Sunday 20 October 2002

Pic of the day: They do this a lot.

Sims Unleashed again

In my first review of this game, I broke with a trend both for myself and reviewers in general, and said something negative about a Sims expansion pack. Today I will confirm and expand on this.

So far, we Sim owners have more or less automatically bought each new expansion pack if we could afford it (and the upgrade of computer necessary to run it). I recommend thinking twice about getting Sims Unleashed. If you have missed pets in the game, for instance because you are used to pets in your home and want the game family to reflect your own, go right ahead. If not, think twice.

Yes, the neighborhood is now much larger. But you are likely to have a harder time making friends, not only with the new neighbors but with those in the smaller neighborhood too.

When you have neighbors over, if it is afternoon or evening, there will be stray cats and dogs. These will grab the attention of your guests. So instead of talking with you, they will be off petting strays. I suppose the strays will disappear if you chase them away regularly, but by default they are there and compete successfully for the attention of your guests. You can of course still take the initiative yourself and talk to your guests; but because of the personalities involved, there are times when a conversation works much better when the guest initiates it. (This can happen when the guest's main interest is a medium interest of the host, while the host's main interest is a non-interest for the guest.) Besides, the guest are all over the lot, chasing stray cats and dogs, so you have a long walk. Gathering people for a meal similarly takes half an hour or more when they need to walk from the edge of the lot.

***

Not satisfied with distracting your guests, the strays will also pee on your pavement. Not once in a blue moon, but every night, and in several places. When you run for the carpool in the morning, the room value of your outdoors is way in the red, and your mood falls accordingly, and with it your work performance. You will now have a harder time reaching a promotion, unless your character rises early to clean up the stray pee.

The answer to this is to enable the cheat code MOVE_OBJECTS ON. You can then click and delete the puddles of pee. You should already have this enabled, because flood water from showers and broken sinks and such can no longer be dried up by the Sims when there are objects in the same square. Feel free to also delete skunks; the official thing to do is to call a new service number, and pay for having them removed. That's probably realistic; but along with all the rest, the game now has so much nuisance that it is barely playable without cheat codes.

I'm not sure if this came in with the current expansion or whether it's been there before and I only noticed because of the tighter time squeeze. But the Sims now will turn to one side and another before moving; sometimes they will turn a full round, for instance every time they clean dishes. I know this is realistic, but you would think it was already factored in when they use 15 minutes to cross the floor. The game does not run in real time ... by default, 1 second represents 1 minute. This means their turning around can easily take a couple minutes extra, and that's NOT realistic in the least. (I believe this, and aimless walking into the bathroom or kitchen with no errand there, started in a previous pack. But as I said, the time is now so squeezed that it becomes a real nuisance.)

Forget to have a job and a pet. The pet needs food and attention and lots of cleaning up. The day is simply too short. (Again, because the game happens in compressed time).

In conclusion, we have reached a point where the game should offer the option to halve the time proportion (so you can do twice as much during a day). This would allow people to enjoy all the nifty features in the game. As it is, it has become a stressing strategy game where you have to think hard (or cheat) to keep your head above water (or in this case, above pee). I believe people have enough of this in real life.