PLATFORM

Nintendo Wii

DEVELOPER

EA Redwood Shores

PUBLISHER

Electronic Arts

GENRE

Life Simulation

# OF PLAYERS

1

Rating

E

U.S. RELEASE DATE

September 18th, 2007

MSRP

$49.99

MySims

OVERVIEW

The Sims’s town is rundown, and the mayor needs you to fix it! Build houses and furniture to help the town grow and prosper again.

REVIEW

This was one of the recent batch Wii releases I was most looking forward to. The Sims was a game I have enjoyed in the past, but I found that it emulated life a little too much for my liking. The Sims were often extremely needy, especially socially, and the time needed to have your Sims working made it so that you were frantically trying to establish relationships. I felt a little less emphasis on “needs” might be good. Boy was I wrong.

The differences between MySims and a classic Sims game are apparent off the bat. The whole look of the game has been transformed into that cutesy anime style that Nintendo often gets grief for from serious gamers. I didn’t view this as a drawback in this game however, and I still don’t think it hurt it. The characters were very distinct and had personality, which is way more than you can say for classic Sims, where the personality is pretty well limited to the cloths on their back.

If you pick this game up, I hope you like to build. And I mean really like to build. Because that is pretty much all you are going to do.

When you fire up the game, the first things you do are the usual - design your character, name your town, etc. The character generation was really lacking. The design choices are rudimentary and not very diverse. It would have been far better if this game would have allowed you to use your Mii instead of designing a poor-man’s version.

After naming your town and designing your character, you visit the town and talk to the mayor who explains to you that the town is run down and almost deserted. In order to restore the town to its former glory, they need someone who can use essences. As you might imagine, that person is you!

Mayor Rosalyn first takes you to your house. Much to her embarrassment, it hasn’t been built yet! So it is up to you to design your house.

As this is your first exposure to house-building, you would expect there to be a much more involved tutorial. Sadly, you are mostly on your own here. You are presented with all the basic building parts, and just set loose after some rudimentary instruction. I built an entire house out of these generic parts before I even realized that if you clicked the arrows on the sides, there were more pages with much more varied pieces. If you take the time to paint your house, you get a hint of what essences can do. The problem is, since they still aren’t explained to you at all, you are left to figure out on your own what their significance is, and how the “scale” applies to the game.

After being tasked with finding some essences (4 apples, in this case), you are shown to your workshop, where you will build various furniture items for inside the houses. And, naturally, this has not been built yet either! After this arduous task, you are asked to build Mayor Rosalyn a podium.

At this point, I gave up. I was well into an hour on this game with all the building, and I was bored to tears. But, wanting to give an honest review of the game, I pressed on and sat down for another session. It had to get better! There had to be something worth sticking with this game for! So after another hour or so, I finally realized - I should have put it down for good the first time.

Building is all there is to this game. And the building isn’t even fun. The control-scheme is unwieldy and the panel is laid out poorly. Instead of having a nice side-bar with your building blocks, they are scattered on the ground in front of your plot. So when you zoom in to see the details of the building you are constructing, the pieces move off the screen. If you want a new piece or to try something different, you have to zoom all the way back out and back in again. The same holds true for the item crafting - but it has even more problems. The blocks can’t be resized like they could be in the house-building, and you have a really limited number of shapes and sizes at your disposal. The game does highlight in green the pieces you can use to fit the pattern, but that doesn’t help you figure out what piece is supposed to go where sometimes. You are “encouraged” to build your design outside the pattern, making things more individual, I suppose. But you don’t get any perks for this, and rarely does the item look any better with your own personal touches (still blocky as ever), so it really just ends up being a shortcut.

So after all this building, you eventually earn a star for your town, which allows you to go to the hotel and invite visiting Sims to move in. Which requires you to build them a house, and complete building tasks for them, which earns you more stars which leads to more building and more new Sims and more building and… ARGH!

One of the best parts of the classic Sims games was the interactions. You met people, had relationships, and had different outcomes based on the relationship choices you made. This was balanced by your Sim’s own needs, the needs of your “friends,” and the design elements of your house. The reward for doing well was a complex and almost interesting virtual life that was unique to your game, and which would be very difficult to duplicate.

MySims is hardly The Sims at all. It is like they took all the worst parts of Animal Crossing, enhanced them, and slapped a Sims label on it. The game isn’t diverse at all. If you played this game through two times, it is entirely probable that you will end up with two identical games. Unless you tried really hard.

The Simspeak is annoying here. Instead of serving as the primary mode of communication, you get to listen to a track in Simspeak, then you are given speech windows to read what is said! While this is necessary to get tasks, it makes the Simspeak totally worthless. You can have your Sim communicate with another on a more basic level, but the choices you have are much more limited than you might see in a regular Sims game. “Be Nice” and “Be Mean” just don’t cover much. And since your relationships don’t matter too much, the only real reason to do this is to get essences. So you get to waste more time being nice and being mean, watching the same Simspeak cut-scenes, and wasting more time flattering or abusing the townsfolk to get building materials. And since your actions have almost no consequences, it all becomes tedious rather quickly.

The game jerks. A lot. You will be walking along minding your own business, and suddenly you will freeze. I can only assume this is where the game is loading. It happens all the time, and it doesn’t take long to get annoying. Especially when paired up with all the other load-time in this game coming in and out of buildings, and going in and out of the build screen. The graphic environment is nice - but the jerkiness really makes it difficult to enjoy.

BOTTOM LINE

Don’t buy this game. Well, if you are the type of person that enjoys building in a video game, rent this game, and if you like it, it will be worth the money to purchase.

This game is the first major disappointment for the Wii. This was a game that I was really looking forward to, and I was totally shocked when I discovered how horrible it was. Everything that was ever great about The Sims is missing, and in its place some of the worst elements of Animal Crossing to fill in the gaps.

There is a totally different version for the DS which is set in a vacation resort, where it is your job to lure in tourists. I didn’t get a chance to play that, but from the reviews, it does seem to be a better game. The building elements are there, but the addition of minigames would make this version a whole lot better. Why they opted to include those in the DS version and not the Wii version is a mystery to me.

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Rating(out of 5):

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