The Sims

"Good for the console gamers, but that's all."

As most of you know, The Sims is the fastest selling PC game on the market. Everybody owns a copy of The Sims, even your 90 year old granny who barely knows what a computer is. The Sims are hitting the next generation platforms for the console gamers out there, but this can be good and and be bad. Lets check it out.

Graphics
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The game's visuals have been upgraded from the PC version of The Sims. First off, the player models have been fully upgraded to fully 3D rendered models. No more 2D rendered models like the PC version. There are also a lot of added lighting effects not seen on the PC game. The trees in the game actually move this time around as well. Objects in the game seem to have a little more detail to them too. Just like the PC version, the game does have it's fair share of slowdown when there are a lot of things onscreen.

As far as the PC version goes, this version of The Sims looks a lot better. Though for the Xbox, this game could use a lot of work visually. Textures on the player models are quite plain, and there is lots of clipping here and there. Big black gaps like to appear between walls sometimes as well, which should have been fixed. The game's censor bar for naked sims is quite ugly in the console version too. The Xbox version does sport some minor enhanced visuals from the PS2 version, but nothing to make you buy it again.
Rating - 7/10

Controls
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This section is where the game falls short. In the PC version, everything you needed was onscreen and you simply just point and click. The Sims on Xbox has far too many menus and buttons you have to press in order to do simple tasks. For example, when you select your sim to perform an action, an icon for that action appears on the top of the screen. When sims do things on their own, you may not know what some of those icons stand for. Instead of simply moving your mouse cursor over the icon, you have to press a specific button and scroll through them, which annoys me. The build and buy modes are integrated into a pause menu that just seems way too slow.

The worse thing here is building your houses. It's a pain in the butt to put wallpaper on the walls. Half the time you miss the wall and end up paying for unused wallpaper. Also, you will wallpaper the wrong wall, which is fixed by hitting a specific button, but is way too annoying to mess with. Moving through the buy menus with the d-pad is handled better than I originally thought though. Playing with your sims and having them interact with objects is very easy to do, and this will be the majority of the gameplay in The Sims. Building is just very annoying though, but with practice can be overlooked.
Rating - 5/10

Sound
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The game's sound effects are top notch here. Some can be annoying, like the gibberish that comes out of your sim's mouth while performing some tasks, but nothing too bad. There is no music played in the game unless you are building, and these tunes get over played due to the lack of songs played. Music that is played during gameplay are just a few classical tracks. The music that the sims play on their stereos are very well done. I actually enjoy the radio songs more in the console version than the PC version. Television show noises are funny and fit well, but these are just exact noises from the PC version.
Rating - 6/10

Enjoyment
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The console version offers an all new Get a Life mode which is a blast to play. This mode simply requires the player to make their own sim and the game starts you out living with your mother. Every level gives you a list of goals to achieve in order to move out and live a better life. This mode is very addicting and fun to play. You will find yourself playing this for hours. The game also features the full normal version of The Sims where you start a neighborhood and a house from scratch and go from there. Also, a pretty fun split screen two player mode is added to the game where you and a friend can play together. Replay value is practically endless too. The Sims is one of those titles that you will grow bored with in a month or two and suddenly gives you a craving to play it again shortly in the future, until you have played through this game hundreds of times.
Rating - 9/10

Overall
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The Sims is a very fun and addicting game that is sort of ruined by some bad control choices from the developers and a chuggy framerate. If you have access to a decent computer that can run The Sims, you would be better off sticking with that instead. If you are a pure console gamer, than by all means do not miss out on the fun that millions of people have been enjoying for years.

Overall Rating - 7/10

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 06/12/03, Updated 06/12/03