Comments on: The Sims Sells 100 Million

By: sinister agent

sinister agent — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 13:56:42 +0000

Well done Maxis and EA’s slave drones, aye, but well done too (or comiserations, depending on your outlook) to the legions of fans who made the custom content that EA simply hoovered up and sold as expansion packs.

The Sims 2 is pretty fun, but if helps if you have a high frustration threshold and don’t expect it to work properly – it’s buggy as hell (largely because it appears to have been bashed together using code from the first, so I have low expectations for the next one frankly), but those bugs can lead to great amusement simply because they cause such weird and sometimes unsettling behaviour.

To get the most out of it, you need to treat it the way Maxis were always banging on about in the 90s with their -city/-ant/-life ‘software toy’ spiel, and just screw around with it. Unleash your inner soft furnisher, maid impregnator and bisexual casanova. I’ve no time for the people who’ll joylessly grind a ho-hum FPS to unlock everything but pour scorn on Sims fans because it’s not about macho men waving around their 9mm.

By: Dean

Dean — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 20:51:09 +0000

“There was a ‘moon colony’ game or somesuch once but it was a bit drab. if someone did a total conversion of the sims for star trek, I’d be well into it :D”

Startopia maybe? Played it recently, it’s good fun.

It’s amazing that The Sims was THE next big thing for a long while, until it actually came out. Even then the reviews were positive.

By: Stromko

Stromko — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 18:31:01 +0000

I actually spent a lot of time with The Sims and Sims 2, and I’m STILL cynical about it as a whole. The headline that the Sims has sold 100 million copies might be good for EA’s stock price, but really means nothing considering they’ve released about a hundred different Sims-branded games.

The vast majority of products were horrid and cheap, either avoiding the novel Sims gameplay altogether (every console variant) or charging 30$ for a few hours of poorly balanced content (every expansion).

So, it’s not unlikely they’re still making insane profits on the series, no matter how many products it took to reach 100 million sold.

By: Turin Turambar

Turin Turambar — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 18:09:45 +0000

I played for 3 or 4 days the first one. That’s it.

By: malkav11

malkav11 — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 17:20:50 +0000

Space Colony was the Sims-clone in space. Kinda. (You can’t create the characters, which I think is part of the draw of the Sims.) It’s pretty fun and available on Gametap, in the US.

By: Dave

Dave — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 16:13:46 +0000

To my wife, the Sims is a dollhouse, Lego set, storytelling medium, and a kind of Garry’s Mod for creating illustrations, as well as a challenging game. She has mastered all the command-line cheats, and regularly recolors and retextures clothing and objects. She has all kinds of opinions about how the tools and AI could be improved, and the fashion sense of the artists.

To me it was a horrible bore. Too much work to tell mini-me when to relieve himself. I always died of depression or burned to death trying to cook. That’s a little too much like real life. :)

By: James

James — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 15:00:26 +0000

As others have mentioned, the Sims has a gateway drug capacity like no other game I’ve ever seen. Most people I’ve put onto it only play it for a while, but sometimes all that’s important is putting the foot in the door, so to speak. It’s sort of like a great big show of “see what games can be?”

Personally, I love the idea a lot more than the execution. I can play it for a while, but I’ve spent far, far more time in the character creation and house renovation side of things than I have actually *playing* the game, but I don’t know that there’s anything wrong with that. Those editors have an incredible intuitiveness to them, which is always nice to see.

By: Jockie

Jockie — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 14:17:01 +0000

I can’t say i’m wholly surprised to see this. The Sims damn it’s black heart is the only game that ever managed to get my mother addicted to it.

For a period after the first game came out i would find her sat in front of my PC for hours playing it, and well, i don’t think i’ve ever seen her play a computer game before or since. Talk about Universal appeal.

By: Jim Rossignol

Jim Rossignol — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 12:02:02 +0000

Yeah, there’s a definite gap for The Sims: Spaceship.

By: Adel

Adel — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 11:58:29 +0000

I played and enjoyed the original Sims. I also played and enjoyed Kudos (and Rock Legend!). Can’t wait to see Kudos 2, Cliff.

I don’t know about other people, but The Sims scratched my consumerist side’s itch and let my inner [nightmarish] interiour designer shine!

By: heliocentricity

heliocentricity — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 11:41:45 +0000

but why oh why oh why is there not a fantasy or scifi version of the sims?

Different markets though, scifi isnt tuned at being open to everyone.

That said, they could simply have it so sim3 had different/custom villages which could be anything, a space station for example.

I always used to make the outsides of my sims houses as orwellian as possible, when my girlfriend played she’d see these black and grey monoliths on the horizon and people, whole famalies of identical black suited men would visit her.

Ah… the Gnome villa, a 4 story building, build underground the top covered in gnomes, owned by a familiy dressed like gnomes (custom skin) who work in a gnome production sweat shop.

By: Jay

Jay — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 10:56:08 +0000

I liked The Sims! Well, sort of. I really much preferred to build houses and buildings – that was the best part for me, which is a hangover from my Simcity days. I let my sister play the game proper though, making me build the houses.