It's a Simulated World: Part Two

By Bob Mackey

April 11, 2008

4 comments

Last week, I looked at the best moments in the Sim series.  This week, I'll be discussing the worst moments of the Sim series, along with the copycats that tried (and often failed) to capture that unique Sim magic.

The (Simulated) Bad Times

SimCity 3000 (1999) – Simcity 3000 certainly isn’t a bad game; but, as a sequel to SimCity 2000, it falls a little short.  Essentially, 3000 is little more than a gussied-up version of 2000 with a handful of new features—which is fine for anyone who never played 2000.  But if you happened to play 2000 to death, there really wasn’t much new fun to be had here.  To be fair, the game could have been much worse; Maxis originally conceived 3000 as being in 3D, but dropped this idea when they realized that rendering really brown rooms in Quake was the only 3D late-90s PCs could do.

SimCopter (1996) – Given the premise of SimCopter and the year it was made, the game was destined to fail.  SimCopter maybe have allowed you to fly around your SimCity 2000 cities, fully represented in 3D, but unfortunately, it was the very rudimentary 3D of the mid-90s.  To be extremely gracious, the game does feel like a sort of proto-good-guy-Grand Theft Auto—except with no story, no characters, and a very rickety and unstable representation of 3D.  Zooming around a fully realized city was a novelty at the time, and while the prospect of doing rescue missions in your own SimCity was quite a novelty, it never really became more than that.  Simcopter makes it clear why the glut of SimWhatever titles ended by 1997.

The Sims Online (2002) – The Sims has no real final goal, and the same can be said of most MMORPGs.  But, in order to get people to pay a certain amount of money a month to play what they’d already playing for years, The Sims Online had to have some kind of hook: hence, the free enterprise system that could’ve only come out of Ayn Rand’s naughtiest dreams.  And if extremely limited capitalistic competition with online strangers didn’t float your boat, all of the God power that makes the Sims games famous disappears as The Sims Online reduces the amount of controllable characters to one—and in real-time, too.  At best, The Sims Online was an expensive chat room that let you watch tiny meters grow.

The Copycats

Animal Crossing (2002) – While the Japanese N64 release of Animal Crossing happened a little over a year after the dawn of The Sims, the games have a dangerous amount in common.  But where The Sims is sort of like real life, Animal Crossing resembles an eternity at summer camp, or what a sugar-addled 6-year old may fantasize what adult life is actually like.  The jobs, chores, and mandatory social relationships of The Sims aren’t present in Animal Crossing; in fact, Nintendo’s life sim can be considered even less of a game than The Sims—though it’s still completely addictive for some inexplicable reason.  The Wii’s online capabilities may be more than a little lacking, but no game has really cried out for online play more than Animal Crossing.  Hopefully, at some point in the not-too-distant future, you’ll be able to send your Wii friends fruit and colorful objects without a 20-digit code and government clearance.

MySims (2007) – Technically, MySims is an official Sims game.  Still, it feels like a Maxisized take on Animal Crossing—which makes this a pared-down version of a game that’s very similar to a pared-down version of the original Sims.  MySims can’t help but be derivative, but it does do some very smart things: namely, making the graphics more appealing and TV-friendly.  It’s great that they kept the audience in mind while creating MySims, though all of the tedious and frustrating furniture-creation in the game is an odd contradiction to MySims’ intention of being universally approachable.  And for a sandbox game, MySims carries the ultimate sin: there’s not really that much to do.

Singles: Flirt Up Your Life (2004) – Considering The Sims’ PG-13 take on sexual relationships, it wasn’t long before someone, somewhere created a version of the game that goal identical to the American high school experience: getting laid.  Singles focuses primarily on the social of life sim games and not much else; though, it is a lot more titillating than any nude Sims skin ever released on the Internet by social deviants.  In the end, though, Singles isn’t really good for much except cheap sexual thrills—and cheap sexual thrills can be had for cheaper by simply typing “boobs” into Google Image Search.  Thanks, progress.

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