The Sims - The People Simulator from the Creator of SimCity

Product Details

The Sims - The People Simulator from the Creator of SimCity From Electronic Arts Games List Price: $49.99 Price: $24.00 Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Ships from and sold by greatstuff53 111 new or used available from $2.23 Average customer review:

Product Description

Get the best-selling PC game of all time and all seven of its expansion packs! / Rated T: Teen With The Sims - Unleashed you'll add a furry friend to your Sims family. Housebreak your pets, train them to do tricks, buy them toys, and do your best to keep them from destroying the house! The Sims - Superstar lets you experience the lifestyles of the rich and famous and guide your Sims to superstardom. Become a movie star, rocker, or supermodel and spend your cash on extravagant new items for your home. In The Sims - Makin' Magic you'll cast spells, hypnotize friends, and even turn a neighbor into a frog. But watch out, spells can go haywire if you're not careful. The neighborhood will never be the same!

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3500 in Video Games
• Brand: Electronic Arts Games
• Model: 15008
• Released on: 2000-02-02
• ESRB Rating: Teen
• Platforms: Windows 98, Windows 95

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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review 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

Amazon.com Product Description From Will Wright, the creator of SimCity, comes a strategy game that hits close to home. You are in charge of a neighborhood of Sims, and it is up to you to show them that they're living in your world now! Force them into a life of crime or help them live life in the fast lane. Build them a sprawling mansion or dump them into a dilapidated shack. Let them party like swinging singles or fall in love, get married, and raise a family. They can live out your wildest dreams or experience your worst nightmares. It is up to you to decide--their fate is in your hands. 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

Very adictive I am 12 years old and I have had this game for about a month now. It is very fun and addictive. One thing I would like to point out, is that parents should not be worried by the rating saying T for teen and "mature sexual themes." These "mature sexual themes" do not exist. Unless they consider kissing as that, they don't have anything like that in it. You control your sims and help them make friends, get a job, etc. When you first start out, you choose the last name for your sim, and the first name. Then you choose gender (male or female) then choose the head, clothing, and personality. Then you can right a biography about your sim, but you can just skip that. Then, you click done and you can then move them into a house or lot. You can choose an already built house, or buy an empty lot and build from scratch. After that, start living! you have to get your sims a job, and help them fulfill their needs: hunger, by feeding them, comfort, by letting them sit down in a chair or sofa or couch, hygiene, by telling them to take a bath or shower (don't worry, nudity is blurred out), bladder, by making them use the toilet (also blurred out), energy, by giving them coffee, expresso, or making them go to bed, social, by having them do something with another sim, fun, by having them do something fun such as playing on the computer, and finally room, this is not a major thing, but to improve the room rating, just keep it clean, and put up paintings and such. So, should you get this game? Absolutely! It's worth it, although it can get kind of repetitive after a while, unless you get expansion packs, but despite that, go ahead and get it! It's worth it. Sims...how cool!! The Sims is the most funnest game I've ever played! You get to create a family, build a house, get jobs, control your family, and decorate your place in just your style. After you've gotten used to this game, buy one of the expansion packs to add other options to your Sims' lifestyle. A great gift, and a great game. THIS IS A DEFINATE BUY!! This is not a fast-paced game I give this game 4 fun stars out of 5 because the slowness can become tedious once in a while. It takes a long time to make friends, build skills, get promotions (just like in real life), and if all does not go well I get discouraged. Luckily you can choose to leave a family that is giving you trouble and play with a different one. I enjoy being able to build my own house, create characters with different personalities, and micro-manage every aspect of their lives. The game works well on Windows XP, but I would recommend a very good graphics card and 512MB of RAM to make it run smoothly. I had a couple of technical issues with it crashing, and a house and family disappeared from the neighborhood (though their neighbors can still call them up, strangely enough). I contacted EA and they were very unhelpful in resolving the issue. The game does have some bugs that can be fixed with downloadable patches. Plus you need to download a lot of things to make it more interesting, such as wall lights, new furniture, different wallpaper and flooring, etc. What comes with it is limited. I suppose this is why expansion packs are made. Four out of 5 stars overall because of the technical issues and the limitations.