The Sims Deluxe Edition

Product Details

The Sims Deluxe Edition From Electronic Arts Price: $43.98 Availability: Usually ships in 4-5 business days Ships from and sold by Hitgaming Video Games 133 new or used available from $1.75 Average customer review:

Product Description

The Sims: Deluxe Edition combines The Sims, the most popular PC game of all time, and the top-selling Livin' Large expansion pack in one box with a host of all-new exclusive features and content. In this box you'll find:

• The Sims: Create an entire neighborhood of Sims and run or ruin their lives with the full version of the bestselling PC game of all time. Help your Sims pursue careers, make friends, and find romance--or make a complete mess of things! Open-ended gameplay gives you the freedom to set your own goals as you chart your Sims' destiny.
• The Sims: Livin' Large: With over 125 additional items, five additional career tracks with 50 additional jobs, and a cast of wild characters like the Grim Reaper and the Genie, this bestselling expansion pack puts your Sims into outrageous situations and settings.
• The Sims Creator: Create any Sim you can imagine with this powerful new tool that allows even novice users to customize every detail of how their Sims look. Choose their clothing or create your own. Select from a variety of details like ties, jewelry, and tattoos. Players can even put their own face in The Sims with this easy-to-use tool.
• 25+ Exclusive Objects: Furnish your Sims' homes with two completely new design sets with over 25 objects exclusive to The Sims: Deluxe Edition.
• 50+ New Clothing Choices: A selection of modern and extreme fashion choices await your Sims.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3550 in Video Games
• Brand: Electronic Arts
• Released on: 2003-12-16
• ESRB Rating: Teen
• Platforms: Windows 98, Windows XP, Windows 95

Features

• Start out with the original Sims -- a hilarious game where you actually have to control a person's life from start to finish!
• Give them a look, find them a job, keep them happy and get them a nice place to live -- if you do, you'll be rewarded with some of the comical game scenes around!
• Once you've done that try out the great expansion pack, Livin' Large. where you have to give your Sims the high life, and help them keep it
• There's also new objects, all-new skins, new designs for walls and floors, and two new themes - Roman and Science Fiction
• You can even create the perfect Sim for yourself using the amazing new Creator tool!

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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review The Sims: Deluxe Edition combines The Sims, the most popular PC game of all time, and the top-selling Livin' Large expansion pack in one box with a host of all-new exclusive features and content. In this box you'll find:

• The Sims: Create an entire neighborhood of Sims and run or ruin their lives with the full version of the bestselling PC game of all time. Help your Sims pursue careers, make friends, and find romance--or make a complete mess of things! Open-ended gameplay gives you the freedom to set your own goals as you chart your Sims' destiny.
• The Sims: Livin' Large: With over 125 additional items, five additional career tracks with 50 additional jobs, and a cast of wild characters like the Grim Reaper and the Genie, this bestselling expansion pack puts your Sims into outrageous situations and settings.
• The Sims Creator: Create any Sim you can imagine with this powerful new tool that allows even novice users to customize every detail of how their Sims look. Choose their clothing or create your own. Select from a variety of details like ties, jewelry, and tattoos. Players can even put their own face in The Sims with this easy-to-use tool.
• 25+ Exclusive Objects: Furnish your Sims' homes with two completely new design sets with over 25 objects exclusive to The Sims: Deluxe Edition.
• 50+ New Clothing Choices: A selection of modern and extreme fashion choices await your Sims.

The ultimate goal of life is to achieve happiness, and the way to achieve happiness is to buy stuff. So says The Sims, a game that lets you create, direct, and manage the lives of SimCity's residents.The game begins with the creation of your simulated people: pick a name and a gender, decide on personality/astrological sign, and then choose a look from a variety of heads, bodies, and skin tones. Name, gender, and appearance don't affect gameplay much, but personality determines how your Sim plays with others. A serious, neat Sim might go crazy living with a sloppy party animal--or opposites might attract, and the two could end up falling in love. After creation, the next step is to find a place to live. Again, the player can choose from among the empty houses in the neighborhood or decide to buy some land and design a dream house. Building houses is a blast, and the easy-to-use house design interface could almost be its own game: players design the floor plan, put up walls, pick carpet, wallpaper, and siding, and fill the house with furniture, decorations, fixtures, and appliances. You're limited only by your imagination--and your Sims' pocketbook. But the choices you make in designing and decorating your Sims' house are vital. A good general rule is that the more expensive the object, the better its ability to satisfy Sim needs. Each little Sim person has needs (Hunger, Comfort, Hygiene, Bladder, Energy, Fun, Social, and Room) which can be satisfied by interaction with other Sims or purchased objects: throw a party with the help of a rockin' stereo system, and watch your Sims' Social and Fun ratings improve. Have one of your Sims whip up some food from the refrigerator, and you'll satisfy the Hunger needs of your guests. Or have your Sim engage another Sim in a game of chess: not only will their Fun and Social moods improve, both Sims will gain some points in their Logic skill rating--which might help on the job. One gameplay goal is to improve your Sim so he or she can climb a career ladder, which nets him or her more money, which allows the purchase of higher quality stuff, which lets you improve your Sim even more. With proper care, your Sim can have a mate, kids, and a mansion with an indoor pool. Mismanage your new, simulated family, and you'll be faced with the worst of MTV's The Real World: jealousies will ignite, fights will break out, jobs will be lost, and the house will fall apart. Bringing about such a calamity is almost as much fun as guiding your Sims to material paradise, and takes considerably less time. Triumph or tragedy, each significant event in a Sim's life is captured in a snapshot and saved in a photo album for later viewing. Players can also take photos any time they wish. The photo album feature is cool by itself, but the best part is that you can upload the album to www.thesims.com and share your Sims' sagas with the world. Entire families can also be uploaded and downloaded, as can houses. Want to re-create and manage your own version of Friends? Download the free face and body editor and make Sim clones of the Ross, Rachel, and the rest. Want to perfectly re-create the set? Snag the free wall and floor texture editor. Feeling a little silly? Add Darth Vader to the family and see what happens. With The Sims, you can create whatever--and whomever--you desire. Toying with the lives, successes, and emotional states of dozens of little Sims is undeniably fun. In the same way that SimCity players develop a condescending attitude toward real-world city planners, The Sims players will begin to see life as a series of needs-satisfying challenges; the game gets in your head. But that's OK: limitless gameplay, endless variety, imaginative Internet features, and the ability to play matchmaker/landlord/counselor/God makes The Sims a great way to increase your own Fun score. --Mike Fehlauer Pros:

• Unique, addictive, fun gameplay
• Included photo album feature records triumphs and tragedies
• Free uploads and downloads expand the game and allow swapping with other players
• Sims are smart--it's sometimes best to just let them act on their own

Cons:

• Addictive gameplay may cause loss of sleep, job
• Complex behavioral modeling program--requires serious computing power
• No pets other than fish

Sex and aliens. That's really all that was missing from the amazing original edition of The Sims, and the expansion Livin' Large delivers these new treats to liven up your beloved Sims existence.New characters (including a gladiator and Xena-like warriors), and, more impressively, new decorations are the reasons to buy this game. The furnishings are mostly grouped by theme, with the medieval dungeon option the most authoritative of the bunch. (Little Cassandra Goth has been longing to read by torch light all along.) Our personal favorite is the futuristic theme, with an optional, but expensive, maid/gardener robot to take care of the fabulous modern furnishings. Clearly the Sims team has been doing its research over at Herman Miller, and you'll have a bright red, flowing-foam sofa to show for it. But it wouldn't be The Sims if only good taste prevailed. Bring on the mai tais with a tiki-heavy islander theme. There's also a startling collection of carpeting and objects best grouped under the design ideal we call "demented clown." The attention-getting rarities include: a lame fortune-telling ball (our advice mostly centered around hiring a maid), a voodoo doll for hexing roommates, and a genie who delivers as much bad as good (dead plants, anyone?). And, yes, there's a vibrating bed to give your Sims the spice they've been missing. While the expansion didn't blow us away, it did provide more of the humor and novelty true Sims die-hards will appreciate. With even more attention to detail than the original offering, EA deserves Sims-like applause for this edition. --Jennifer Buckendorff GameSpot Review Maxis' The Sims is about creating, managing, and controlling the lives of tiny computerized people who dwell in miniature homes. The game's excellent music and sound effects, detailed scenery, cleverly animated characters, and equally clever writing go a long way toward fulfilling this intriguing premise. Yet though you can exercise a considerable amount of control over your sims' behavior and lifestyles, The Sims' actual gameplay is rather limited in some respects - either by odd inconsistencies or by actual restrictions placed on your actions. But to the game's credit, the most objectionable thing about these occasional limits is how starkly they contrast with the otherwise tremendous freedom you have to lead your sims' lives. At a glance, The Sims looks fairly good, if plain. The game itself takes place entirely within a small suburb just outside SimCity, and the streets, houses, and fixtures are all colorful and detailed - and all in a style consistent with the SimCity games. At first, the fully polygonal characters might look no better than the scenery. But if you leave them alone for even a few minutes, your sims will do all sorts of things; they'll dance to the radio's music, hunker down in front of the TV, or strike up a conversation. And when your sims start doing anything, they'll do so with expressive animation that lends them a great deal of personality. When the music is playing, sims dance the Charleston together; TV-watching sims will lean forward and gaze intently at the screen or laugh out loud; and conversing sims will gesticulate appropriately as they chat, dish out insults, tell jokes, and more. Despite the fact that the actual dialogue among the game's inhabitants is made to sound like complete gibberish, The Sims sounds superb overall. You can't make out exactly what they're saying, but you can easily infer their intentions from the tone of their voices. Sims will speak, then pause and clear their throats while they're thinking of what to say next, yelp in pain when they cut themselves preparing a meal, or tell naughty limericks as jokes. Sims also interact with their surroundings, and everything from coffee makers to toilets sounds realistic, clear, and in some cases downright hilarious, like the slapstick noises of the TV cartoons. The Sims' music is also excellent; even though much of it consists of vapid easy-listening, those unassuming tunes provide a perfect ironic contrast in the background against whatever havoc your sims are wreaking on center stage. Your sims can get into all sorts of trouble depending on what choices you make in their design and actions. You can begin the game with a pre-generated family of sims or create your own using a number of different 3D models, more of which are constantly being made available on Maxis' web site. Each sim has five personality attributes (neat, outgoing, active, playful, and nice) which help determine the sim's personality and how compatible he'll be with other sims. Each sim also has six learnable skills (cooking, mechanical, charisma, body, logic, and creativity), which not only affect the way a sim interacts with his fellow sims but also how well he can make use of the objects in his house and how well he can perform his job. There are ten career paths available in The Sims; each is best served with a sim trained in a particular combination of the six skills. Once you find a job in the daily paper or online via a computer, your sim will be picked up by a carpool at a certain time each day. Getting a job is advisable, since it's really the only way for your sims to bring in a steady income to buy more stuff. One of the most important things to do in The Sims is to buy things, whether appliances or furniture for the inside of your house, or walls, windows, or even a second story for the outside. For instance, a new mirror will let your sims increase their charisma, and a new stove will help them cook more satisfying meals. Each product you buy for your sims' home has its own description; many of these are extremely funny, and it's worth the effort to simply browse through them just to read some of the better gags. There's a fair variety of products to choose from, and Maxis intends to continually provide new household goods for download. In addition, you'll eventually want to expand the size of your house's exterior, since a bigger house means more room for more sims and more stuff. You can do so quickly and easily with one of The Sims' many user-friendly interfaces, the build mode, which lets you customize, add, or remove all sorts of new walls, floors, windows, doors and more with some clicks and drags. --Andrew Seyoon Park --Copyright ©1998 GameSpot Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part in any form or medium without express written permission of GameSpot is prohibited.

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Customer Reviews

Real-Life Simulation at its Best I put the Sims Deluxe Edition on my Christmas wish list because I wanted to see, once and for all, what was so great about what I guess is the best-selling computer game of all time. Well, I got it for Christmas and have played it a lot since, and I now understand the appeal of it. It is a very open-ended game where you choose the sex of your sim (or sims), what they wear, what sign they are, you choose their name, you choose their job, you choose their house - you give your sim the life you would like to have, pretty much. Once you've made enough money from your job, you can buy cooler and better stuff that will make your sim happier. You can choose the wallpaper, the carpet, the paintings you hang on your walls, and you can even build an expansion on to your existing house, or just build a new one altogether. This part of the game is so entertaining for me, that it has almost inspired me to become an interior decorator. My one complaint about the Sims is this: I decided to create two characters based on me and my boyfriend, and had them living in the same house together. Things were fine at first, but then after they both got jobs, they never saw each other any more, and neither one had time to do anything other than work - socializing became a chore I had to squeeze in after their long day at work, and just having fun (like playing on the computer, or watching TV) was hard to do. Since the game's clock runs so that every one second equals one minute in the Sim world, it takes 15 seconds for me to watch the character to walk out to get the mail, but it takes the sim 15 MINUTES to get the mail, which is a bit unrealistic - and it makes the game annoying because it takes so long to do little chores, all you have time for is sleep and work. (Actually, maybe it IS realistic.) Once my two sims were really in love and kissed many times, a little bubble popped up and asked if we should have a baby. I said yes, and boy was that a mistake! It is virtually impossible for sims to have babies. The baby has to be constantly taken care of for a total of three days before it becomes a child. If you so much as take a break to get something to eat, the social worker comes and takes the baby away. This is, of course, after one of your sims already lost their job to take care of the thing. So, while it may be cool for your sims to have a kid, I recommend waiting until you are filthy rich, so that one sim can stay home and care for it around the clock. (You can hire a maid, you can hire a gardener, but you can't get a babysitter?!) However, even with the tiny little annoyances this game may have, it's still a great game. Who knew that watching a computer character read a book could be so entertaining? I would recommend the Deluxe Edition to first-time sim-ers (like me) because it also contains the expansion pack Livin' Large, which provides more houses, more items, more enjoyment. Enjoy! Grand Idea A lot of the reviewers are wrong and so lets clear a few things up. Number 1 is that you do not have to uninstall your original Sims game to install the Sims Deluxe Edition. You can add it right to what you already have, even if you own every expansion pack there is you just add it on, so it's easy. Second of all, someone said you had to lose your families and data. Not true at all. There are no downfalls that I can see to adding on this edition. Even if you already have Livin Large, adding this on will not harm your game. And for those people who have never had the Sims, it is a perfect time to get started as they get two for the price of one. I have already bought mine and added it to my game which included all the expansions and it is great, so I know what I am talking about. To me it is well worth the money as the Sims Creator is such a fun add on. Enjoy!! Caution.... this game is addictive I first purchased this game about a month ago, and have been addicted to it ever since. When I first heard about The Sims, I thought "how can this game be interesting?" I would be in the middle of chatting with a friend over the internet and they would end the conversation with "it's getting late and I want to play some Sims before going to bed." Now, you might think this is normal behavior for a teenager, right? Well what if I told you these people are in there mid-20s? A bit odd right? Well not if you are one of the many addicted to The Sims. So I had to go out and buy the game to see why everybody likes playing this game so much. If you haven't purchasede this game yet, I recommend that you buy the Deluxe Edition instead of the Original Sims. Reason being Maxis has included the Livin' Large Expansion pack. You will have more choices in furnishings and building options. In truth my rating for this game is 4 1/2 stars. Even though this is a good game, I have experienced some problems with it. The first thing that I don't care for about the game is that it takes a long time(Sim) to do things. For instance, a Sim can take up to 45 minutes(Sim) to get out of bed. Now this is a problem if your Sim gets picked up for work in the morning, because they have two hours(Sim) to get in a good mood before work. Another problem I have is that once your Sim gets a job, socializing becomes a hassle on many levels. (1) If you choose a Sim that is very outgoing, they need to talk to other Sims more often or they will be sad. One soltuion is to have two Sims live together, but if they have two different jobs with different schedules...their relationship slips because they have no time to spend with each other. (2) In order to climb the corporate ladder, you need friends to make the bucks. (3) Once you have the friends you have to maintain that friendship or your Sim will not have a friend for very long. Each day that your Sim does not at least call and talk to another Sim, their relationship falls by 3 points. (4)When you first move in a couple(that you had intended to be husband and wife) does not mean they will sleep in the same bed...so forget about saving money and buying a double, you will have to buy two beds until they love each other. The final problem that I experienced with this game is that I have lost track of time. I have been late to work a few times because of this game. I also had problems with the game freezing up my computer when I played this gamed for extended periods of time. One time I could not restart my computer by normal means, so I had to unplug it. I have a new computer, less then 6 months old, with 80% of my hard drive free and over 200MB of RAM. So this is not because of the equipment I am playing it on. No matter what the problems I had with this game, I still think this is a great game. It is fun to see how that Sims interact with one another and how they act when they are in a bad mood. You can have as much control over your Sim as you want, because your Sims(if you so choose) do have free will. Having this feature activated in the play options is a plus especially if your Sim household has multiple Sims. This is a must if you enjoy simulation games, or even if you might be a control freak. Who knew that be controlling was a plus:) All kidding aside, one can have a lot of fun with this game, it is up to the imagination of the player. If you are not into playing simulation games, this may not be the game for you. There is no win or lose, or even quick stragey to The Sims. It takes a long time(reality) to play this game, of course there are plenty of fan websites that offer cheat codes, but it is more fun without them. This is a definite recommedation to those who are all ready interested in the simulation genre or enjoy other games put out by Maxis.