Slashdot Mirror
Greatest Games - The Sims
Gamespot has another article in its continuing series on 'The Greatest Games of All Time'. This time they profile The Sims, the Will Wright PC classic. From the article: "While The Sims was certainly revolutionary, it wasn't simply the revolution that makes it one of the greatest games of all time. Like all truly great games, it is the timeless and continually entertaining gameplay that makes The Sims so worthwhile. And while in the years since its release there have been many more versions to choose from, there's something quite heartwarming and familiar about the original game and its very specific choices, the sublime stainless steel refrigerator, the Henry Moore-esque statue, and that handy dandy little burglar alarm."
That found the Sims to be totally boring? After about 10 minutes of playing it, I realized that you could build walls around the people, and kill them. That was the highlight of the game. If I want to worry about being late for work, making dinner, cleaning up, excercising, etc..., I'll just quit playing and go on with my life. Isn't the point of playing a game like that to get away from worrying about things like that?
...the kitchens set on fire and all the exits suddenly missing, the swimming pools with all the ladders suddenly missing, the bathrooms with the door suddenly missing... ;)
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
Has anyone else noticed the decline in quality merchandise from Maxis as EA's interventions have increased...
/shrug.
Prime Example... Sim City. Great Game.
Sim City 2000. Wonderful Game.
Sim City 3000. Somewhat enjoyable Game.
Sim City 4. A shameless lust for more money.
The Sims doesn't feel nearly as grand as everyone praises it to be. And the Sims 2 seems to have even less appeal. Does anyone remember the short-lived Sims Online? Was that silently killed by the suck that is EA?
Deja Vu
n. 1. The sensation that you've read this very article before.
Yes, it would seem pointless at first, since, all you seem to do is get to play what you already live out in real life, paying bills, getting late for work, etc. I still find it amusing because it lets me do or be other people. For instance, I can be a cop, a soldier, a president, or a crime-lord. I get to swim in jacuzzis, have a gardener mow my lawn, etc.
And since I still live in my parents' basement, I get to feel what its like to live on my own; have my own big house to play with. A lot of things people take for granted may not necessarily be so to others. And that, I suppose is the allure of this thing.
We've all heard the hype surrounding this game, but you have the admit that the premise of Spore is very intriguing. If they really do pull off everything that they say the game will have, this could be one of the games to beat in the upcoming generation(s) of titles. I say generation(s), as they haven't given us many details short of what was announced at E3 and GDC. I for one am hoping that it really is as fun as it looks, and it might just be the breath of fresh air that gaming needs. Maybe all these fancy new graphics/consoles/etc might force what we've all been screaming for a while now: a return to the gaming of old, where the graphics weren't necessarily the concern, but the overall content of the game. Anyone can make a game look good nowadays. Now they can focus on the gameplay itself, and with games like Spore pushing the developers mind/envelope, the next generation of gaming could prove to be alot of fun. (Or quite the opposite, but that's another argument in itself.)
...I just broke out the Sims2 Disk (a gift) last weekend since my T.V. was on the blink - a PC game was my only choice. I played for about 3 hours and realized that my Sims hadn't even been able to leave the house - such was their urgent bathroom, hunger and sleeping needs. WTF - I can forgo all of this stuff for a night out on the town - I found it annoying that my sims bitterly complained and couldn't "suck it up!" The Sims should have been called "Mundania" There is a certain sense of irony of being surrounded by squalor while playing this game - I kept thinking maybe I should stop and take out the garbage. The more Sim kids I had the more sucky the game became. So I hired a maid and a nanny for my Sims - both useless - I still had to take out the f***king garbage. Perhaps it's a cautionary tale - this could be YOUR life - ugh - thank god it was only a game.
You had me at merlot
Most of the comments in this thread seem to support a view that The Sims simply Wasn't That Fun for a number of reasons. It certainly doesn't appeal to all, but I believe its many fans consider it to be among the greats. The Sims was one of the world's best-selling series because it has engrossed so many people.
But those people may not be the same ones that like to spend hours wandering down dark corridors with a make-believe gun.
They may not even be the same people that can appreciate the appeal of a game where you dress up as George Washington ordering people to discover...(fanfare!)...animal husbandry. Or a game where you can run people over for money. Or one where you follow an @ sign around the screen while it bumps up against a pile of lowercase a's.
Those posts that describe The Sims as, "a game where you mop up puddles," are missing what its fans enjoy about it, just as the above descriptions miss out on what we love about Doom, Civilization, Grand Theft Auto, and Nethack. (Though perhaps that is actually a good description of Nethack. Lemme grab a cold ! and think about it.) There's more to these games than a wry description of a banal activity.
Many critics tout The Sims as a Great Game because it brought many non-gamers into gaming without being so simple as to cater to the lowest common denominator. If Slashdotters don't connect with the game, I'd say that it's because our interests lie with other genres -- not because it's universally boring. The responses I see here are much the same as that of a non-gamer watching a Soulcalibur match and asking, "How can you even enjoy that? Hitting Y repeatedly is not fun!" The Sims may not hold the attention of a hardcore gamer for long, but is it beyond us to imagine why other people enjoyed it?
We're indie. We're working on our 14th game.
Fantastic observation!
So... Will you be my friend now? I only ask because I'm trying to get this promotion at work. If you do not comply now, that is OK; I will simply keep joking with you and giving you backrubs until you do. Be warned, however, that if I am too involved in rubbing your back or trying to tickle you, I may pee myself and yell nonsense into the skies.
The thing interesting about Sims is you can model yourself, experiment in behaviour/relations you wouldn't do in real life without thinking twice. Of course, spending 2 hours on the toilet a day is ridiculous, I do that while at work.
Excuse my french but EA Completly Whored out the Sims game. :P untill everyone moved out of my tower from too much noise :(
How many expansion packs do u say? seven???
EA dont want to make the best game they want to make the most money. Who cares if it gets booring? as long as they can sell it.
On the other hand i do like Maxis games. Sim tower was neat
The Sims sold, more importantly its expansions packs sold proving there is a large loyal crowd of players. After all just selling the main game does not prove populatity it could be that everyone dis-installs the game after ten minutes of play. But surely only people actually playing the game and having fun doing so bother to buy expansion packs?
There are two ways of playing the sims. First is the pure game mode and to get yourselve rich and famous and in college and god knowns what other goals the expansions set. This is either your cup of tea or it isn't but I hazard to guess that those who love it would find wandering around an endless maze shooting incredible stupid AI just as boring.
The second mode of play is to customize the game to your hearts content. While the original game and indeed the expansions have a very limited "fashion" sense and almost force you to go for the "high class" tacky items because of stats instead of choosing the items you really like you can find any number of creations on the net to fill your make believe house in.
In this yes it is a barbie doll house and just ask the people behind barbie what a stroke of genius that is.
Personally I can't play the game very long even with the huge amount of user created content because of the lame AI. To much time is spend getting your characters to go to the bathroom with almost every morning ending with at least 1 toon peeing her pants (yes all my toons were females, I am male what did you expect). While this has a certain appeal (they look so cute) it means doing anything else becomes a chore.
If The Sims2 had a better AI so that the toons would properly use the toilet, let the best cook prepair breakfast while the rest cleaned and took out the garbage, paid the bill etc etc it would have been a lot more fun since you could then concentrate on playing the game without the need to micro manage.
I am not alone in this, a suprising amount of the user created content consists of furniture with extreme stats that make eating/peeing/sleeping work faster.
The Sims managed to attract a whole gaming crowd that usually does not play PC games or games at all. So what if 9 out of 10 slashdotters find the game boring. I got a little question for you, who is more likely to actually pay for the games they buy, the average doom playing slashdotter OR the "female" The Sims player? So who do you think it makes more sense to make games for?
Perhaps part of the reason The Sims sold so well is not that it was more popular then more male oriented games but that it was popular with an audience that does not pirate its games.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Experiment gone right? Yes.
Game able to withstand time? Yes.
"Greatest" game of any time period? No. Financially successful but lets face it, if it wasn't for the hardcore modders, the game would've gone stagnant years ago. The expansion packs offer beans compared to the meat and potatoes of the free online add-ons.
Revolutionary? No, all they did was take SimCity and put it at the micro/Sim level. The only reason it was never done before was due to hardware limitations.
Is The Sims' ability to withstand time a mark of its success? No, again thats entirely due to EA's complete failure to make the expansions worthwhile and the community's ability to make far better content for free.
The Sims IS a good game, just not the reasons they listed.
Do you love a challenge? Do you like speedrunning? Are you totally bored by your Sims game? Try the speed sims method! Put eight people in one house and build just one bathroom. Then set the game speed to two, turn on free will, and try to get them all to work in a decent state. I guarantee you'll be sweating in no time at all.
It's hard to take this article seriously considering their list doesn't even include the All-Time #1 Greatest Game of All Time...
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
... many of the concepts and ideas in The Sims were lifted wholesale from "Little Computer People", which I remember playing on my old Commodore 64 around the 1985/1986 timeframe. To me, LCP was just "cuter" and actually more fun. Sure, it got old... but when I played The Sims I think I played for all of two or three evenings then just tuned it out. Micro-managing the mundane is not my idea of fun.
I'm still hoping they'll make a sequel to SimTower once they've milked The Sims cash cow extensively. It would fill in the gap between the broad-level SimCity series and the close-up The Sims series. SimTower strikes a nice balance between not micromanaging your sims as in The Sims and not being able to relate to them at all in SimCity.
Women.
That's what makes The Sims the best selling PC game of all time. Will Wright created a game that women just drool over. He might as well just have called it "Dollhouse." The game allows women to play like they were little girls again, but without anyone questioning whether they have grown out of anything or not.
That is the revolution behind this game, not exactly the game play.
I inherited the original game from somebody who bought it and didn't "get it". From a traditional perspective there wasn't much of a game here, killing people wasn't part of the plot, it wasn't a linear storyline, it had no fully rendered FMV sequences, special moves, or bonus levels. It wan't a "game" that gamers knew how to play. Which I guess accounts for the many comments above about various ways to kill sims, you have to have death in it, it's a video game! Which is not to say that people haven't found even more dubious ways to kill sims, or that death/killing sims wasn't part of the game, they did, and it was. But there reall was a great game in there for those that had the time, and the inclination to find it. I played "the game" for a bit, got bored, and got into the meta games, I liked bulding & decorating houses, I experimented, and occasionally told my sims to clean the place up, and get a shower. But I digress, if EA do it, it's bad, if Nintendo do it, it's genius. A great game is a great game, and the sims, both on popularity and simple gameplay counts, is a great game. The fact that you don't like the gameplay, is you loss.