Sims Nieuws

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.

This week we have Five New Skins and Four New Wall Lights -- all created by your friendly Maxis Artists.

• Download Skin Pack One (760 Kb)
• Download Wall Lights (157 Kb)

Our new contest is up and running! The theme: Valentine's Day. Your mission: Create a romantic couple, by February 15.

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The Sims in the San Francisco Chronicle ... "The Sims lets control freaks run characters' everyday lives."

San Francisco Chronicle

Playing Virtual God

The Sims lets control freaks run characters' everyday lives
Neva Chonin, Chronicle Staff Critic

You're having an affair with the handsome married guy down the block. While your husband is napping, you invite lover-boy over for a tryst. Hubby unexpectedly wakes up and joins the party. You slip away for two tiny minutes to freshen up, and when you return, Hubby and boyfriend are in each other's arms with Tchaikovsky's love theme from ``Romeo and Juliet'' blaring in accompaniment. A new daytime melodrama? No, a new video game. Correction: the most addictive video game to come along since Everquest turned thousands of Net heads into digital junkies. There are already a slew of Web sites honoring the Sims, and it only reached stores yesterday.

The Sims, a "domestic strategy" game from SimCity creator Will Wright is set to become one of the year's biggest hits, not by focusing on hyperfantasy but by simulating the vagaries of our own so-called lives. In the Sims, the player plays God over a neighborhood of jabbering little people, guiding them through their careers, setting up their families and circles of friends, instigating romances and generally making them as crazed or wholesome as he or she wishes. You can't change the world around the Sims -- the newspaper arrives every day and bills must be paid -- but you control how effectively the characters cope.

Sounds fun, sure. But sometimes playing God can bring out the worst in a player: In three games -- each individual household in the Sims neighborhood constitutes a game -- this reviewer toasted three family members in a grease fire, then evicted the surviving member and bulldozed the house; inspired a character's nervous breakdown; and had two kids taken away by child welfare authorities. Yes, responsible omnipotence takes practice. Fortu nately, in the Sims, there are many opportunities to get it right. Players can either choose existing Sims characters or create their own. Savvy gamers can even download images of their own family and friends to use as character "skins." Sims are assigned points in five categories (neat, outgoing, active, playful and nice -- 1 point for neat and you've created a slob, 10 a clean freak) to determine their personalities. The options are more varied than they sound, and in combination can create anything from an anti-social bachelor who works as a lab test subject to a family of eight ranging from schoolkids to astronauts and thieves. There are 10 career paths from which to choose. Daily life in Sims land is much like that in the real world. First characters have to deal with hassles such as bills and cleaning. Then, as they learn a few things and clamber up the career ladder, they can hire maids and gardeners to look after some of the mundane details while they devote themselves to buying more merchandise, adding onto the house (or buying a new one) and enjoying new friendships and relationships. These are all maneuvers the player decides for them, unless the "free will" toggle is used. But where's the fun in letting them make their own choices? The game has a point-and-click interface in which players click on a newspaper to find a job, click the refrigerator to grab a snack and so forth. Action is viewed from several zoomed-in perspectives.

There are a couple of technical downers. The game has 2-D, tile-based graphics that are functional but visually dull and encour age claustrophobia after 10 hours inside one household. Sadly, characters leave home only to go to work and can't go out and play. Friends come to them and are summoned by telephone. And as in the non-Sim world, nasty stuff can happen. Fires and fights break out. Thieves steal televisions. Wrong numbers wake up the household at 3 a.m. Spouses have affairs with other spouses. Kids go bad. Such is life. Some tips for a smoother game:

• Pay bills promptly, or those precious possessions will be repossessed.
• If the baby cries, feed it fast. Child welfare agencies repossess, too.
• The more material possessions Sims have, the happier they are. Blow the nest egg and buy the household a TV and a stereo. For a quick mood fix and a great way to make friends, splurge on a hot tub.
• Always flush the toilet. Plumbing clogs easily, and things get mighty ugly mighty fast.
• Be sure to provide Sims with fun things to do that complement their personalities. A quiet egghead will probably appreciate a well-stocked bookshelf more than a basketball hoop.
• There are no weekends in this game, but days off from work are fine as long as they don't happen two days in a row. A final word of caution: The power to control and shape the lives of virtual beings is a heady thing. When you find yourself inadvertently trying to click on your co-workers to make them take a bath, it's time to put aside the Sims for a while and take up something less habit-forming, like television.

This article appeared on page B - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle.