The Sims is a game by legendary game designer Will Wright of Sim City fame. This was an effort to take the micromanagement of a whole city to the smallest possible level, "the individual". Located in suburbia in an area that houses 12 neighbors, you develop your "Sim" with one of 8 different career paths, their relationships with the other "Sim-Neighbors", and their free-time. In a brilliant move they made the normal mundane task of everyday life: using the toilet, sleeping, going to work, and cooking meals interesting and sometimes even exciting. This is the ultimate role-playing experience, in that, if you do not "help" your Sim-person well enough they could end up dying. You begin by creating the persona graphically with an easy-to-use interface, assign it several different traits of which you have limited points to work with (neatness, niceness etc.). Then let them lose! Later, they'll make friends (or enemies), have parties, fall in love, and/or have extra-marital affairs. Everything a good soap opera would have. Better yet, they have free downloadable utilities such as Face Lift, for creating new faces, Home Crafter for checking out new walls and floors, and Sim Show for outfitting your new faces to bodies and clothing. You can create storyboards of your Sims with pictures and subtitles. You can take these stories and upload them to www.thesims.com along with your SIMs themselves. You can also download other people's stories and Sims as well. Maxis also releases new object and skin packs every Thursday which keeps the game fresh long after you install it. The Sims is definitely one-of-a-kind and lot of fun.
-Jeff Pinard
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