Sims or Real Life?

Posted by Stefan Crowe On October - 22 - 2008

I recently decided to delve in to the massive virtual universe that is The Sims. Well, The Sims 2 to be more precise. This is mostly unknown territory for me. I say “mostly” because I did try out the series once. A long time ago. This was before there was even a mention of expansion packs.
Right, back on track, so I tried The Sims 2 at a friend’s house on his PC. It was…fun, I think. It allowed you to be quite creative in designing your own rooms, sort of like a home furnishing and decoration game. Think “Changing Rooms – The Game”. There is a significant library of styles, colours and accessories to line your ‘pad’.

That pretty much sums up the non-interaction side of the game. Now for the actual game-play, this makes use of little guys and gals, aptly named “Sims”. Your “Sim” has several emotional and behavioural traits. The idea of the game is to keep certain conditions high and others low. You have bar representations of properties such as their health, hunger, happiness and social attitude. You have to keep these bars at their ideal levels, usually full except in the case of needing the loo, where lower is better.

One of the most noticeable features is the ability to interact with other Sims and one of the expansion packs portrays this ability quite well in the form of virtual dating. People could argue that you should just go out on a real life date. I believe a lot of people will like Sims Nightlife expansion as there are no worries or concerns involved that they may have with meeting up with an actual person. But personally I don’t like the idea of virtual dating and I recommend starting out like my girlfriend and I did, simply as two friends dating. We knew each other beforehand so there were less nerves and panic involved.

So after getting slightly sidetracked with my rant there, I definitely see why people go for this game series, but have to say, it just isn’t my cup of tea.

Note: I don’t drink tea so nothing is ever my cup of tea :)