Features

For a number of years “The Sims” has been one of the most popular games on the market...mostly the PC market mind you, but there have also been releases of the game on the Xbox, Playstation 2, PSP and even on the Nintendo DS. This time round Electronic Arts has done a revamped version of the game aimed more at the younger market. With characters that look more cartoon like and perfect for the Nintendo Wii market, EA may well have a big seller on its hands once more.

Discover A New Town And Make It Your Own! Explore a new world with MySims—it's your world to transform! Move to a town that has been struggling lately. With a little creativity and some help from the locals, you can make this place thrive. Improve the town to attract new characters, from Chef Gino Delicioso and DJ Candy Supergroove to arcade owner, Vic Vector and Cap'n Ginny, the town pirate. Discover what the residents want and need, so that you can help them enjoy life in your Sim's new town. Design a hot tub or jukebox from scratch; build homes and businesses from the roof to the front door. Uncover special decorations and patterns as you explore the growing town. From the furniture and objects to the buildings to the town as a whole – each of your creations is unique. In MySims, what you make... makes all the difference!

• Build and customize an entire town — Your town is your own unique creation, from the design of the flower shop to the layout of a Mad Scientist's laboratory, and beyond.
• Shape the community — It's your call who lives there and who moves out! Who will you befriend? Who will you ignore?
• A whole world to explore — Socialize with the locals and uncover all sorts of useful and surprising treasures hidden throughout the town.
• Create your own Sim — Personalize your Sims appearance from head to toe with the Wii controls. Unlock cool new clothing as you befriend the neighbors.
• Design your own stuff — Decorate with your very own furniture and accessories, then customize your creations with things you can grow, harvest, or discover around town.

How Does It play

MySims looks far less like The Sims and more like another Nintendo title called Animal Crossing. This isn’t really a bad thing as it does push the game out more to the Wii market. The game is colourful and full of sweet characters that have a unique style to them. So if you are coming into the game hoping for a full blown “Sims” title, then you will want to look elsewhere. The game really cuts this down to more friendly, easy going title.

The objectives in MySims are simple. You are a builder who is tasked with the challenge of getting your new town back to its former five-star rating. Doing this means you have to construct houses, buildings, complete tasks, search out items and interact with the characters you meet during the game. As you can tell from this, the game is a much more simple “Sims” title than any other has been.

The game starts off with you creating your Sim, naming them and then naming the town and starting the game off. The Wii Remote is used to create your sim, you simply point with the remote at the on-screen character model, choose the fair, colour etc and go through various clothes to wear. This only takes a very short time to do and is easy for anyone to use. The only problem here is that once you start to play around with it, you wish that there were more selections available for you to use.

The good news is that the Wii Remotes ease of use in creating your characters is also the case when using the user interface during the main part of the game.  At the start of the game you will meet a number of people, such as the town mayor who helps you create your first house and furnish it. You may get asked to build restaurants or other such tasks for the computer controlled Sims in the game. These are all fun to perform as everything is so easy to use and anyone can do it. You collect the essences needed for the items then go off to your workshop and build the items.

Using the Wii Remote to customise and build items is simple, you can grab objects, rotate blocks and then point and click to add things such as colours and patterns to them. You are giving a basic blueprint for the items that you need to build, but you are free to build them how you like to make your own kind of style for each item. The game has been made so that you have the option to do things how you like, so your town will have the look and feel just as you want it to.

The first world is small and doesn’t really have that many other characters for you to interact with, but the more you play and the further you get, the more people come to the town, more and more of the area opens up as you get the star ratings up further and further, you also unlock special items as you go to, some can be used to increase the size of the town as well.

Not everything is perfect though, as we have mentioned no end of the times, the game doesn’t have the same feel as “The Sims” does, this is because there isn’t much of a social aspect to the game, you don’t have a job, you don’t need to sleep (you can, but don’t have to) and you only talk to people when you need to have a new task. Essences (the items to build things) are good fun at first, but later in the game that can get harder and harder to find which a frustration that could have been avoided is.  The worst part of the game though is the loading, nearly everywhere you go requires a load of some sort, enter a building, load, leave building, load etc – this is a real shame as without these load times the game would have got a higher mark and would have been a game you kept on playing and not getting frustrated with.

Final Comments

So overall I liked the game, it is fun to play, has a good presentation that I’d like to see advanced on in a future “MySims” title, I would have liked to have seen some kind of internet aspect to the game, as well as blending in Nintendo’s Mii avatars into the game. Fans of “The Sims” probably won’t like this game much and will say it dumbs the franchise down, but in fairness to EA they are not aiming it at that market, they are squarely aiming it at the younger, family gamers who have flooded to the Nintendo Wii, this is also a game that does have very good use of the Wii remote and the nun chuck . So a good game, marred by some very poor loading times, but I do hope it sells well enough for there to be more releases of the game in the future as I can see this becoming a big title over time.