LADYDRAGON.COM - The Sims

Ever wanted to have a virtual family? That is just what this new Sim game is all about. Maxis the makers of great titles such as Sim City lets you create your own family and manage their existence.

When you start you can create a family or play one already made for you. There are tons of options so you can make a lot of variation. You get to choose about their appearances and personalities.

Now you need somewhere that they can sleep, you can either buy an existing house or build yourself one from bottom to top. You can also buy furniture such as TV sets, couchs, plants or even a fancy cappuccino machine. All the furniture has statistic that affects your family's fun, comfort and room factor. An un expensive couch will bring them less comfort than a expensive deluxe one.

Throw a Barbecue together

That is what the game is about to keep your Sims happy. Of course being happy is expensive so they have to work. With better knowledge you will get better jobs and better jobs gives you more money. Your characters must do various things to get better skills and earn a promotion or find a new job in the daily paper.

Keeping them alive is another task of yours, you have to feed them, clean them and have them learn new cooking skills so they do not set the house on fire.

You actually have to do all the things a normal human would do, bath, toilet with hand washing and tooth brushing included.

What life would be complete without relationships... Neighbors will come to visit you and they can get to be your friends or enemy depending on the actions you have taken. If you are a bachelor do not expect to flirt with two Sims at the same time, it would make quite a scene.

Friends will call you, visit you give gifts and love may come your way. Kissing, hugging, teasing, joking, complimenting, flirting or asking them to leave, again everything is there. You may even propose and by luck you may get a lucky call to ask you if you want a Sim-baby.

Maxis's team has a lot of experience in gaming and it shows, everything is simple and feels intuitive.

Visit neighbors

Fall in love

There is many actions but everything is simplified by easy mouse click. There is also a tutorial in case you do not feel ready to start from scratch.

The Sims is not without its flaws, the characters often get stuck in the furniture so if you have many Sims you have to always check for them so they do not get stuck for a day and pee on themselves or die. Also the furniture and house pieces although abundant are limited to multiple variation of the same thing and many things like a kitchen table take too much space in a normal house.

A day does not last long and going to the toilet and washing your hands can take up to 25-30 minutes. The biggest problem of this game is that after a month or two of playing you will realize that you can do all this with your own hands in your own house.

But, the month or two you will play will get you completely hooked, a lot more than most of the other games. You may even come to a point where you neglect your own life to take care of your little virtual family.

Graphically, the game could not look better for what it is. There are plenty of small details you can look at with the zoom function. It uses an interface that is similar to the one seen in Sim City 3000.

Take care of your plants

The sounds are a lot of fun, especially the voice bits. All the sounds are clean and overall pretty good. You can even use your Mp3 to make them play on the house radio and have your Sims dance to it.

Although the characters tracking is sometimes bad the controls are intuitive and responsive. All the actions you can do are at the tip of your mouse so it really is not complicated in any way nor situation. Anyone can enjoy it even people who are not familiar with pc games of course it does require some common cense.

The Sims brings us something never seen before. This game is time consuming goodness that, even with its flaws could have never been handled better than Maxis did. The Sims will be on top of Sim games for a long time.

Companies

Developer
Maxis

Publisher
Electronic Arts

Category
Life Simulation - Strategy

Notes

Originality: 100%
Gameplay: 88%
Interest: 96%
Graphic: 83%
Control: 97%
Sound: 91%

TOTAL:93%

Requirements

Operation System
Windows 95-98

Processor
233 MHz Pentium

Memory
32 RAM

Hard Drive
300 MB

CD ROM
4x

Sound Card
Direct X 7 - Compatible

Video Card
800x600 Resolution
2 MB

Input Device
Mouse

Multiplayer
None

Rated by ESRB
"T" Teen

Pierre-Luc Cossette

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