"The Sims 2 - Hotel Tycoon?"

My overall response to this game is "It sucks." It looked like it was going to carry on the fun tradition of previous Sim Gameboy games like Bustin' Out, and Urbz: Sims in the City. But this is a horse of a different color...

Graphics - 7/10
I'll give the graphics a hand. But not a good one. I feel they haven't advanced from the Gameboy games, and this game is on the Dual Screen system. I mean, Nintendogs, Super Mario and even WarioWare have clearer graphics than this. Still, it's fun to have a bigger character customization. I have a Sim with cute pink hair and I can change her outfit. I like the portraits of the other Sims--there are "inside jokes" with the names and portraits of some sims.

Sounds - 4/10
I stopped listening to the music after about a day. The sims' voices didn't bother me any, it was the music in the background. It sounds awfully childish in places, and then there's just some very repetitive music that bothered me. The "main" music is this loopy, simi-scary sounded music that occasionally has this "bumping" noise. It's... bizarre.

Gameplay - 5/10
Okay, here's where I find the game really lacks. First of all, you have to interact with each sim by picking three choices according to what they do -- and there is no clue as to how to pick what to do. So in the beginning, you'll probably spend quite a lot of time being driven insane (literally, you have a sanity bar) by not being able to correctly respond to a sim's reactions. And even once you get these down, it's *incredibly* repetitive. And the sims can sometimes take up to half a minute just to decide what THEY'RE going to do so you can progress.

And there there are the mini-games. Or the lack there of, that is. In the beginning, you have two mini-games to make money, money you badly need. Keelhaulin', a card game, or the vaccum. Yes, a vaccum. But you have to wait til you can find a pile of dust, and even then, you're more than likely to not get any money out of it. So then there's the card game... which I spent hours playing, not because I found it fun, but because I badly needed the money early in this game, and the game is horrid. It's one of the most annoying mini-games I've ever played. You try and get three cards of one character to make them walk the plank... one game alone can be thirty minutes.

And the rooms. You cannot place furniture near the walls--don't even try it. Get used to your furniture sticking out three feet from the wall. Don't expect to have rooms any time soon. It'll take eight hours to build a room, though really, I think it took my sim nine hours to build them. Yes, you could simply change your DS's internal clock ahead, but that's a method I actually discourage. What happens when you need to change it back to the normal time for another game? It'll mess up your sim.

I'd like to write about something fun........... but I can't find anything. I'm highly disappointed in this game, but again, this is just MY opinion. This game is a large break from Bustin' Out and Sims in the City, the games I was hoping this would be.

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 11/01/05