The Sims: Vacation

"They just keep 'em coming!"

Gameplay
This is the single most innovative series of games ever. You control every aspect of your Sims' lives. You are omnipotent. This type of open-ended gameplay makes this game extremely fun. You can do anything you want from getting married to going on Vacation (hence the title) to planning a block party. Seems pretty overwhelming, eh? Not really. There is almost no learning curve to this game. You can literally control every aspect of it with just two mouse-buttons. Vacation features over 125 new objects you can use to furnish your Sims' houses or even create new vacation lots for your Sims to take a break from the daily grind. And with those new objects even the daily grind won't be that normal. Take a break from your life and control your Sims'.

Story
The thing about The Sims:Vacation is: there is no story. You create the story yourself through your Sims' daily lives. You control every single aspect of it. And trust me, that story can be an odd one. Although I've personally never been abducted by aliens just to have my personality points be changed by it, it can happen in Vacation. And with the handy Photo Album you can record your story and even upload your family to www.thesims.com for others to download and continue.

Graphics
This game is a bit of a resource-hog but on a decent system the graphics will run smoothly with little to no clipping or screwed up textures. Speaking of textures...wow! Everything in this game is so detailed. There is very little jagginess and all the animations are all fluent. A major thumbs-up to Maxis' artists.

Audio
If you've ever played one of 'The Sims' games before you know that the sound is amazing. The gibberish the Sims speak to each other will give you a good chuckle and all of the sound effects in the game sound just great. If you don't like the audio (I don't see why you wouldn't though), you can even load up some of your own MP3's into the game via the radio folder in the game's installation directory.

Replayability
This game has an infinite amount of reply value. And when I say infinite, I'm not exaggerating. Since you control your Sims' lives the game only ends when they die (most likely by your own hand). Even then you can start a new family. And the ability to add and create new objects to load into the game expands the replayability an infinite amount of times (if you can even multiply infinity by infinity).

Buy/Rent
Well, since I've never heard of a place where you can rent computer games it looks like you're going to have to buy the game. Don't worry, though. It'll be well worth the $29.95 you shell out for it.

Reviewer's Score: 10/10, Originally Posted: 04/02/02, Updated 04/02/02