The format of these posts is simple: let’s discuss a specific game or series!
Let’s discuss The Sims. What is your favorite game in the series? What aspects do you like about it? What doesn’t work for you? Are there other games that gave you similar feelings? Feel free to share any thoughts that come up, or react to other peoples comments. Let’s get the conversation going!
If you have any recommendations for games or series for the next post(s), please feel free to DM me or add it in a comment here (no guarantees of course).
Previous entries: Half-Life, Earthbound / Mother, Mass Effect, Metroid, Journey, Resident Evil, Polybius, Tetris, Telltale Games, Kirby, LEGO Games, DOOM, Ori, Metal Gear, Slay the Spire
Build. Mode. Music.
I know multiple women who mainly got themselves a PC to play Sims back in the day and who are now in senior IT roles because once they got the PC they kind of “sticked with it”.
That is something we indeed should thank The Sims for.
I can’t think of another game that I like so much and enjoy playing so little. I will spend countless hours creating families and houses and then five minutes playing the actual game before I’m like “oh, right, I hate this” and then I start making another family.
The thing that helped me felt very counterintuitive, but I ended up just picking one family member as a ‘main’ character, and letting the rest run on their own.
My instinct is always to try and micro-manage everyone in the household, which gets stressful quickly. If I focus on one person and let the rest just generate their own stories I tend to last a lot longer.
I loved the building, but I find the other half of the gameplay quite boring. Some of the more focused games i thought were a bit better, but it’s been quite some time since I’ve played them.
I really enjoyed the GBA titles
I loved the building, but I find the other half of the gameplay quite boring.
i would spend hours using cheats to create the perfect house for the sims family and then lose interest within 30 minutes of letting the family do its thing.
i would rinse and repeat with each house becoming more elaborate and strange each time; they should make a game that focuses on that aspect of it more
Have you seen any of the youtube previews of Paralives? I’m very curious if the building in that title will be better. They have a couple features that seem really nice
When I was 12 my Mum gave me my first PC, it was a second hand work PC with a tiny HDD.
There wasn’t enough space to install The Sims, so I deleted the Program Files folder, thinking I don’t need any programs, only games.
I bricked my PC lol. Needed a tech to reinstall Windows. Thankfully, I could tell him I needed enough space for the game and he debloated it as much as he could. Legend.
Did your Sims home become minimalist to save space?
Been playing TS4 again, lightly modded to facilitate poly relationships. I’m not a fan of the shit storm of DLC that’s basically the staple of the game’s monetization at this point, but that’s nothing that can’t be solved on the high seas. Otherwise, I still enjoy the series a lot. (Also, shout-out to the various weird spinoffs like Castaways.)
I payed just the first game and I loved it, I mean, everybody loved it at that time. But a couple of times months later the love faded away.
I think it was indeed a ground braking game, but it was so grinded by EA that most people at some point stated to hating it
My favorite is the Sims 3, and I’ve spent a lot of time on it! It’s a very addicting game for me, but only by spells. I’ll play it every chance I get for a few weeks, then let it sit for a long time. I’ve also played 2 and 4 as well. 2 was good, and 4 was disappointing to me. The overall gameplay wasn’t as good in my opinion, and losing the open world aspect of 3 was a negative too. Add to that the launcher and additional login requirements and I quit playing it fairly quickly.
I think the main reason I like 3 better than the others is because of the open world aspect. I can quickly switch back and forth between two sims at opposite ends of the map, and the world itself feels more real due to not having loading screens. I also like the graphics style a little better, but that’s a minor thing.
The way I normally play is to create a sim, either by picking traits or randomizing, and drop them into the world with a starter house. From there I normally have them get a job or learn a freelance skill to make some money. I generally let my sims find their own friends and spouses by finding who they get along with and going from there. I generally get at least a few generations in before I move on to another game or start over. I rarely do the challenges and things that many people do, but I have done games where I tried to keep a generational line going for a while.
I was really looking forward to both Life by You and Paralives, but the publisher and/or devs of Life by You just blew through their third release date, and have now delayed it indefinitely. So maybe Paralives will be good!
Sims 3 was my favorite for the open world and freelance jobs too. Was nice to be able to secure an income without disappearing off the map for 8 hours a day. Was surprised 4 didn’t follow through on that as much but I only played it a little.
My wife plays Sims with cheats all the time and I get that it becomes a fancy interactive dollhouse in that case, but to me the game is all about that progression from bachelor in a one room box to old family man in a mansion.
I played a bit of the original and sims 2. It’s interesting but really my thing.
My daughter on the other hand loves playing sims 4. As soon a dlc goes on sale, she buys it. So many dlc’s… It’s nuts.
I recently helped another person I know, who is like your daughter, pirate the game with all dlc so they don’t spend even more on the game than they already have.
The prices on the DLC are crazy when added up
Repacks make installing the game with its bazillion DLCs a breeze these days.
They definitely do, it was only 40 GB instead of the 70 GB when unpacked
I only played one The Sims many years ago. I wonder if it was the first or second.
It certainly was a good game with good mechanics and content.
I’ve only seen a little bit of how it evolved in videos. I wonder how much EA is reiterating and republishing the same content and mechanics, and how much has evolved and changed? Did the products warrant regular and many releases and DLC?
Each Sims game is quite different. The biggest difference is between Sims 1 and 2 simply due to the change from isometric 2D to 3D graphics. Not the first game in the genre to have 3D graphics and they weren’t even particularly impressive for the time nor good compared to its competitor, but the charming animations and attention to detail make it a far more enjoyable experience than the comparatively sterile predecessor. Sims 2 ended up becoming an evergreen with very long legs, to the point that people are still playing it, although it helped that EA distributed the complete version with all add-ons (the game is older than the term DLC) for free for a while (you can still find it if you know where to look).
Sims 3 was fundamentally different from Sims 2. Gone were the isolated homes of the predecessor (initially in Sims 2, you couldn’t even see your neighbors’ homes unless you were on the map screen; later they added in low-res stand-ins) and instead, it’s an open world game where you can see your Sim commute to work in real-time. Neighbors can be visited without going through a loading screen - it all feels more organic as a result. Customization saw a huge upgrade as well, the AI was improved, etc. Sounds nice in theory, but the problem was that it was too ambitious for PCs of the time. This series has traditionally attracted non-gamers who don’t deeply upgrade their machines all that often and instead play on laptops bought for homework or old rigs inherited from big brothers. Sims 1 ran on a toaster, Sims 2 on a pizza oven with some kind of GPU grafted to it - whereas Sims 3 was one of the most demanding games of its time in order to facilitate gameplay changes that few people actually asked for and rounded, bloated looking Sims that are somewhat offputting. It was still a massive success and a huge hit with modders as well, but Sims 2 remained popular due to its more focused nature, the fact that it ran on anything and the fact that it was complete with a massive library of add-ons that took years to be replicated in Sims 3.
Sims 4 reset the series back to Sims 2, but went too far initially, limiting player freedom in regards to neighborhood creation. Instanced homes returned, customization features and open world of Sims 3 were cut, the AI saw a massive improvements, Sims didn’t all look obese anymore, hardware requirements were modest again - but at the price of having incredibly intrusive DRM, an attempt to monetize the proud modding community and being very bare-bones in the beginning, requiring years of DLCs to reach feature-parity with Sims 2 and 3. IIRC, even pools - an absolutely essential part of Sims lore - were missing initially. All of the improvements to the building mechanics in particular were overshadowed by EA’s corporate nonsense. It’s come a long way since though. Just like with the predecessors, buying all DLC at once will make you poor - but the base game is free now and the actual intention is that you only buy the DLC that have features or items you care about. The modding scene is as vibrant as ever, making any non-feature DLC unnecessary anyway.
This series is an interesting and unique phenomenon. It’s a prime example of something that only ever truly works on PC. All of the many console, mobile and browser spinoffs and ports were nothing but mere blips on the radar, because fundamentally, it can only work on a platform as open as the PC. It primarily attracts female players who rarely play anything else, yet dive deep into modding and modifying every little aspect of these games like the most hardened PC nerds. It started out and still is in many ways a faksimile of ideal American suburbia, although enhanced by both some quite subversive humor and subverted by an astonishing level of player freedom that goes against the conformity of the real world - while at the same time replicating the fads, consumerism, cliques, feuds and other less wholesome aspects of the real world through its behemoth of a community. It’s ultimately a platform for individual creative expression and the worlds (both in-game and outside of it) that emerge as a result of it, a sandbox that was only ever bested by Minecraft, which literally broke everything down to its individual building blocks. Each game and its DLCs become more like car payments to seasoned players, something you pay for so that you can travel where you want to go, which in turn keeps the experience fresh, finances further development and prevents the community from getting stagnant as it has to learn to adapt to changes from the developers.
I’ll end this here. This wasn’t meant to turn into an essay and now my fingers hurt, because I typed all of this nonsense on a touchscreen.
I thoroughly enjoyed that! I’d read your blog!