MySims

"A promising new franchise"

I once had a screaming nightmare that affected my sense of reality so badly that I couldn't get back to sleep. It was important that my husband keep sleeping, so that he was well rested for a meeting he had to attend the following morning. Our apartment is small and has no doors, and our town is pretty sleepy - there's nowhere for a paranoid woman to go in the wee hours of the morning. So I stayed up and played video games. Harvest Moon was my last grip on reality at 4AM. People knock these types of games for being monotonous and over-cute, but for Collector-type gamers and Cute Enthusiasts, they're radically addictive and can take months to start losing freshness.

My Sims is a promising installment in the sim genre, and a serious contender with mainstays like Animal Crossing and Harvest Moon. It is not a game for your "Mii"s, or a cute-ified version of The Sims, but a concept to itself. Your customized avatar rebuilds a town of your naming by enticing new neighbors into town and building them customized houses and furniture to suit their tastes. There are "essences" scattered around the town - growing on trees, swimming in lakes, and so forth. You gather these and reuse them as objects or paints to give furniture a special appeal: cute, fun, spooky, geeky, studious, and tasty. As you complete furniture requests for your residents, your town grows in popularity and adjoining areas open up with new places to explore and different essences to gather.

I like having specific quests to complete for my neighbors, rather than just giving them things that you think they'll like. It gives the game more of a linear progression, so you feel like you're actually progressing through the game. You can give random gifts and redecorate their houses and your own, so you're truly omnipotent. Apart from collection, the game's all about home design.

With any new franchise, there are design issues. When you're building furniture, you're doing it piece by piece to a blueprint on a grid, with different sized blocks in different shapes. The blocks you need for each piece are highlighted and snap into place when they're close to their location on the grid. But because the furniture is 3-dimensional, it can be very difficult to place all of the tiny pieces properly, especially if you're going against the plan. It can be very time consuming to make an intricate piece of furniture exactly the way you want.

There are also some problems with the menus. When you have a few essences, you can access them easily, but as the game progresses and you get more essence types, you have to scroll through all of them to select the one you want. If the essences were organized by type (geeky, cute, etc.), this would drastically cut down on that frustration. The Sims games do this for their "collections", so I really wonder why they rejected this feature for My Sims. The furniture and building pieces have a similar scrolling setup. When building, you have to leave and re-enter your workshop for each piece of furniture. If you want to redesign a neighbor's furniture, you basically have to steal it from them and take it back to your workshop to edit it. It would be better if there were some way to edit furniture directly in the houses.

But many of the design mechanics are impressive. Some artist obviously spent long hours making sure all of the essences in each category were complimentary to each other, and there are four different paint types for each essence you collect - generally, two patterns and two solid colors that represent the item you picked up. The variety of essences, blocks, and other objects is truly astonishing. Each neighbor has their own subset of decorations, and you can unlock new designs by giving them gifts of furniture that match their tastes.

My Sims will be instantly addictive to anyone who's ever played a sim game and wanted to design the town down to a micro level. There's a wealth of content that pushes the game past a stale freeplay sandbox and into a joyous explore-and-collect expedition. I hope they release a My Sims 2. With a few more features and some improvements to the interface, this game will solidify its place as a franchise to be reckoned with.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 12/19/07

Game Release: MySims (US, 09/18/07)