An awful lot of people have been waiting for this game. One poll last year suggested it was the 2nd most anticipated PC game of the year. (If you can’t guess what the first one was then you really need to move out of that cave.) Indeed, Maxis’ game has the promise to be the most involving sim-game so far with its offering of God-like omnipotence. Whether it’s God-like in it’s execution is exactly what the next few paragraphs will tell you...

In The Sims you oversee the life of one or more individuals as they go about the tricky business of living. You build them a house and help them furnish it. You encourage them to train for a career and you help them nurture friendships. You make sure they brush their teeth every day. Let’s get something clear right from the beginning - Quake 3, this isn’t.

Still, having never cared much if a game was macho enough or not, I went ahead and installed The Sims. The moment the CD auto-run kicks in, the familiar Maxis look and sound is immediately obvious with its pastel shades and soft music. Having loaded the game you are presented with a neighbourhood screen that reveals a number of houses of varying cost for your sims to inhabit. At this point you can either pick one of the ready-made families to play with or create your own people. I chose the latter.

The people-creation options allow you to choose a look and personality for your guinea pigs. Old, young, black, white, male or female - the choice is yours. Having given them a body to inhabit, you then have to decide what their soul will be like. This is done RPG-style by giving you 5 character traits and a number of points to fill them with in whatever combination you feel - the traits being Neat, Outgoing, Active, Playful and Nice. Whatever combination you choose will automatically assign them to their nearest star sign. This is presumably supposed to help you reveal what they like and who they’re going to get along with but was useless to me because I can’t tell a Scorpio from a Libra. Nor do I care.

Having done the Frankenstein bit all I needed to do was to choose a place for my sim, named after myself of course, to live and I could begin. A quick glance at the neighbourhood showed a little $10,000 home which I thought would suit my man just fine. So I moved him in. Now all I had to do was to buy him a few essentials and sit back to watch him live his life. Buying items is very simple. You can either choose by category (seating, plumbing, appliances, etc) or by room (bathroom, kitchen, etc). Starting out you can only afford really basic stuff. As long as your sim has somewhere to eat, sleep and shit, they’ll survive. But they won’t be terribly happy about the whole thing.

In order to increase their overall happiness you need to keep an eye on various meters that reveal your sims’ varying states of mind and body. If they’re tired, you’ll know about it. If they need the toilet, you’ll know about that too. Not only are the various meters a good indication of what’s going on but you sim will also let you know how they feel through speech and thought bubbles. Deprive them of sleep, for example, and you should see a red speech bubble with a bed icon inside it. Oh, and they’ll be moaning at the top of their voice too.

Leave them to their own devices and they’ll get around to most of the basic functions but how they go about it will depend largely on their personality. For instance, create a sim that’s fun loving and lazy and they’ll spend most of their time slumped in front of a tv, if you let them. If they’re outgoing and nice, they’ll yearn for the comfort of friends. If you want the little bastards to be beaming happiness you really need to take charge of their life and make sure that all their needs are satisfied.

Money is taken care of by finding a job for your virtual humans. My man went for a career in medicine. (He cares you see.) Once they find a job, you need to train them so that they can increase particular skills and gain a promotion. Training itself is done through interaction with certain objects - sit them in front of a piano for long enough and they’ll improve their creativity, for instance. Once their career is in full swing there is demand for more skills as well as the need to maintain more and more friendships. All this can be very time consuming, seeing that you need to keep them clean, fed and smiling as well. Sim Jazzer went as far as surgeon in his chosen career path. A $700 a day income suited him, and me, just fine.

Friendships play an important part of the game. Sims can fall in love, become jealous of each other, move in with each other and even marry. Although, the way Maxis have treated the tricky subject of divorce and adultery is to completely ignore it. In other words, if one of the sims falls in love with another who’s already married and they move in together, this has no effect on their friendship with the previous partner. In fact, they’re still married to that sim! In effect, you can have a sim that is married to half of the neighbourhood. It’s all mighty strange and I think that Maxis missed a real opportunity here. Why not have rowing couples, adulterers caught in the act and sticky divorces? (For extra fun, invite a couple of people who hate each other over to your place. Watch the evening deteriorate as you flirt with one of them and watch the other seethe.) (The opprotunity for a divorce court hearing and watching your Sims' hard earned house and furnishings lost in the settlement could have made for a potentially challenging aspect, I personally think - ED)

The Sims does work, in a way. It’s certainly different that a lot of games out there. It’s curiously addictive as well. Building your Sims’ home from a hovel to a palace is strangely fun. The problem lies when you’ve got every possible consumer item available and they can go no further in their career. Sure, you can switch careers but this is a weak area as well. Hours, salary and skills demanded change as you rise through the ranks but somehow this seems too little to engage you in the process. Relationships can come and go for your sims but even here’s not quite variety. I kept wishing you could do things like start a fist fight or have your best mate’s girlfriend over the bathtub in the middle of a dinner party. Or get a sim drunk? Or play pranks on people? Or steal things? Anything, as long as it could break all that niceness every once in a while. (Sims Deathmatch - ED)

Overall, I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t enjoyed the Sims. It’s not for everyone and its long-term interest has yet to be seen but it’s different enough to be worth looking at. Myself, I’m waiting for the ‘Adultery and Drunkeness’ add-on pack.

Later,
Jazzer