
There were a lot of expansion packs for this game, that is undeniable, and they did start to lose freshness after a while, but the first few add-on packs were tremendous fun, letting your Sims do a huge amount of extra stuff, and giving you extra scope in your house designing plans. They weaved a few extra threads in this tapestry of gaming fun.
For all the fun and enjoyment The Sims was for me, it wasn’t all good. Characters had to go to the toilet a bit too often for my liking, and maintaining friendships got a little tedious after a while (if you got your friendship rating up to 100 it should have stayed at 100 forever, meaning your friendship is solid and unbreakable). The time spent relieving your bladder, washing your hands, preparing and eating food, and waiting for friends to come by was rather tiresome and it did take some of the fun out of the game. Your character would wake up in the morning, he’d have a pooh, have a shower, prepare breakfast, eat breakfast, then have to leave half his breakfast because the carpool had arrived, then he’d be off to work for many hours, get home and be too tired to do anything else. Repeat for a few days and you can see where the critics are coming from.
Despite the downsides, The Sims didn’t just provide fun for me, no, it provided a lot of fun for other people in my household as well; my brothers and sisters enjoyed the game immensely, my elder brother sitting up to ungodly hours playing with his family and their gaudy house which looked like it came straight from one of those obscure American sitcoms. My youngest sister annoyed everyone else by constantly creating new households and using cheats all the time, but she has had lots of fun on The Sims, and has been awaiting the release of the sequel like the coming of a new messiah. She is proof of how accessible The Sims really is; she was in the infant school stage when playing The Sims for the first time, and gradually became better at the game and has been a fan of it ever since.
So why do people love The Sims so much? How has it lasted for so long? It’s an endearing game that’s for sure, as unlike most other games, it is a highly personal game, with you controlling the destiny of your own virtual self. You could play the game as you saw fit, play it your way. Your Sims could be a mirror for your own personality, or it could be the exact opposite, and you also don’t really need any gaming skill to enjoy it, it’s not overly complicated or mentally demanding.
The house designing element was fun, and I also enjoyed the humour to the game, the Simlish speaking and singing, and the various character interactions (juggling, cheering up sad people with a glove puppet, fighting, rough-house etc etc).
It has been a very Marmite-esque title as people would say; people who hate The Sims hate it with a cynical passion, but those who love The Sims really enjoy the game. I was pleased to be part of The Sims experience from nearly the very beginning, seeing my own Sim family grow and develop, and seeing a franchise grow and develop also.
So, congratulations EA and Maxis I raise a glass to you in celebration of a fine venture, and I hope The Sims 2 can live up to expectations, and give as much pleasure and enjoyment as the first Sims series did (and I hope that I’ll be able to play it this weekend if I can manage to prise my younger sister off of the game).
Live an interesting life.
Simply wonderful. What would I do without my Sims
The Sims is possibly the most boring game I have ever played. The first time I bought one, I spent about two hours building an awesome house, filling it with all the latest goods, and that was actually quite fun.
But then when it got to looking after the sims, it was the most boring thing I've ever spent over an hour doing. Ok for the first few days (Sim days) it was interesting, getting a job, making friends, slowly adding to the house.
But then you get into a dayly routine, sim wakes up, eats, does a s**t, showers, goes to work, comes home, eat, s**ts, showers, possibly sees friends and then goes back to bed. It's boring enough doing the same thing day in day out in real life, but in a videa game? Ha!
Sims then worked it's way out my game collection in less than a week.
But then when it got to looking after the sims, it was the most boring thing I've ever spent over an hour doing. Ok for the first few days (Sim days) it was interesting, getting a job, making friends, slowly adding to the house.
But then you get into a dayly routine, sim wakes up, eats, does a s**t, showers, goes to work, comes home, eat, s**ts, showers, possibly sees friends and then goes back to bed. It's boring enough doing the same thing day in day out in real life, but in a videa game? Ha!
Sims then worked it's way out my game collection in less than a week.
Is "THE SIMS" still going?
I really think they ought to drop those expansion pack rubbish, better still destroy the series and make some design a computer, game, it'd be much better.
I really think they ought to drop those expansion pack rubbish, better still destroy the series and make some design a computer, game, it'd be much better.
I liked the Sims at first, it had some genuinely good ideas, it still does yet it doesn't quite lead to an altogether fun game. Eventually I found my self not so much playing a game, as living out a routine. Wake my sim up, Get them to Eat Breakfast, Send them off to work, speed up time until they get back, feed them, clean them, send them to bed the repeat the next day.
There was no point to it at all, the only thing to look forward to was buying a new object with the money you saved from working, while the only challenge came from trying to get promoted at work. It's just like real life, only the Sims made you realise just how boring seemingly everyday tasks where to watch.
And the expansion packs where nothing more than a cheap way for EA to cash in on it's young, gullible fan base, packaging items you could get off the net for free and offering a meagre amount of new addition. Yeah you could call people round for parties, go on holiday even take a visit to downtown areas, but these all ended up the same as the main game, fun at first, then slightly dull.
The Sims isn't a game, it's an experience, and a very monotonous one at that.
There was no point to it at all, the only thing to look forward to was buying a new object with the money you saved from working, while the only challenge came from trying to get promoted at work. It's just like real life, only the Sims made you realise just how boring seemingly everyday tasks where to watch.
And the expansion packs where nothing more than a cheap way for EA to cash in on it's young, gullible fan base, packaging items you could get off the net for free and offering a meagre amount of new addition. Yeah you could call people round for parties, go on holiday even take a visit to downtown areas, but these all ended up the same as the main game, fun at first, then slightly dull.
The Sims isn't a game, it's an experience, and a very monotonous one at that.
I don't share those sentiments about The Sims. I had a crack at it a few times but got bored quite quickly simply because while you can make your sims all happy and fluffy you can't go far the other way. Short of walling them up and having them wee themselves to death, you can't do anything really really evil. You can't turn them into psychopaths and have them offing other sims. Give me Dungeon Keeper over The Sims any day.
No, The Sims is a mollusc of death and vileness attached to our lives, and it must be removed at all costs.
It's dull, it's repetitive, it's ugly, it's boring as f**k, it's just disgusting, it's wrong.
It's dull, it's repetitive, it's ugly, it's boring as f**k, it's just disgusting, it's wrong.
Well, the mighty behemoth that is The Sims bandwagon is about to start rolling along again like a nasty case of SARS in a poor Eastern country. The Sims 2 arrives in shops today, and this post is a kind of tribute I guess, to one of the most enjoyable, innovative and accessible games series around.
The Sims is without a doubt one of the biggest franchises in gaming history now, and even though it is a much derided game amongst the snobbish hardcore gaming elite, who see it as a pointless casual gamers virtual dollhouse which the evil suits at EA use to squeeze their loyal fans for mucho greenbacks, I love it. I’m now going to cast my mind back to the very beginning of The Sims, what makes it so great and why I love it, even though there is plenty of cynicism and resentment regarding this franchise.
When I bought the first Sims title, it was back in the day when PC games came in those needlessly large cardboard boxes, even though the actual games were only house in regular CD cases (I never really found out why that was).
I was already a huge fan of developer Maxis’ previous work with the Sim City series, having enjoyed the original SNES version and Sim City 2000 on the PSone, and the idea behind The Sims sounded intriguing; you control a virtual person/family, and do everyday normal stuff. The premise sounded, and still does sound, highly boring to some people, but the monotony of everyday normal life was something not really seen in a video game before. We’ve controlled giant fighting robots defending the galaxy, we’ve even controlled ninjas and beefy street fighters, but normal people doing normal stuff at home? I’d never work…would it?
I strolled into my crappy local branch of Dixons (the only local place I could buy games at the time without having to travel to a different town) and bought The Sims and the first expansion pack Livin’ it up in a double pack offer.
I took it home, installed it and when starting to play found that I was being eagerly watched by my younger siblings, after all, it was a game they were also very interested in, because of the family friendly nature of the title.
I started off by having a look at the tutorial mode, and then decided to make a copy of myself and let him live his virtual life, with me being the voyeuristic god watching on. I would eventually play this character from the very beginning of my Sims life right until I eventually stopped playing the original series.
One of the most enjoyable aspects of The Sims is without a doubt the ability to design your house, both exterior and interiors, and though it seems fairly unsophisticated and restrictive now compared to The Sims 2, it was fantastic fun at the time. When you eventually built up enough cash (without using dirty underhand cheats) to design and build your own little virtual dream house. My character had slaved away hard in his virtual life, finding time to converse with friends and neighbours, doing plenty of bodybuilding and having a career in the medical sector, working his way up from humble low level hospital jobs to being the very top of the medical profession, and over time I also went from business mailroom clerk to CEO, humble waiter to superstar, security guard to Captain Hero and even a pickpocket to a criminal mastermind.
After working hard in various different sectors, I convinced my beefy neighbour friend Julius Benedict (named after Arnie’s character in Twins because he looked like Arnie) to move in with me, in a purely financial arrangement of course. We eventually moved from my original house to the best mansion in neighbourhood 1. I changed it quite radically, turning it into the ultimate dream home, with elegant interiors that would make Larry Llewelyn-Bowen weep into his overly large shirt cuffs and a beautiful landscaped garden with large pool. Julius and I lived like kings in our mansion, lording it over all the other neighbours.
I eventually had an affair with beardy Bob Newbie’s wife Betty, married her and spend lots of my time being a part-time bum, part-time gnome maker. At night I’d snuggle up to the hottest chick in the neighbourhood and occasional bag myself a burglar. After seeing the trouble that the kids were in other houses, I decided against bothering with having a kid of my own.
Eventually, EA kindly decided to provide us with extra Sims content in the form of expansion packs; there was House Party, which added loads of new items but also gave extra scope for having fun parties. Hot Date allowed your Sims to go downtown and find lurve. On Holiday let you go…on holiday, to parks, beach resorts or snow-covered lands. Unleashed let you own a variety of pets and gave you exciting extra gardening-based gameplay. Superstar introduced celebrities into the game, and let you become a superstar yourself. Lastly, starting to scrape the barrel, we had Makin’ Magic, which introduced a whole load of weird, wonderful and macabre magical stuff.
There were a lot of expansion packs for this game, that is undeniable, and they did start to lose freshness after a while, but the first few add-on packs were tremendous fun, letting your Sims do a huge amount of extra stuff, and giving you extra scope in your house designing plans. They weaved a few extra threads in this tapestry of gaming fun.
For all the fun and enjoyment The Sims was for me, it wasn’t all good. Characters had to go to the toilet a bit too often for my liking, and maintaining friendships got a little tedious after a while (if you got your friendship rating up to 100 it should have stayed at 100 forever, meaning your friendship is solid and unbreakable). The time spent relieving your bladder, washing your hands, preparing and eating food, and waiting for friends to come by was rather tiresome and it did take some of the fun out of the game. Your character would wake up in the morning, he’d have a pooh, have a shower, prepare breakfast, eat breakfast, then have to leave half his breakfast because the carpool had arrived, then he’d be off to work for many hours, get home and be too tired to do anything else. Repeat for a few days and you can see where the critics are coming from.
Despite the downsides, The Sims didn’t just provide fun for me, no, it provided a lot of fun for other people in my household as well; my brothers and sisters enjoyed the game immensely, my elder brother sitting up to ungodly hours playing with his family and their gaudy house which looked like it came straight from one of those obscure American sitcoms. My youngest sister annoyed everyone else by constantly creating new households and using cheats all the time, but she has had lots of fun on The Sims, and has been awaiting the release of the sequel like the coming of a new messiah. She is proof of how accessible The Sims really is; she was in the infant school stage when playing The Sims for the first time, and gradually became better at the game and has been a fan of it ever since.
So why do people love The Sims so much? How has it lasted for so long? It’s an endearing game that’s for sure, as unlike most other games, it is a highly personal game, with you controlling the destiny of your own virtual self. You could play the game as you saw fit, play it your way. Your Sims could be a mirror for your own personality, or it could be the exact opposite, and you also don’t really need any gaming skill to enjoy it, it’s not overly complicated or mentally demanding.
The house designing element was fun, and I also enjoyed the humour to the game, the Simlish speaking and singing, and the various character interactions (juggling, cheering up sad people with a glove puppet, fighting, rough-house etc etc).
It has been a very Marmite-esque title as people would say; people who hate The Sims hate it with a cynical passion, but those who love The Sims really enjoy the game. I was pleased to be part of The Sims experience from nearly the very beginning, seeing my own Sim family grow and develop, and seeing a franchise grow and develop also.
So, congratulations EA and Maxis I raise a glass to you in celebration of a fine venture, and I hope The Sims 2 can live up to expectations, and give as much pleasure and enjoyment as the first Sims series did (and I hope that I’ll be able to play it this weekend if I can manage to prise my younger sister off of the game).
The Sims is without a doubt one of the biggest franchises in gaming history now, and even though it is a much derided game amongst the snobbish hardcore gaming elite, who see it as a pointless casual gamers virtual dollhouse which the evil suits at EA use to squeeze their loyal fans for mucho greenbacks, I love it. I’m now going to cast my mind back to the very beginning of The Sims, what makes it so great and why I love it, even though there is plenty of cynicism and resentment regarding this franchise.
When I bought the first Sims title, it was back in the day when PC games came in those needlessly large cardboard boxes, even though the actual games were only house in regular CD cases (I never really found out why that was).
I was already a huge fan of developer Maxis’ previous work with the Sim City series, having enjoyed the original SNES version and Sim City 2000 on the PSone, and the idea behind The Sims sounded intriguing; you control a virtual person/family, and do everyday normal stuff. The premise sounded, and still does sound, highly boring to some people, but the monotony of everyday normal life was something not really seen in a video game before. We’ve controlled giant fighting robots defending the galaxy, we’ve even controlled ninjas and beefy street fighters, but normal people doing normal stuff at home? I’d never work…would it?
I strolled into my crappy local branch of Dixons (the only local place I could buy games at the time without having to travel to a different town) and bought The Sims and the first expansion pack Livin’ it up in a double pack offer.
I took it home, installed it and when starting to play found that I was being eagerly watched by my younger siblings, after all, it was a game they were also very interested in, because of the family friendly nature of the title.
I started off by having a look at the tutorial mode, and then decided to make a copy of myself and let him live his virtual life, with me being the voyeuristic god watching on. I would eventually play this character from the very beginning of my Sims life right until I eventually stopped playing the original series.
One of the most enjoyable aspects of The Sims is without a doubt the ability to design your house, both exterior and interiors, and though it seems fairly unsophisticated and restrictive now compared to The Sims 2, it was fantastic fun at the time. When you eventually built up enough cash (without using dirty underhand cheats) to design and build your own little virtual dream house. My character had slaved away hard in his virtual life, finding time to converse with friends and neighbours, doing plenty of bodybuilding and having a career in the medical sector, working his way up from humble low level hospital jobs to being the very top of the medical profession, and over time I also went from business mailroom clerk to CEO, humble waiter to superstar, security guard to Captain Hero and even a pickpocket to a criminal mastermind.
After working hard in various different sectors, I convinced my beefy neighbour friend Julius Benedict (named after Arnie’s character in Twins because he looked like Arnie) to move in with me, in a purely financial arrangement of course. We eventually moved from my original house to the best mansion in neighbourhood 1. I changed it quite radically, turning it into the ultimate dream home, with elegant interiors that would make Larry Llewelyn-Bowen weep into his overly large shirt cuffs and a beautiful landscaped garden with large pool. Julius and I lived like kings in our mansion, lording it over all the other neighbours.
I eventually had an affair with beardy Bob Newbie’s wife Betty, married her and spend lots of my time being a part-time bum, part-time gnome maker. At night I’d snuggle up to the hottest chick in the neighbourhood and occasional bag myself a burglar. After seeing the trouble that the kids were in other houses, I decided against bothering with having a kid of my own.
Eventually, EA kindly decided to provide us with extra Sims content in the form of expansion packs; there was House Party, which added loads of new items but also gave extra scope for having fun parties. Hot Date allowed your Sims to go downtown and find lurve. On Holiday let you go…on holiday, to parks, beach resorts or snow-covered lands. Unleashed let you own a variety of pets and gave you exciting extra gardening-based gameplay. Superstar introduced celebrities into the game, and let you become a superstar yourself. Lastly, starting to scrape the barrel, we had Makin’ Magic, which introduced a whole load of weird, wonderful and macabre magical stuff.
There were a lot of expansion packs for this game, that is undeniable, and they did start to lose freshness after a while, but the first few add-on packs were tremendous fun, letting your Sims do a huge amount of extra stuff, and giving you extra scope in your house designing plans. They weaved a few extra threads in this tapestry of gaming fun.
For all the fun and enjoyment The Sims was for me, it wasn’t all good. Characters had to go to the toilet a bit too often for my liking, and maintaining friendships got a little tedious after a while (if you got your friendship rating up to 100 it should have stayed at 100 forever, meaning your friendship is solid and unbreakable). The time spent relieving your bladder, washing your hands, preparing and eating food, and waiting for friends to come by was rather tiresome and it did take some of the fun out of the game. Your character would wake up in the morning, he’d have a pooh, have a shower, prepare breakfast, eat breakfast, then have to leave half his breakfast because the carpool had arrived, then he’d be off to work for many hours, get home and be too tired to do anything else. Repeat for a few days and you can see where the critics are coming from.
Despite the downsides, The Sims didn’t just provide fun for me, no, it provided a lot of fun for other people in my household as well; my brothers and sisters enjoyed the game immensely, my elder brother sitting up to ungodly hours playing with his family and their gaudy house which looked like it came straight from one of those obscure American sitcoms. My youngest sister annoyed everyone else by constantly creating new households and using cheats all the time, but she has had lots of fun on The Sims, and has been awaiting the release of the sequel like the coming of a new messiah. She is proof of how accessible The Sims really is; she was in the infant school stage when playing The Sims for the first time, and gradually became better at the game and has been a fan of it ever since.
So why do people love The Sims so much? How has it lasted for so long? It’s an endearing game that’s for sure, as unlike most other games, it is a highly personal game, with you controlling the destiny of your own virtual self. You could play the game as you saw fit, play it your way. Your Sims could be a mirror for your own personality, or it could be the exact opposite, and you also don’t really need any gaming skill to enjoy it, it’s not overly complicated or mentally demanding.
The house designing element was fun, and I also enjoyed the humour to the game, the Simlish speaking and singing, and the various character interactions (juggling, cheering up sad people with a glove puppet, fighting, rough-house etc etc).
It has been a very Marmite-esque title as people would say; people who hate The Sims hate it with a cynical passion, but those who love The Sims really enjoy the game. I was pleased to be part of The Sims experience from nearly the very beginning, seeing my own Sim family grow and develop, and seeing a franchise grow and develop also.
So, congratulations EA and Maxis I raise a glass to you in celebration of a fine venture, and I hope The Sims 2 can live up to expectations, and give as much pleasure and enjoyment as the first Sims series did (and I hope that I’ll be able to play it this weekend if I can manage to prise my younger sister off of the game).