However, there occasionally comes a time where a concept, game, or parts of a game blow my mind so much that I simply have to point out the flaws. Today is one of those times. I will be putting a negative view on a game series that is actually a fairly popular one, which is once again a very rare thing. Today, I will be complaining about...Sims.
Who hasn't heard of this series? I mean, c'mon, really. It's one of the most popular PC game series known to mankind. It started out big, and to this day it still has quite the fanbase.
If for some reason you don't really know what the Sims is about, allow me to explain. Tomorrow morning, wake up, eat your breakfast, get dressed, and do everything you normally would on a that day. You don't have to wear anything unusual, do anything unusual, just go out and do what you usually do. If you have a job, go to work. If you're a mother, take care of your kids. And then at the end of the day, go to bed. Congratulations, you've just played Sims.
In Sims, you live the life of a human being on earth, and you simply live your life. The apparent "appeal" to this game is the fact that you can live your life exactly how you want it. Have your dream house, your dream spouse, your dream neighborhood, you can literally make life almost exactly how you want it for your little self in the PC. And this is exactly why I don't like this game: the concept.
Now to be fair, it's not the simple concept that the entirety of the problem. I do enjoy games where you personalize things and put yourself into the game. In fact, those are some of my favorites. However, Sims is actually very different compared to those games, and I will use some examples.
I really enjoy Animal Crossing, and it's one of those kind of games. You move into a new town and decorate your house, your character, and do all sorts of different little activities. It even follows real time, which means when an event happens in the game at 7:00 P.M., it's occurring during the actual 7:00 P.M.
However, there's one major difference between this game and Sims: the setting. In Animal Crossing, the setting was already made for you. It's a colorful world where everyone are animal-people, where money falls out of trees, and where you can sell anything, even garbage. It's creative, silly, and possibly the greatest draw to Animal Crossing.
Sims has a setting set for you too...THE WORLD YOU FREAKING LIVE IN!!!! Yes, you can take creative liberties, yes there are things like aliens and magic, but they're not anywhere near creative. The aliens look exactly what you'd expect an alien to look like in the real world, and they act how you would expect them to act in the real world. It's still on completely based on the world you could experience by simply standing up, doing outdoors, and looking around.
Harvest Moon is another example. You take up the life of a farmer as a young man, and live the life of one. Grow crops, raise farm animals, and even meet the woman of your dreams. Once again, a game that I love playing. And once again, this game, unlike Sims, has aspects that make it creative and unique. All the characters are drawn in a Chibi-style format, and the world is filled with creative characters, unique scenery, and wonderful music...Sims has NONE of those.
And finally, the BEST example, Rune Factory. Rune Factory is quite literally what it claims to be: a fantasy Harvest Moon. You still are a farmer, you still can raise animals, and still marry a girl...but there's magic, and weapons, and the animals aren't farm animals but cool monsters, and there's an amazing story and great music and oh man...I could keep going on and on about how amazing these games are.
One of the greatest points of video games is to immerse yourself in a world where you can do the impossible. Play Mario and have incredible agility, be Sonic and run at ridiculous speeds, be Link and save the land of Hyrule, things that are impossible and don't exist in the real world! Yes, there are real-life roots, but they're just roots, and aren't very visible from the outside. Seeing worlds unlike our own excites us and interests us, and it is such a big part of what video games are.
Sims isn't a poorly made game. Indeed, for what it's trying to accomplish, it's made fantastically for it. The graphics are done well, the gameplay is fairly smooth, and design-wise, it's not bad at all. It's what it's trying to accomplish is what's so mind boggling to me. Never in my life have I once thought "You know what, I want create another me and watch myself live a perfect life". If anything, it'd probably make me more depressed about how my life really is!
If games like Animal Crossing, Harvest Moon, and Rune Factory didn't exist, then I would be fine with playing a game like Sims. But those games exist, and they're so much better that there's simply no point to playing them. It's just like android games. I don't play them, because why play Angry Birds when I can turn on my 3DS and go on wild adventures in Monster Hunter? Sims is not a poorly made game, but the concept has been done so much better that there's no point in playing it, especially if you have the means. If you're going to imagine yourself in a world, don't do in this world, where what you do is possible, but do it in a world where you can do things that simply can't be done in this world.
