MySims
Preview
EA takes The Sims to the Wii. Well, is it really The Sims?
by Ross
previewed on WII
How it plays
Playing the game you will notice that you can easily walk your Sim around and that letting your character perform actions is easy and intuitive. Houses are easily built too. You start off with two large blocks that are the first and second floor. The latter is not actually accessible and is there just for show. Once the foundations are ready you can add doors and windows to the walls and decorate your house with items like plants and sun screens.
When you are done with fiddling with your house, you can give it a ‘theme’ or ‘designation’ by placing a token on it. There are all sorts of tokens available and sticking for example a Funny or Spooky theme onto your house will affect its surroundings. A town that has primarily houses with a Spooky token will turn dark and cloudy and the background music and sounds will change accordingly. The entire scene will give you the feeling that you are visiting a haunted town.
Something's missing
While MySims brings some interesting new concepts to the franchise, there are some specific things that do not seem right to me. With your main goal being creating items for other villagers, it almost feels as if your Sims do not really live their own lives anymore. They do not have to maintain their relationships, watch their money or have to watch their needs. In fact, they don’t even have to care for their family.
There is also no real reason to build and decorate a house –for- your Sim. Why would you put time and effort into a place that they never spend any time in? Your character doesn't need a bedroom to sleep in or a kitchen for cooking. If you have played other games in the series, you will most definitely miss this. In the end it feels as if too many of the base ingredients have been removed and too few new elements have been put back in.
MySims will be released in time for the holiday season and make an appearance on Nintendo’s DS and Wii systems. I had the opportunity to play the game on the Nintendo DS as well and to be honest, that game felt much better than the Wii version. It ran much smoother and it looked better at the same time. I only played the game for a few minutes, too short to say anything definite, but it did look good.
Audience
While the characters in MySims look silly and therefore quite funny, they look nothing like the characters that players create in The Sims. All in all, the game doesn’t feel like it fits in with the rest of the series and perhaps shouldn’t even carry the Sims name. Obviously Electronic Arts is not targeting PC gamers or even traditional console gamers with this game. Instead the publishing behemoth targets the exact same audience as Nintendo had in mind when they concocted the Wii: casual to semi-hardcore gamers that are tired of Sony and Microsoft’s offerings.
Does that make MySims a bad game? It is too early to tell but one thing is for certain, there’s no genetic link with The Sims. If you like ease and simplicity in your games, this game is probably just the right thing for you to buy. If you are a PC gamer and expect a little bit more depth from your games, I would look elsewhere.
