I remember playing the original game and while it was mildly amusing for about an hour, it quickly became repetitious tedium. I compare it to playing “virtual house” or perhaps computerized dolls. It’s just not my type of game.
I always thought of it as an update of The Little Computer People Project.
I used to be really into it, but then I realized that I was wasting all of my real life time trying to manage fake people time. And I found it to be incredibly stressful.
I enjoy watching their sexual escapades.
I don’t get it either. Not my cup of tea at all.
I enjoyed creating dynasties, designing houses, playing with genetics, and creating stories for the sim neighborhood (When I played, it was my own personal soap opera.)
I don’t play it as much, as ‘Sims 3’ has a bug I can’t get around (disappearing baby in crib in my main family). A few of the later expansion packs have really changed the game for Sims 3 though. The ‘Adventure’ expansion pack basically has you playing a Sim who goes on quests (Exploring tombs, fighting mummies, uncovering plots etc…). I expect the Sims Medieval will be like this and therefore more attractive to the average gamer.
Because, since it’s completely mindless, it’s a good game to play in between bouts of something else. Even better: it combines utter mindlessness with levels of destruction rarely seen outside of a gore movie - if you feel like it, that is.
Why do I like the Sims? My sig may explain it a bit.
I had fun for awhile creating Sims of me and my girlfriend in our appartment and running various scenarios. Disturbingly, most scenarios seemed to end with her Sim dying in a kitchen fire and mine going insane.
I got the first one and it was fun for about 3 days and then it got boring. I mostly just played trying to find fun ways to kill my sims.
I had the first Sims game and loved it. My favorite part was downloading user-created modpacks off the internet to add everything from new outfits to house parts. One time I found some very cool architectural mods and built a whole neighborhood of Craftsman and Frank Lloyd Wright-style houses. Another time I built a “haunted” house with some Goth-type decoration mods and populated it with a zombiefied couple (in the first Sims game you could plead with Death to rez your dead spouse, but if this worked they always came back as a zombie).
I didn’t end up doing much actual life-management in the game. That part was kinda boring to me.
I just loved building houses. Once I installed the Sims, it wasn’t quite as much fun. But it was fun watching them interact with the stuff I put in there.
Why is playing with dolls fun?
I always tended to enjoy building the houses, but once it got down to playing with the Sims, it got boring very quickly. So, I could always get enough enjoyment as a basic architecture sim, but not much else.
I’m also one who loves building and decorating the houses, and landscaping. The Sims play part is fun, but secondary.
I bought the first Sims when it came out. I never even finished the tutorial. The interface was so counter-intuitive to me that I just couldn’t make it work.
For me, it was kind of like dolls, legos, and sea monkeys all combined into one. But I’ve only played the older Sims titles on the PC, like the original and the first couple of expansions.
And if you get bored enough, you can put eight people in a house with only one bathroom that has two doors in it.
It’s a virtual dollhouse. I got the first game when I was about ten and played it endlessly, although like many in this thread it was more fun building the houses and buying stuff than actually playing with the sims themselves. They were kinda stupid, pissing all over the floor and such. I also liked reading on the internet about all the “easter egg” type things you could do, like certain things would appear if a certain object was in a certain place at the right time, etc. then trying to make them happen.
One of my favourite things to do was to put the sims in the pool then delete the ladder so they had no choice but to swim themselves to death. Fun!
I skipped over The Sims 2 and got 3 when it came out but the magic had worn off.
Heh, I should have known I wasn’t the only one who loved designing the houses more than the actual game. I remember the house that looked so cheery and pleasant on the outside and for much of the interior…until you discovered the secret room with the HR Giger wallpaper and demonic furniture. Whoever made those mods, bless your heart.
Besides that, I liked giving the Sims the names of people I knew or characters I loved, so that the stories that played out took on an added level of meaning. Why, look at that – Heathcliff is spurning Cathy and flirting with Mr. Rochester, tee-hee! But after a few days, it would get stale.
I’ve been tempted by Sims Medieval, though – some of the details sound adorable (if you choose the back history of “parents killed by whales,” for example, you get Whale Rage periodically, which can be satisfied only by screaming at the sea or killing a whale in revenge).
Yeah, building the house was the hour of mild amusement I got out of it. I would have gotten much more enjoyment out of some floor plan designing software. In fact, I’m going to look into that right now…