Die Sims (Deluxe Edition) für Windows

With 14 other reviews to date it may seem that the Sims needs no more epinions made. However, no-one seems to have really given it a good slagging off, so here goes

Don t get me wrong, on first appearances this is a gem of a game. The interface, graphics, help system and general slick finishing are all there in spades this is a game that s had lot of work put into it. Indeed, I initially spent a very happy week introducing my little pretend people to eachother and making sure they didn t wet themselves. Problem is, there s not much else to do apart from that.

Obviously I d be lying if I claimed I didn t know what I was getting myself into I ve played simulations before, and I m quite aware that the point is there is no point, or at least, no aim or goal. However with the sims this became apparent a lot earlier than I d have hoped for. But enough of that for now first I ll look at what was good

The game centres around a virtual neighbourhood you can have as many of these as you want. Initially your neighbourhood starts off with a few houses in it and a couple of families. This let s you get to grips with the basics trying to cope with these pre-designed households before you make your own. Each house acts as it s own save game in that, when you save, the household that you have been playing is frozen, but no other houses are affected (not much anyway I ll cover that later) as you can t take your sims out of their own plot of land. There s also 3 preset households that you can move in to any of the empty houses in the neighbourhood. Of course the most fun is to be had when you create your own

Which is easy thanks to the endless amount of customisation options built into the game new sims can be created from a pre-set bank of heads and bodies, or skinned by hand, including the option to add your own face to a sim from a photo. As with other games this has lead to a lively web presence of skins for just about anyone you can think of. You can then move your newly created personal-sim in to a custom house using the build-house tool again, fully customisable down to carpets, wallpaper and roof tiles the dragable interface is pretty darn instinctive as well - a testament to the amount of beta testing this game must have gone through.

So, once you ve got your pretend family in their pretend house with their pretend starting money ( simoleans of all things) you can start to buy them stuff. This part is pretty fun, you can buy them all the cool stuff you want yourself, but could never afford there s just about everything you could think of available, apart from washing machines. Apparently sims don t need to wash their clothes. Apart from that there s everything from luxury items like guitars, grand pianos, works of art, rugs, TV s, to the basics like a shower, a fridge and a toilet. Just about everything can be interacted with once you ve bought it, in a variety of ways.

The next step is to start your sims living, or as close to it as they can get. Time passes pretty fast in sim-city, about a day in ten minutes at regular speed (thankfully the game can be sped up to about 10x, useful when your sim is asleep or at work). Each character in the household can be controlled separately, and when you re controlling one of them, the rest find their own way around using a combination of their need meters (constantly decreasing bars representing satisfaction in different areas of life, e.g. hygiene, hunger, comfort etc.) and their personality (individual scores in areas such as niceness, tidiness, activeness ). They re pretty autonomous but your better off telling them what to do yourself as you can imagine, a sloppy sim left to their own devices will drop rubbish everywhere which in turn will depress the heck out of your tidy sims

So straight away you re running around making sure they re clean, have eaten, have slept, don t need the toilet, all the stuff you should be doing for yourself, and that s before you ve even worried about either their social lives or career. The social aspect of the game is one of the trickiest and in my opinion, most frustrating. The sims can all interact with eachother you can have sims in the same house talk to eachother (which keeps them happy to a degree) or to other sims in the neighbourhood . This literally means that any other saved-game-houses in the neighbourhood with sims in could send them visiting or just walk them past your house. So, if you want your family to have more friends, you ll have to move more people into the neighbourhood. Once you start to interact with another sim you e immediately on the track to friendship which uses a negative 100 to positive 100 scale. After +50, a sim is considered a family friend . Once you know another sim, your sim can ring them on the phone (assuming both households have one) and either chat to them or invite them over. The biggest problem with this is that, once contact has been made with another sim, they will no longer pop round at random, the only way to get them to your house is to ring them and invite them over (your sims can t leave their property remember?). Unfortunately if the sim isn t already considered a friend, they won t come over. Which means you ll never talk to them, and they ll never become a friend. Can anyone say Catch 22?

Assuming your sim does make a few buddies in the neighbourhood, and he can keep from wetting himself, that s not where your problems end the bills will start rolling in and you ll be running out of money to pay them. This is where a job comes in. Your sim can get a job from a newspaper or from the internet theres 15 different careers they can end up with (they re all quite fun) and your sim starts on the bottom of the ladder. For instance the rock star career path starts you as a busker, and the actor career path starts you as a waitress. Your Sim get s to work by getting to the car every morning (car pool apparently though your own sim doesn t appear to drive). Each job has complimentary pay scales and working hours/times. This allows for some pretty realistic results when you get a working couple, one on night shifts the other on day they ll have lost touch with eachother in no time and soon they won t even sleep in the same bed together it s nights on the couch for someone! Pretty realistic stuff. Your sim gets promoted promoted within each career path by staying happy, making more friends (?) and improving their abilities using appropriate objects (e.g. multigym enhances body skill, reading a book makes you a better mechanic etc.)

And that s where the cycle begins you keep your sims alive, happy, social and employed you earn some money, buy them better stuff, move in to a bigger house, get a pool, have a baby, have an affair, whatever you want. And you simultaneously run all the houses in the neighbourhood experimenting with what happens when you put 4 untidy students into a bungalow together , this woman has fostered 12 kids, how will she cope , this guys a rich bachelor, how many girls can he have on the go at the same time . That sort of thing. And that s before you ve gotten involved with the endless expansion packs taking them on dates, getting them pets, sending them on holiday (though this version of the game does include livin large play rock paper scissors with death, conjure up a genie, make a Frankenstein with your chemistry et )

And it s fun to a degree. Until you realise that because you ve spent the last four hours keeping you sim fed and stopped him wetting himself, you yourself are nor starving to death and sitting in your own waste. With no friends. In a way saying the game is addictive is far from an insult but personally, I need a game with a bit of a goal, something to work towards. With my first household I saw it as a competition. I got my guy a good job and kept him happy. Problem was, I didn t play it as a ooh, how funny, look what the little chaps doing now sort of thing instead the game allows you to stack up tasks (i.e. toilet, eat, shower, go to work, socialise, sleep, repeat ) and play it on 10x speed. So I d stack up a few tasks, let 12 hours whiz by, then do the same. In the end he had a great house, loads of money, but I was bored stiff.

The fun of the animations and the unpredictability wear off pretty fast once you realise it s a game and it s run by a bunch of numbers same as all the rest. I can see why people are buying expansion packs in their droves it s the only way to keep any interest in the game alive.

Oh, and for the record, I was running this on a 2.4 mhz athlon, with 256mb ram and 30gb of hard drive and I was still getting slowdown at 1024x768.

My advice go speak to your real friends, get some real food down your neck, get a real really well paid job.

And for god s sake, don t forget to really go to the toilet.