The Sims Double Deluxe

"Leave your life at the door"

The PC is a very interesting gaming platform. It's not a console and it's not a handheld. It's just there, and it has no real competition in its market as it is a singular beast. PCs are as good as you, the gamer, makes them, and feature various perks that console gamers don't have, such as better online play and stuff like that, but they also suffer for rarely offering offline play (PC does stand for personal computer I guess). Regardless of the pros and cons of using a PC as a gaming platform, there are some classic PC games that every gamer needs to play at least once. From StarCraft to World of Warcraft to Diablo to Spore to Civilization, there are plenty of PC games that have reached practically legendary status. However, one of the most popular PC series ever is The Sims. Sure, the series has seen plenty of releases on handhelds and consoles, but these games don't even come close to the awesomeness that is the PC titles, especially the original game, simply titled The Sims.

Will Wright, the mastermind behind the widely publicized Spore, created The Sims as an extension of another series, like SimCity. SimCity, and all of its sequels and spin-offs, fall under the life-simulation category, sort of like games such as Animal Crossing or Viva Pinata. The Sims, however, takes life-simulation to a whole new level and provides some unbelievably addicting gameplay and memorable gaming moments that will be cherished forever.

As you start The Sims, you get to create your family. There are some restrictions on the number of people you may have and it's annoying that you can't make your people be married when you create them, but regardless, this is what you do. Each individual member of your family can be customized deeply. You choose their appearance, their pros and cons, and you even have the option to give them a mini-biography of their life.

Once you create your family, whether it is made up of a man, woman, boy, or girl, you have to move them into your house. The game gives you some money to start out and from there you can purchase some property to begin your life. The first thing you need to do though is get a suitable job to support yourself and your family.

You can get a job by reading the newspaper that is dropped off daily or you can purchase a computer and search for a job online. Anyway, after you choose your job, your Sim will have to go to that job at a certain time everyday, and if your Sim performs well at the job by going to work in a good mood and showing up everyday, they can get promoted, which offers various rewards.

A large part of The Sims is making sure that they are in a good mood to attend work or school. You have to keep check on things like their bladder, how hungry they are, and how clean they are, among other things, so you constantly have to click around your house to tell them to do things. You can tell them to relieve themselves by clicking on your toilet and issuing commands and you can tell them to prepare a meal by clicking the refrigerator and choosing the command.

One of the most addicting parts about the game is building up your Sims' skills in order to earn them promotions and such at their job. You do this by working on that particular skill, which may require reading or simply practice.

Your Sims develop relationships with the Sims they live around, and this can result in bitter rivalries or deep love affairs. Your Sims can get married and having children, but for some reason or another, your children never grow up. This can make the game feel a little tacky, but you get used to it after a while.

Like all life, your Sims' life will eventually come to an end. When this happens, none other than the Grim Reaper appears to claim your Sims' soul. After your Sim has passed away, it will be converted to either a gravestone or an urn, and they can even haunt the house where they died.

This is the best part of the game. You can literally do pretty much whatever you want. The sky's the limit as they say. If you want to make your Sims have a good life and do well in their jobs, you certainly can. If you want to create a house of hell and delete all of the doors once they enter, you can do that as well. You can evict your Sims and make them move into a different home, and you can even delete families (the game has some pre-made families you can play with if you want).

You can create houses for your Sims if you don't feel like having them move into a pre-made home. You can buy a variety of items for you Sims as well, with some pretty crazy options.

Doing all of this can take a very long time, and you aren't going to have to baby sit your Sims while they sleep. You have some tools at your disposal to make time go by faster in the form of, very literally, a fast-forward button. You can fast-forward your Sims' lives on varying speeds. This keeps the game from getting boring, unlike most life-simulation games where a point eventually comes that completely stops you from enjoying the game at all since you have nothing important to do. Figuratively speaking, you could just click the fast-forward button and watch your Sims live a life totally uncontrolled by you.

However, this is a very special edition of The Sims that comes with most of its expansion packs. These expansion packs open whole new avenues of entertainment. They allow you to create more families and give you more neighborhoods in which to cause trouble. These expansion packs do more than just that though. They also create brand new gameplay possibilities.

They add some jobs and some new items that can really alter your experience. They allow you to travel downtown to do some shopping and they can allow you to invite other Sims on dates. You can even take a vacation and you can host your very own party. These different gameplay mechanics mesh up to be one of the most entertaining packages in video game history and the bang for the buck couldn't be louder.

The Sims features fairly simplistic graphics. The character models are classic and the objects are all neat to look at. There are some graphical mishaps here and there that may cause some problems like people walking through walls, but there's nothing too hampering. The load times are a little excruciating on lower-end computers and going downtown can become a hassle during these load times. There are some glitches present as well. At one point, I had hired a maid, and then later bought a robot. Instead of doing any of the chores, the maid hopped into the pool with the robot to swim for over a week, and then left and made me pay her the daily wage. I didn't see her again. Another incident saw my mailman unmoving on the sidewalk for nearly a Sim month. These problems don't ruin the gameplay experience though because it's all in good fun and they definitely give The Sims more charm.

The Sims speak their very own language that, while you definitely don't understand it, is memorable and fun to listen to. Your Sims can play video games, which have their own sound effects, as well as listen to the radio, but it would have been nice to have some licensed tracks of sorts. When buying items for your Sims there is some easy to listen to background music that keeps you from getting bored.

Technically speaking, The Sims never really ends. The gameplay possibilities are endless and there are people who play this game everyday even to this day. You will log in at least 100 hours on it before getting bored with it, but even after that you will find yourself coming back to enjoy some random chaos. There's definitely a lot to do in The Sims, plus if you feel like using cheats, it makes the experience that much more entertaining.

Twenty years from now, people will still remember Will Wright's brilliant masterpiece, The Sims. The game has spawned countless spin-offs and has laid the cement for plenty of titles that came after it, such as other life-simulation games like Animal Crossing and Viva Pinata. The only real problems that The Sims has is that it's awkward for your children to remain children forever and the load times are a headache plus the audio isn't extraordinary, but there is just so much charm stuffed into this amazingly cheap package that there's no way it could receive less than a 10. The Sims is one of the most influential games of our time, and every gamer should at least play this awesome title once in their lifetime.

Reviewer's Score: 10/10, Originally Posted: 12/14/08

Game Release: The Sims Double Deluxe (US, 09/22/03)