Taking Control of the Little People

Gamecenter.com said " ... just as in the real world, there isn't enough time in the day to complete everything that needs to be done, so you must be extremely frugal with how your Sims spend their free time."

Gamecenter.com Review

The Sims

CNET Gamecenter Review

By William Harms
(2/10/2000)

The good: Very addictive; the open nature of the game ensures endless playability.
The bad: Reminds you how mundane your life really is; only one neighborhood; can't explore beyond the limits of your property.
The bottom line: This game rocks, end of story.
Multiplayer: N/A
Single player: Excellent
ESRB rating: T (Teen)

Taking its cue from Seinfeld, The Sims is a game about nothing. Oh sure, a lot happens during the course of the game--love is won and lost, houses catch fire, and there is much tomfoolery in the hot tub--but everything that occurs is tinged with the same sense of the absurd that made Seinfeld such a great show. And this absurdness is what makes The Sims tragic, funny, mundane, and one of the most entertaining games I've seen in a long, long time.

Taking Control of the Little People
The latest installment in Maxis's phenomenally popular SimCity series, The Sims, moves the action from city management to people management. You can play the game with either predefined Sims or Sims that you create. If you choose the latter, you decide how they look and what their personalities are (neat, outgoing, friendly, and so on). This determines how easily they'll make friends, whether or not their house is a pigsty, and how fast they'll move up the career ladder.

Once you've created your virtual guinea pigs, you need to get them a place to live. Each Sim "family" (the Sims in one household) is given $20,000, which is used toward the purchase of a house and a few belongings. Naturally, money is pretty scarce, so after you get a roof over your Sims' heads, you need to be pretty tight with your funds and forego the plasma television in favor of a cheaper black-and-white unit. Everything in the house affects the Sims' behavior and happiness in some way, so in the early going your little virtual people are probably miserable.

The real genius behind The Sims is its ability to mirror the real world, while still offering a compelling gameplay experience. To succeed, you must balance a number of factors, such as eating, sleeping, and learning career-building skills, all while making sure you get your Sims out of bed in the morning so they can go to work. And just as in the real world, there isn't enough time in the day to complete everything that needs to be done, so you must be extremely frugal with how your Sims spend their free time.

It's hard to explain in a few words how the game plays, because it sounds extremely simple but actually is exceptionally complex. One day you're cultivating friendships; the next you're recovering from a thief who has stolen all your electronics; still another day, you're trying to improve the mood of your Sims so they will go to work. And although there are some limitations built into the game--your Sims can't become serial killers, for example--you can do pretty much anything.

Building a Life
As with the SimCity games, the interface powering The Sims is a thing of beauty. Accessing the Build and Buy screens is extremely easy, and making the Sims interact with each other and their environment involves nothing more than a couple clicks of the mouse. All the items available for purchase are laid out by room or item type; just click an item to see what it is and how it will affect your Sims' lives.

On the surface, The Sims' graphics don't look as though they are hardware intensive, but don't be fooled--if you want to run this game at its highest resolution, you need a hog of a system. Even at 800-by-600-pixel resolution, scrolling across the screen can be slow and painful, which makes trying to manage multiple Sims frustrating. Still, the graphics are crisp and clear, and bring everything to life. The Sims themselves show off a wide range of animation, making it easy to identify their various moods and when they need something.

The Sims is one of those rare games in which the sound effects actually outshine the graphics. Every action has a corresponding sound, whether it be the whacking of a knife against a cutting board, or the blaring of music from the stereo. The dialogue, which is made up of gibberish, is humorous, especially when your Sims are miserable and trying to get your attention.

Shiny, Happy Sim People
A few annoyances rear up from time to time, which detract a little from the game's charms. Your Sims don't always do what they're told, even when they're completely happy, and they can't perform multiple tasks, such as use the microwave and answer the phone at the same time. Additionally, there is only one neighborhood, and if you want to make more friends, you have to exit out to the neighborhood screen and introduce new people. It would also be nice if your Sims could walk over to a neighbor's house.

As with the SimCity games, The Sims is totally open-ended. Unless you do something truly horrible to your virtual characters--such as place them in a room without a door and starve them to death, or kill them in a house fire--they'll live forever. And because anything can happen and disaster can strike at any time (just as in the real world), the game offers tremendous replayability.

Adding to the game's replayability is the support offered by The Sims' Web site, where you can go to download new families and houses to incorporate into your neighborhood. Editors for faces and for wallpaper and flooring are also available online.

The Sims is a pretty bold experiment--after all, how do you get gamers to buy a game that reminds them of the mediocrity and triviality of their own lives? The experiment pays off because The Sims truly has something for all gamers, whether they want to create an artificial and shallow megastar, or cultivate the biggest slob the world has ever seen. This is one game that people will be talking about for a long time to come.