News & Commentary: 2004-11-24

Sims-2 Game by EA, Why it Sucks and Why So Many Games Suck

Yes I have been wasting my time playing games, on MS-Windows.

I remember that I used to play "Little Computer People" on the Amiga 1000 and certainly we have come a long, long way from there!

Requirements

Therein lies problem number one, the average budget laptop has 256M of memory, which is more than plenty for my laptop running X11 on linux, using twm as a window manager. However, to run the Sims-2 on MS-Windows requires a minimum of 512M (half a gigabyte) and I found it necessary to add 512M to the original 256M to get reasonable game. The "official" requirement is 256M of RAM and with this system it is almost unplayably slow while the hard drive thrashes the page file. Making your sim go to the shops with 256M of RAM is damn hopeless.

Believe me that 512M is an absolute minimum requirement is you want to enjoy the game.

So once you get the memory requirement sorted out, what about the game itself?

Graphics

The graphics are cool. Very detailed, very real. The design of the character's physical appearance is excellent, particularly the face. You don't get too many options on the build of the body but I'm told that's an add-on so I guess EA want to maximise their after-market opportunities (welcome to the world of proprietary software). The range of heads, noses, chins, hairstyles almost resemble an identikit -- if you had nothing else to work with, you could use it as an identikit. An artist could use this to quickly build up characters for their work, that's how detailed it is.

The design of the houses is also excellent. You can do moderately tricky stuff with stairs and attics as well as split-level houses, balconies and that sort of stuff. You can almost do a walk-through if you zoom right in and then just move the point-of-view around but a real walk-through based on seeing through the sims eyes would be ideal and it seems like a sad omission (once you have the graphics engine done, make the most of it). One comment is that some of the design tools are hard to use, especially once you get into difficult multi-level stuff. With practice, you get used to how the things work and you can do a lot with it.

Character Motion

The motions are cute and kind of realistic but still have that marionette look. That doesn't detract from the game because the actions are readily recognisable much like way a puppet show still tells a story. In a way, the movement adds a surrealistic quality like the actors on midday soaps who try extra hard to express an emotion but somehow still manage to look wooden at the same time.

Sound

You can hear them say stuff, you can't make out the words but you can figure out that there are some words; you can recognise the tone of voice. While they speak little bubbles float above with icons that help you puzzle over what they are on about. Mostly it's pretty good. The stereo plays something that is recognisable as music and you can choose a few different styles. In one case, I kept trying to get a sim to put away one particular book and he kept running out to the front of the house and swearing at the front door (a little thinks bubble with a minature picture of the front door came up above his head). I never did figure out what was wrong with that door, wrong colour, wrong style? All I know is that this particular sim never did pick up that book.

Gameplay

Here's problem number two, and this is really where things come unstuck in a big way. The gameplay is pure micromanagement and starts to seem like a waste of time before too long. I played intensely for about two days, by the third day I had a pretty good idea of what sort of house you needed and what to put in it so I thought I would have a try at getting the family started and letting them run on their own for a while... totally hopeless. You have to be constantly attentive or they die quite quickly, even if they were doing well and all they had to do was keep doing what they were already doing.

I find this especially annoying because to me, it isn't entertaining to keep reminding someone to go the the toilet or take a shower because they can't figure it out for themselves. Worse yet, they CAN figure it out for themselves but they don't do it properly... here's a detailed list of all the ways in which the sims control algorithm is broken (I can't bring myself to call it "AI" because it is such a far cry from intelligent, and in fact it doesn't need to be intelligent, I could write a simple script to play this game):

It has become a cliche that computer game graphics dominate the market and both gameplay and game intelligence have been thrown aside. I would very much like to say something different in this case but I can't... Sims-2 is entirely graphics oriented and the gameplay sucks shit after three days.

Game Rules

There are also some strange items in the rules. Everyone starts with no skills. If you start an adult, they never learned any skills as a child, if you start an elder, they never learned any skills as an adult. Thus, starting a character as an elder is a waste of time, you cannot get a job of any sort without skills and your chance of promotion is about zero. Starting as an adult isn't too bad but you run out of time very fast. Starting as a child, you have to run an adult as well, just to give the child a parent and this is about the only way to get a highly skilled sim.

The diurnal cycle is non-existant when you are playing the sims -- they will wake up whenever they feel like it and sleep whenever they are tired. Humans don't naturally do this, they react to the sun. Stranger still, the NPC sims (i.e. the sims you aren't playing at that moment) will keep certain hours and will get angry when you ring them late at night. The objective is to force the player to impose a diurnal cycle so again you have the fun of doing the job of a timer clock.

Sales and Success

The original sims sold very well and it's an adage in the gaming industry that graphics is what sells games; good gameplay just stops people wanting to buy the next game. Sadly, the Sims-2 is proving this true once more.

The sims sells well because it is a bit like Reality TV, because it is one of the few games that girls are interested in playing and because parents buy it when they are sick of yet another shoot-em-up, beat-em-up, kill-em-up sequel and there's just a shadow of a chance that the sims series might have educational elements.

the thing is that with the first sims, EA sold a huge range of expansion packs which people kept buying because they thought that each one would extend the playable life of the game. With sufficiently crap gameplay you can keep getting people buying that next "hit" when they get bored.

Reviews

Here's a bunch of reviews, and my comments on the review.

Summary

It's eye candy, good quality eye candy but the content is shallow at best. Judging from what people are writing, I'm a very strange individual not to like it.

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