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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.

Check out IGN.com's review by reporter Ryan Thompson. Ryan says he "uses his godlike authority to create a better, stronger, single male..."

Go to IGN.com

First Impressions: The Sims (PC)

Brief: How does it feel to finally have a life?

After school today I picked up my copy of The Sims from EB. I was extremely excited about this title for a long time, and now I finally had it installed on my hard drive. Before starting a game I made sure to install EB's Official character pack, adding character models resembling a few familiar game personalities. The detail in The Sims is just amazing. I actually had a female Sim get angry at my male Sim for leaving the lid up on the toilet.

The following are the events that led to the fall of the Evils:

1. Kane(from C&C fame)Evil and Notso Evil move into their new home, they are both single men who are roomates.
2. Both find jobs, Kane finds a job as a mascot. Notso finds a job as a Mailroom worker. Movin' on up!
3. Both are promoted at their jobs. They hold a party and invite the people nearby.
4. Kane walks in on the wife of one of the guests in the bathroom. She gets upset and leaves the room. Notso flirts with her and makes her husband upset. Both leave.
5. Kane apparently is jealous at the attention Notso is giving to the local women. Kane becomes depressed and quits going to his job. Two days later he receives a call telling him he is fired.
6. Relations between Notso and Kane breakdown. A fight breaks out in the early morning hours, making Notso late for work. Kane cries, Notso yells.
7. Burgler breaks into the House of the Evils, and steals pretty much everything. Both characters are depressed. Notso misses work. House is a wreck, everyone hates them.
8. Ryan Thompson uses his godlike authority to create a better, stronger, single male and places him 3 blocks from The Evils. Let's hope this goes better.

So you can pretty much see taking on two Sims right from the start is probably a bad idea. I wasn't able to catch most of the events in screenshots because they are so unpredictable. I assure you, this entire story is true. We will have a full review up real soon.

-- Ryan Thompson

The Sims received DailyRadar.com's highest rating: a Direct Hit. Read the full review.

Go to DailyRadar.com

The Sims Review

The idea of a "game" based upon the routine and banal lives of suburbanites sounded perfectly silly to us. Then we started to play it. Four days later, we realized we were hungry...

To say that The Sims is addictive is like saying that sex is "neat-o"; it doesn't quite capture the experience. When we first slid our copies of the game into our CD drives, they remained there -- for days. The ability to control, design, influence and sometimes destroy the lives of little virtual versions of ourselves is mysteriously engrossing. From the earliest tinkering with their personalities to the later bacchanalian orgies of polygamy by the pool, The Sims is our very own desktop melodrama. It's not perfect -- the graphics are dated, the game feels rather static, and climbing the career tree is not very rewarding -- but this is the only game we can remember that everyone in the office wants to play.

Although The Sims doesn't have the epic sweep of games like Civilization or the manic combat of Command and Conquer, it does have the same Siren's call of complete control. Players command every aspect of their SIMs's lives, from whether they get married to when (or if) they take a shower. Wisely there is a "free will" toggle that will allow SIMs to live autonomously, but we found it difficult to keep our hands off the scruff of their necks.

The game begins with a choice between controlling pre-existing SIMs or creating new ones. In the creation mode, players can design both the personality and the look of their cyber sea monkeys. Strangely, the are only five categories to a SIM's personality: neat, outgoing, active, playful and nice. It's not immediately obvious why these five traits were chosen, nor is it clear how "playful" is different from "outgoing." Players assign "points" to each of these traits to determine a SIM's personality, but once created, that SIM cannot be remolded.

Gamers can choose to guide the life of a solitary bachelor or bachelorette, or they can stuff a house with up to 8 different adult or adolescent SIMs. Regardless of how many SIMs they've created, all players begin life with only $20,000, an amount that sadly stays fixed whether a player starts out with one SIM or a whole brood. There are some already built houses in the neighborhood, but the starting cash only provides access to a few, and we found it is a lot more fun to actually build our own places from scratch.

Once the game begins, the possibilities are enormous. A player can construct pathetic couch potatoes that only order pizza and spend too much time playing games on computers they really can't afford. Or create the scheming workaholic that only befriends people to advance a career. Players can live the swinging life and see how many women in the neighborhood will marry them -- the game supports polygamy but not divorce -- or ignore all the neighbors and live a lonely, unsatisfying life.

It's the social simulation that makes the game so fascinating. The first SIM we created was a miserable sod who had to get up every morning at 5:00 AM but always stayed up too late watching TV. The result was that his energy plummeted, his job suffered and he became too depressed to work out or look for a new job. And when his girlfriend started to hook up with another girl on the patio while he played pinball, we would have laughed if the damn thing didn't hit so close to home.

For the upstanding member of the community, there are 10 different career paths to choose. Unfortunately, Maxis hasn't done enough to differentiate those career paths and motivate players to replay the game and try different lives. When we reached the pinnacle of the crime profession, nothing changed. Life was exactly the same even to the absurd point that if we skipped a couple of days of work we could be fired. By whom? It would have been nice if each profession had something special about it, something as simple as a unique FMV sequence or just a few extra objects to buy. As it plays, getting to the top of a career is a bit of a letdown.

Bring Your MP3s
Tired of the canned music pouring from the steroes in The Sims? You can get your SIMs to play your favorite MP3s on any stereo in the game. Just add any .mp3 file to your C:\Program Files\Maxis\The Sims\Music\Stations\... directory. Don't create a new folder, just place the file into any of the four "stations" subdirectories and fire up the game. You can put more than one .mp3 in and have your SIMs switch to the next song to play your whole collection.

There are all sorts of little inconsistencies in The Sims that didn't ruin the experience for us, but did make us itch for more features. The graphics, although functional, are the same dated, 2D, tile-based sprites that we have seen since the original SimCity. A spiffy new 3D engine with a more agile camera would have been welcome, but considering the mammoth task of programming a game like this and the emphasis on expandability, the 2D engine was a safe move.

The game also has a rather static feel to it. Only a few passing moments are spent at the neighborhood screen; the rest of the time is devoted to managing a single household. But there is no way to take a SIM on a walk through the neighborhood or a trip to the mall. They are, instead, marooned in their homes. They only leave to go to work or school and must live by the phone, constantly inviting over other SIMs in order to satisfy the vital "social" requirements. As astonishingly accurate as some parts of the game are, we found this rather artificially limited.

As with other SIM projects, whether Cities or Theme Parks, we found seeing progress represented visually is as addictive as ever. The building mode is well done, and given the possibility of user-made skins and objects, there will no doubt be a massive web community to support new features. We were constantly fiddling with our houses, expanding the pool, upgrading the sofa or trying new tile in the kitchen. Days before we were debating Unreal Tournament versus Quake 3. Now we bicker over the basic tenets of feng shui. And the addition of a scrap book and web page creator for the virtual family is a small, but nice, touch.

The Sims may not be for everyone. Players who don't care for micro -management will undoubtedly tire of telling Timmy when to go to the bathroom, but Maxis is betting that most of us are narcissistic control freaks. And given the way we toss Timmy around like a rag doll, they just might win that bet.

- Jim Preston