When the eroyalties rate for computer game reviews dropped to one cent per view I swore I’d never write another one. BUT I couldn’t resist sharing this game with you and will therefore try to capture the spirit of The SIMS in return for the $1.23 I’ll ultimately earn.

If you were bored by SimCity (and if the low number of hits on my review of SimCity are any indication-- most of you were!)--- you will be pleasantly surprised by The SIMS! This is an entirely different perspective - it’s MICROeconomics versus MACROeconomics. If you’re not in the 80% of the members who just clicked the Back button – thanks for staying and I’ll explain…

While the SimCity series focuses on the big picture (maintaining an entire city), The SIMS allows you to zero in on the trials and tribulations of maintaining a single household. For the 10% of those readers who didn’t just click Back while thinking “I hate maintaining my own household- why would I want to maintain someone else’s?”- I appreciate that you’re willing to learn more and I will now tell the 6 of you why you’ll love this game.

SIM stands for SIMulated and that’s the whole concept of this game---you create and control simulated people (and in many cases, stimulated people -more on that later). You start by deciding whether you want to create a single individual or an entire family for your first household (you can make more at any time as you become adept at mastering the many demands each additional SIM places on your time and attention.)

Your first decision in building a SIM is whether to create a male or a female. The next step is to choose whether your little Frankenstein will be an adult or a child. Then it gets really interesting because you get to choose among dozens of heads (ranging from movie-star-handsome to Joe-Average to ugly-degenerate.) Now you must select a body upon which to place your new SIM’s head – the choices include bodies clothed in elegant evening wear, casual chic, comfortable grunge, outlaw biker leathers, sexy halter and hot pants (haven’t tried this on a male SIM yet), and many more interesting ‘skins’. Speaking of skin, you also have the opportunity to adjust the lightness or darkness of your SIM – no discrimination in this neighborhood! All the SIMS I’ve given birth to so far have been modeled after myself, my friends, my neighbors, and my family. You also name each new SIM --- I name them after the real people they represent which adds greatly to my pleasure when ‘Hard-to-Please’ gets to climb into the hot-tub with ‘Sexy Sheila”, for example. Believe me, my SIM alter-ego sees twice the action the real Hard to Please sees!

Now you have to develop a personality (not to be confused with “Developing an Epinions Personality- that was my prior review). You simply assign values to various aspects of your SIM’s personality, such as Neat/Messy, Outgoing/Introverted, Active/Lazy, Playful/Serious, Nice/Mean. Once again, I try to match these characteristics to the real person I’m replicating – thus my SIM boss is dirty, paranoid, lazy, and very rude. (And NEVER wrong!) Of course, part of the fun is putting exact opposites in the same house and watching the sparks fly. For instance, when the wife is a neatness freak and the husband is a lazy slob, you’ll see her do things to him that you can only fantasize about in real life!

While I often wonder if some of my SIM’s real life counterparts have souls – every SIM does in fact have one. They each have many moods as a result of the situations occurring in their lives, filtered through the composite of their personalities. SIMS are motivated by their needs (just like us) and you must insure that their needs are met or you will have an unhappy SIM. It is easy to monitor their needs through a simple click which graphically depicts their state of Hunger, Comfort, Hygiene, Bladder, Energy, Fun, Social, etc.. Call me cruel, but I never let my SIM boss use the toilet – I derive a certain satisfaction from seeing him hop around holding his crotch until he eventually is forced to relieve himself in his pants (they were already dirty anyway).

Now your SIM (or SIMs) needs a home. Your SIM has a starting bank account with which to either purchase an existing home or build a new one. While there are many spacious mansions in some of the better neighborhoods, you’ll have to earn your way to that side of town. For now, you’ll have to make do with a basic starter house. To describe the nearly infinite choices you have in making a home would require a ten thousand word essay I’m not prepared to write (for $1.23 at least!) You choose everything from the wallpaper to the carpeting, as well as the furniture, electronics, bushes, lamps, hot-tubs, pools, terrain, and a seemingly endless multitude of items that we possess in real life. Keep in mind that you aren’t exactly rich at this point so you may have to decide between a big-screen t.v. and a refrigerator. (Of course, I chose the t.v. for Hard to Please). Then you arrange everything in any way you desire in your new home. (My boss keeps tripping over the coffee table placed strategically in front of his bedroom door- perhaps I’ll move it when I’m not so busy carrying out impossible tasks).

Speaking of bosses, your SIM will need to get a job- there’s no welfare system in this neighborhood. You can direct your SIM out to the front yard to pick up the newspaper and choose from the want ads or if you purchased a computer for your SIM, they can surf the net to find an opening for which they’re qualified. Yes, your SIM has the potential for specific skills and it’s up to you to help develop them. They can read mechanical books from the bookshelf to increase their talents for auto-repair or they can work out on the exercise machine to become a better candidate for a laborer. Once your SIM has been hired, you will be instructed as to what time the carpool arrives each morning. If your SIM oversleeps and misses work two days in a row, he or she is fired! For some reason, my SIM boss’s alarm rarely went off on time (did I ‘forget’ to plug it in?) and he has subsequently lost job after job, eventually ran out of money and died a horrible death by starvation.

Through the course of your SIM’s days and nights, they will have the opportunity to interact with many others. You never know when your arrogant neighbor will pay a visit or a burglar will climb through your bedroom window or the maid will tire of your excuses for not paying her. It is through your control of these random interactions that you will develop friends and enemies. Will you decide to insult the mailman or tickle the pizza delivery man or scare the paperboy? It’s up to you- but remember that your SIM must deal with the consequences of their actions.

There are many, many aspects of the game that I am leaving out – in order to do my part in saving valuable ‘epinions’ server space, I will omit much of what you, the player can control and begin wrapping up this review.

The graphics in this game are superb. The SIMs move realistically and fluidly no matter what they are doing. Whether they are snoring on the couch or feeding their fish, they move smoothly and believably. You control your view of their life by zooming in or out and rotating the screen view. My friends all ask the same question about the game so I assume you are wondering too. No, you don’t get to see frontal nudity when your SIM uses the bathroom, changes into pajamas, takes a shower or has sex. At the moment of truth, your SIM will display those strategically-placed fuzzy squares I described in my Jerry Springer review.

The sounds in the game are second-to-none. When they chop vegetables, you hear the knife slicing through the carrots, when they forget to take out the garbage you hear the flies buzzing around the mess, when you don’t let them use the toilet you hear their groans as their bladders fill. Subsequently, the game requires quite a bit of space on your computer so you may want to read the system requirements on the box before purchasing it.

The reason I am not rating The SIMS with five stars is because it takes a lot of work. I know some people who instinctively know what to do and when to do it, but I am not one of them. I find that I have to constantly refer to my manual or use the on-screen help window to maintain my SIMs. To be fair, I have only played the game a few times and it gets easier each time, but I am more of the joystick type and The SIMS sometimes seems more like a job than a game.

I will end with a summary of Hard-to-Please-Sim’s first week of life. He had a pretty nice pad and a maid and was happy to live on nothing but pizza deliveries for the first few days. But he refused to get a job and couldn’t afford the maid so the pizza cartons and potato chip bags began to pile up on the kitchen floor where he tossed them. When Sexy Sheila from next door came over, he took her in through the backdoor to avoid the mess and impressed her with his kick-ass stereo system. They danced to some hard rock and then he switched over to jazz and slowed things down a bit. When he felt the time was right, he put on the moves. Just like the real life Hard-to-Please, he has no sense of timing and was slapped hard across the face, whereupon he urinated all over the couch. After Sheila stormed out, he decided to cook up a little comfort food, but the stove caught the pile of pizza boxes on fire. As the flames spread, I hoped he would pee on the flames, but I guess he had pretty much used up his ‘extinguisher’ on the couch. By the time I figured out how to get Hard-to-Please to call the fire department, it was too late. The kitchen was engulfed in flames, the couch was ruined and Sheila would never speak to him again. It was at this point that the real (and exhausted Hard-to-Please) went to bed… Game over!




Recommended: Yes