Lies, Damn Lies

Drowning the sims

The game "The Sims", has proven hugely succesful, selling millions of copies across the world. It's a fairly simple game, where you control little people's lives- get them jobs, furnishing, design their houses, make them fall in love, have children and snub enemies. It's an amusing game, although frustrating because most of the sims have apparently had a lobotomy, and won't even go to the toilet unless you tell them. Instead they'll pee on the floor and get extremely upset.

This is actually a theme of a lot of god games where you are meant to look after some minions- they are often phenomenally stupid. See Black and White, where to get magical power you must get your worshippers to dance around a giant altar. Which is fine, but for some reason it doesn't occur to them that you're fine with them taking a break to, you know, eat, so they will dance and starve to death if you're not watching....

Another feature of the Sims is, that if you neglected them accidentally, they would die. Not horribly- they would simply be collected by a comedy grim reaper, or just fade into the sky. Now this is the feature that interested me the most.

After exploring the mundane version of the game, the REAL games begin. In my case, they included hiding their toilet in the middle of an extremely complex hedge maze, forcing them to naviagate it before they could relieve themselves (which they were surprisingly good at). Setting them in a room with no doors and lots of very flammible objects. Or, my favourite, putting a diving board on a pool but no ladder... so they can't get out once they have got in. One by one they make the jump of doom....

I have yet to meet a person who has NOT done this. I think it's more to do with exploring what the game allows. And also the extreme hatred you develop for the useless bundle of pixels as they refuse to perform the simplest of tasks without your aid. SIMS MUST DIE!

Ahem.

Labels: gaming, rant

posted by Mr K @ 10:32 am