Direct Hit from DailyRadar.com

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