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PC Games (Games)

Greatest Games - The Sims 57

Posted by Zonk from the pull-the-strings dept.
Gamespot has another article in its continuing series on 'The Greatest Games of All Time'. This time they profile The Sims, the Will Wright PC classic. From the article: "While The Sims was certainly revolutionary, it wasn't simply the revolution that makes it one of the greatest games of all time. Like all truly great games, it is the timeless and continually entertaining gameplay that makes The Sims so worthwhile. And while in the years since its release there have been many more versions to choose from, there's something quite heartwarming and familiar about the original game and its very specific choices, the sublime stainless steel refrigerator, the Henry Moore-esque statue, and that handy dandy little burglar alarm."
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Greatest Games - The Sims More

Greatest Games - The Sims

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  • Am I the only one... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by SoCalChris ( 573049 ) on Thursday December 01, 2005 @10:32PM (#14162941) Journal
    That found the Sims to be totally boring? After about 10 minutes of playing it, I realized that you could build walls around the people, and kill them. That was the highlight of the game. If I want to worry about being late for work, making dinner, cleaning up, excercising, etc..., I'll just quit playing and go on with my life. Isn't the point of playing a game like that to get away from worrying about things like that?

    • Re:Am I the only one... (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Seumas ( 6865 )
      No, I definitely agree. One night of sitting around in a virtual house making pizzas for hours on end with a bunch of giddy chicks over the internet is enough, thanks. How people can play for hours, days, months and years on end is beyond me.

      The Sims is like a giant barbi house. Therein lies its demographic.
      • Barbie house. Not an actual game. Good! I feel better with the realization that my adored Myst is still the #1 best-selling computer game ever... huh? What do you mean, "slide show"?

      • No, I definitely agree. One night of sitting around in a virtual house making pizzas for hours on end with a bunch of giddy chicks over the internet is enough, thanks.

        That's The Sims Online, not The Sims - two very, very, different games.

        How people can play for hours, days, months and years on end is beyond me.

        How people can play FPS games with their endless cycle of "see enemy > shoot enemy" escape me... Different strokes for different folks.

        The Sims is like a giant barbi house. Therein lies its d

        • Re:Am I the only one... (Score:2, Interesting)

          by Seumas ( 6865 )
          Worrying about meals and diapers and house cleaning and employment are something we all do on a daily basis. Most people can't jump into an Apache and go blow the fuck out of dozens of other people in a war ala Battlefield2.
          • Even in battlefield2, most people can't just hop into an Apache, given all the soldiers lying in wait for it to respawn.

            I'm hoping they'll integrate the Sims and Battlefield 2 so that I can take an Apache to those neighbors with the nicer house and appliances.

    • Re:Am I the only one... (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I agree with you about the boringness of the Sims, then again: It hasn't been a big selling game for nothing; And also, it has brought games to alot of people who wouldn't normally consider playing one.

      And no: As a first-person shooter-gamer: I'd rather sit at home than fight a -real- war outside(which would be equivalent to your Sims case).

    • I really never saw the difference between Sims and Tetris... Except Tetris got harder after a while. On the other hand, after she played Sims for about 10 hours straight, my girlfriend turned off her PC and started cleaning the house for the first time ever.
    • I'm with you there.

      It was the moment when I realised I'm telling my Sim to clean the toilet that I realised that a) I'm impressed that they went to that level, and b) WTF am I doing playing this game?

      It astounds me that people actually continue to play this game.

      Buy an ant farm, please!
    • Yeah. It's no fun to simulate the drudgery of real life. Work all day just to barely have enough time to sleep. Weee, what a fun game. Why clean my sim's house, when I could just clean my real house and improve myself.

    • Re:Am I the only one... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by afabbro ( 33948 ) on Friday December 02, 2005 @02:33AM (#14164035) Homepage
      I got a copy just before traveling for a couple weeks...really tried to get into it while chilling in the hotel...just could not.

      The classic answer is "well, that's because you're a male. Females like the virtual dollhouse. It all goes back to the dawn of time when men were out hunting woolly mammoths and..."

      That may be. But for me it wasn't the lack of things to kill or the non-goal-oriented nature of it or even the "there is no winner" gameplay. It was two things:

      • All the tedious, day-to-day bother of going to work, paying bills, etc.
      • The stilted social model

      The worry, bother, and stress of the Sim's day-to-day life was a big putoff...all that time spent trying to keep your dudes and dudettes happy & balanced, on time for work, socially fulfilled, etc. I just didn't find that fun. It's just chasing dollars (er, Simoleons) or trying to get meters aligned right. When kids play with dolls, they skip over the boring stuff! Why wouldn't a game?

      I'd expected that tedium of that to be handled by the game while I focused on more interesting things (relationships, etc.) A game where you're constantly mapping out relationships among many people, interacting, building social networks, and of course all the politics that goes along with that could be very interesting. But no - it was a constant struggle to get the bills paid, keep everyone from being depressed, etc. Just a lot of chores that were not fun. I also found the social scale rather lacking - I expected hundreds of Sims, not handfuls.

      I also found the focus on "stuff" rather tedious. This is not to say I've abandoned materialism, live in a yurt, and eat only grasshopper droppings. But the game focused too much on stuff to buy, how to decorate your house, etc. The interactions with other Sims was rather crude and didn't go anywhere besides marriage and reducing your loneliness. The only reason to interact with other Sims is to push a lonely meter down. If I took either life or the game more seriously, I'd make some weighty comparisons between real life and the game, since tedious materialism and empty relationships often abound in each...

      I am willing to stipulate that perhaps if I'd really gotten into the game (beyond two weeks of nightly play), perhaps I would have found strategies for raking in loot, etc. that would have reduced that part of the tedium. But to me it's just a flawed focus...all of that day-to-day boring stuff should have been out of scope and done by the game, while I focused on Fun Stuff. And nothing would save the social model - perhaps because computers simply aren't there yet to make really interesting social simulations.

      • When kids play with dolls, they skip over the boring stuff!

        Um, are you sure you've ever seen a couple of little girls playing with dolls? I have a 9 year old sister, and I'm 23, young enough to vaguely remember that time in my life, but too old to feel into it. When she was about 6, her friend would come over and bring all her dolls on a weekly basis.

        I caught snippets of what they were doing... do you think they were doing something grandiose? Like a wedding ceremony? Childbirth? Heck no, they
    • That found the Sims to be totally boring? After about 10 minutes of playing it, I realized that you could build walls around the people, and kill them. That was the highlight of the game.
      On the other hand, I find the mindless repetion of FPS games to be boring - variety is the spice of life.
      • Comment removed based on user account deletion
        • "... but see, FPS games have so much more variety, because sometimes you kill the other guy HERE, and sometimes you kill him over THERE. Then, if you're feeling particularly frisky, you can kill him with a DIFFERENT WEAPON.

          Variety! "

          Yes, but that too is repetitious. I think the popularity over FPS is the multiplayer aspect. The Sims BOMBED, yes totally BOMBED in taking their game online. I have NEVER played the single player version of an FPS, but always sent straight to the multiplayer.

          On a geek level, it'
      • I usually find FPS games boring as well, which is why I thought I'd like the Sims.

        I typically like games like Sim City (Only the first few versions, the last ones became too tedius), Roller Coaster Tycoon (The second version was best, the graphics in the third version I thought were horrible), Sim Ant, Civilization, Rise of Nations, etc. I thought the Sims would be something along the lines of the games I just mentioned, but it isn't.
    • Fantastic observation!

      So... Will you be my friend now? I only ask because I'm trying to get this promotion at work. If you do not comply now, that is OK; I will simply keep joking with you and giving you backrubs until you do. Be warned, however, that if I am too involved in rubbing your back or trying to tickle you, I may pee myself and yell nonsense into the skies.

    • found the Sims to be totally boring?

      No, I found it to be boring, too. Though I should admit that I also found your post boring, especially since you criticized the game so I can no longer do that. When I started reading the comments I was like, "man, I'm going to rip the Sims a new one, and probably everyone will mod me down because everytime I'm critical about anything I get modded down. Yet other people like you can be critical like that and get a +5 Interesting. It's like I'm a Sim and the Slashdot m

    • Do you love a challenge? Do you like speedrunning? Are you totally bored by your Sims game? Try the speed sims method! Put eight people in one house and build just one bathroom. Then set the game speed to two, turn on free will, and try to get them all to work in a decent state. I guarantee you'll be sweating in no time at all.
      • I had an 8 occupant single room home with separate beds and a stove near the door (jesus... sounds like some dorms I've visited). For extra fun I added a fireplace as well and put the smoke detector right over the stove on the wall. It only took about 20 minutes before I was left with 8 little piles of ashes. Another fun one was to put a small square room in the back yard. When the annoying neighbour comes over and goes in uninvited you can sell the door and erect a wall. It takes a while for him or her to
    • No, you're not. I'm in the same boat. I don't even know how I got the game. Found the CD in my house and my family claimed they didn't know where it came from. I threw it on my computer thinking that all the sim games had been great, so this one would not be an exception.

      I created some charecters and was dissapointed at the lack of charecter models. Didn't like any of them. Then I bought them a house... Tried to get them to do stuff. They wouldn't get up for work. There was trash everywhere. They

  • Choices (Score:3, Funny)

    by daeley ( 126313 ) on Thursday December 01, 2005 @10:34PM (#14162949) Homepage
    ...there's something quite heartwarming and familiar about the original game and its very specific choices, the sublime stainless steel refrigerator, the Henry Moore-esque statue, and that handy dandy little burglar alarm.

    ...the kitchens set on fire and all the exits suddenly missing, the swimming pools with all the ladders suddenly missing, the bathrooms with the door suddenly missing... ;)

    • Re:Choices (Score:5, Funny)

      by rubberbando ( 784342 ) on Thursday December 01, 2005 @11:48PM (#14163359)
      Yeah, that game really brings out the sadist in a lot of people....

      They should make an expansion called "Die! Sims Die!" where the Sims try to survive their cruel player. They run away from walls/obsticles that spring up around them. You would have to try and lure them to their deaths or into traps to capture and torture them. Also, I'd like to be able to drop in some monsters in the maze to hunt them down as well. Earn money to buy naster traps and monsters and such for each kill!

      Gawd I feel evil...but then the Sims kinda have that effect on many of us... ^_^;

  • Maxis Quality Control (Score:4, Insightful)

    by bleaknik ( 780571 ) <jamal@h@khan.gmail@com> on Thursday December 01, 2005 @10:57PM (#14163085) Homepage Journal
    Has anyone else noticed the decline in quality merchandise from Maxis as EA's interventions have increased...

    Prime Example... Sim City. Great Game.
    Sim City 2000. Wonderful Game.
    Sim City 3000. Somewhat enjoyable Game.
    Sim City 4. A shameless lust for more money.

    The Sims doesn't feel nearly as grand as everyone praises it to be. And the Sims 2 seems to have even less appeal. Does anyone remember the short-lived Sims Online? Was that silently killed by the suck that is EA?

    /shrug.
    • Sim City 4. A shameless lust for more money.

      I have SC4 and have found it to be enormously enjoyable, as well as allowing for a lot of creativity in terms of geographic/regional design. The other thing about the Sims franchise that needs to be remembered is that they're not violent. Violent conflict is what basically drives most other games available, and because that isn't present in the Sims/SimCity at all, people who are accustomed to violence can find the games boring.

      The original Sims took a while to ge
    • I found SC4 to have far superior gameplay than SC2000/3000. I have to give 2000 the hats off -- it was ahead of its time. I think 3000 was instead the "shameless lust for more money" since it didn't really expand the gameplay, but Sim City 4 really upped the simulation detail quite a bit. Although it may seem like work, it's nice to query buildings to find out their traffic patterns to try and get your city humming smoothly with busy subway stations instead -- things that were left totally out of the pic

    • Has anyone else noticed the decline in quality merchandise from Maxis as EA's interventions have increased...

      Prime Example... Sim City. Great Game.
      Sim City 2000. Wonderful Game.
      Sim City 3000. Somewhat enjoyable Game.
      Sim City 4. A shameless lust for more money.

      Myself, I see them as getting better over time. Better graphics, more options, better simulations, etc... etc...

      The Sims doesn't feel nearly as grand as everyone praises it to be.

      Not everyone does - nor does everyone praise Halo or Halo 2 either.

      • That alone suggest something is there, something big, even if the game does not attract the average Slashdotter.

        And that is because, *gasp*, there are more non-slashdotters than there are slashdotters.

        "Alternate" games can have a huge success while being totally non-appealing to the usual gaming crowd. That's because the people who are interested in shooting people and seeing blood everywhere, or playing sports while sitting in your living room, are a very small minority. Yet some publishers consider th

        • On the other hand, there's a company out there (I won't name it because it would make me sound like a fanboy)... That is why you see games like Pokemon or Nintendogs...

          The suspense is killing me! What company could you possibly be thinking of?

    • SimCity 4 is what Sim City 3000 should have been. Shiny 3D goodness, a (reasonably) robust traffic model, a MUCH more realistic budget, difficulty levels that means something after you've been playing the game for any length of time (instead of just crippling your starting cash)...

      SimCity 3000 Unlimited? THAT was a money-grab. =b

  • Spore (Score:1, Offtopic)

    by MastaShredda ( 878485 )
    We've all heard the hype surrounding this game, but you have the admit that the premise of Spore is very intriguing. If they really do pull off everything that they say the game will have, this could be one of the games to beat in the upcoming generation(s) of titles. I say generation(s), as they haven't given us many details short of what was announced at E3 and GDC. I for one am hoping that it really is as fun as it looks, and it might just be the breath of fresh air that gaming needs. Maybe all these fan

  • Coincidence (Score:2, Insightful)

    by 6ame633k ( 921453 )
    ...I just broke out the Sims2 Disk (a gift) last weekend since my T.V. was on the blink - a PC game was my only choice. I played for about 3 hours and realized that my Sims hadn't even been able to leave the house - such was their urgent bathroom, hunger and sleeping needs. WTF - I can forgo all of this stuff for a night out on the town - I found it annoying that my sims bitterly complained and couldn't "suck it up!" The Sims should have been called "Mundania" There is a certain sense of irony of being

  • A Myopic View of Games? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by MiceHead ( 723398 ) on Friday December 02, 2005 @04:33AM (#14164339) Homepage
    Most of the comments in this thread seem to support a view that The Sims simply Wasn't That Fun for a number of reasons. It certainly doesn't appeal to all, but I believe its many fans consider it to be among the greats. The Sims was one of the world's best-selling series because it has engrossed so many people.

    But those people may not be the same ones that like to spend hours wandering down dark corridors with a make-believe gun.

    They may not even be the same people that can appreciate the appeal of a game where you dress up as George Washington ordering people to discover...(fanfare!)...animal husbandry. Or a game where you can run people over for money. Or one where you follow an @ sign around the screen while it bumps up against a pile of lowercase a's.

    Those posts that describe The Sims as, "a game where you mop up puddles," are missing what its fans enjoy about it, just as the above descriptions miss out on what we love about Doom, Civilization, Grand Theft Auto, and Nethack. (Though perhaps that is actually a good description of Nethack. Lemme grab a cold ! and think about it.) There's more to these games than a wry description of a banal activity.

    Many critics tout The Sims as a Great Game because it brought many non-gamers into gaming without being so simple as to cater to the lowest common denominator. If Slashdotters don't connect with the game, I'd say that it's because our interests lie with other genres -- not because it's universally boring. The responses I see here are much the same as that of a non-gamer watching a Soulcalibur match and asking, "How can you even enjoy that? Hitting Y repeatedly is not fun!" The Sims may not hold the attention of a hardcore gamer for long, but is it beyond us to imagine why other people enjoyed it?
    • Maybe I'm totally crazy, but I loved The Sims. To clear up, I am male, 22, (maybe 18, 19 when I played the sims) Hardcore gamer, other favorites at the time were Half-Life, Medal of Honor, Warcraft/Starcraft, Counter Strike, Grim Fandango, Thief, Fallout, et cetera. I got The Sims and fell in love with it. It's a beautiful game, the art direction is fantastic, though the tech they were working with was not so great it didn't matter. The socializing simulation which has been called "stilted" in these comment
    • Not wanting to sound like a Slashdot elitist, but a lot of people love Reality TV and lap up every banal invocation of it. I believe most of us here despise Reality TV, but we're not the majority of the General Public.

      There must be something about watching the mundanities of someone else's life that appeals to a lot of people, but I don't know what it is.
  • The thing interesting about Sims is you can model yourself, experiment in behaviour/relations you wouldn't do in real life without thinking twice. Of course, spending 2 hours on the toilet a day is ridiculous, I do that while at work.

  • Dam EA (Score:2, Insightful)

    by ThePengwin ( 934031 )
    Excuse my french but EA Completly Whored out the Sims game.
    How many expansion packs do u say? seven???
    EA dont want to make the best game they want to make the most money. Who cares if it gets booring? as long as they can sell it.
    On the other hand i do like Maxis games. Sim tower was neat :P untill everyone moved out of my tower from too much noise :(
  • I am sort of the guy in the middle between those non-slashdot readers who made The Sims such an absolute hit at least in sales (and what else counts?) and the slashdot reading "hardcore" gaming who doesn't like any game that does not involve killing.

    The Sims sold, more importantly its expansions packs sold proving there is a large loyal crowd of players. After all just selling the main game does not prove populatity it could be that everyone dis-installs the game after ten minutes of play. But surely only

  • Good game? Yes.
    Experiment gone right? Yes.
    Game able to withstand time? Yes.

    "Greatest" game of any time period? No. Financially successful but lets face it, if it wasn't for the hardcore modders, the game would've gone stagnant years ago. The expansion packs offer beans compared to the meat and potatoes of the free online add-ons.
    Revolutionary? No, all they did was take SimCity and put it at the micro/Sim level. The only reason it was never done before was due to hardware limitations.
    Is The Sims' ability

    • The exact same argument can be leveled against the Half Life series. Without the niftiness of stuff like Counterstrike and Garry's Mod the entire series would have been 'just another FPS', instead of the juggernaut it is now. Any modern game which sets out to be a true classic seems to need one of two things going for it- either expandable by a mod community, or to be a MMORPG.

      • That's completely wrong. Yes the mod community helped by making counterstrike, which is no doubt an immensely popular game, but the fact is every single gamer I know loved Half Life when it first came out. I personally thought the single player was amazing and intense, and the weapons were fantastic.
        So I don't know what you're talking about when you say "Without the niftiness of stuff like Counterstrike and Garry's Mod the entire series would have been 'just another FPS',".
        In fact, I see it in top 10 PC g

        • I agree, Half Life was an incredible game, but so was The Sims. Both would have enjoyed relative obscurity compared to their current status were it not the free content, however. Let me explain more by going through the arguments as put forward and saying how I feel they apply to HL:

          Half Life was a very strong game, but if it wasn't for it's expansions it would have been stale years ago. The expansions (Blue Shift etc.) offer very little compared to the free online add-ons, such as CS.

          Half Life was in

      • Except the game was recieving awards like 'Game of the Year' and 'Best FPS' for years after its release. Counter-Strike and other popular mods simply came along too late in its lifetime to credit mods as the saving grace of Half-Life.
  • It's hard to take this article seriously considering their list [gamespot.com] doesn't even include the All-Time #1 Greatest Game of All Time [nethack.org]...
  • ... many of the concepts and ideas in The Sims were lifted wholesale from "Little Computer People", which I remember playing on my old Commodore 64 around the 1985/1986 timeframe. To me, LCP was just "cuter" and actually more fun. Sure, it got old... but when I played The Sims I think I played for all of two or three evenings then just tuned it out. Micro-managing the mundane is not my idea of fun.
  • Women.

    That's what makes The Sims the best selling PC game of all time. Will Wright created a game that women just drool over. He might as well just have called it "Dollhouse." The game allows women to play like they were little girls again, but without anyone questioning whether they have grown out of anything or not.

    That is the revolution behind this game, not exactly the game play.
  • I inherited the original game from somebody who bought it and didn't "get it". From a traditional perspective there wasn't much of a game here, killing people wasn't part of the plot, it wasn't a linear storyline, it had no fully rendered FMV sequences, special moves, or bonus levels. It wan't a "game" that gamers knew how to play. Which I guess accounts for the many comments above about various ways to kill sims, you have to have death in it, it's a video game! Which is not to say that people haven't found

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