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The Sims Online Review February 06, 2003 Tom Chick |
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Summary: The illustrious Tom Chick set aside his manhood to play The Sims Online, like only a professional game reviewer could. Fortunately the prolonged stay in the virtual world hasn't affected his keen critical mind, and he came back to us in one piece with perhaps the best TSO review ever. Please, a moment of silence for the masculinity of this American Hero, before we click and read!
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Best-selling. Game. Ever. Goes online.
With The Sims Online, the most successful computer game ever has become a massively multiplayer online game. Although the conventional wisdom is that it will blow the lid off the genre, it's too early to tell whether it'll be the commercial juggernaut that its offline counterpart has become. But whatever its commercial fate, there's no denying that Electronic Arts has done something, well, unconventional. Whether you regard it as successful depends on what you're looking for.
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You install the game, set up your account, log on, download the obligatory patches, and pick your avatar. Then you're staring at a neighborhood screen with some filters to help you pick out the different kinds of places you can visit. There are even dedicated welcoming locations, although these are arguably unnecessary; The Sims Online is probably one of the newbie-friendliest games you could ever hope to play. You select a location and, pow, you're in. Welcome to The Sims Online. From here on out, things get a little weird.
Not in Kansas anymore
Unless you're one of the beta testers who seems to knows everyone else, you'll probably spend most of your time dropping in, literally, on other people's houses. One of the many concepts sacrificed in taking The Sims online is the idea of a neighborhood and the people who live in it. Despite a recent patch to allow properties to be grouped under a name, there is no geography in The Sims Online. It is simply a collection of house-sized areas, each limited to eighteen people at a time. From the main screen, you pick one and suddenly materialize at its front door as if you were beaming down from the Enterprise. There's no concept of places being far, close, next door, or across town. It's a cyberworld where every place is adjacent to every place else and therefore nowhere is any place in particular.
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There are basically two kinds of places in The Sims Online: skill/money locations and social locations. Sims can use objects to improve their skills or earn money. For instance, a piano will improve creativity while a chessboard will improve logic. As you raise each skill, you'll unlock new animations that you can use while your sim is interacting with someone else. To encourage grouping, you get a bonus when you're doing the same thing as a group of other sims. Hence locations devoted to clusters of people making potions for money or talking to themselves in front of mirrors to improve their charisma. In these places, sims are just parked like so many cars. There are similar places devoted to earning money. These are like virtual sweatshops, with a dozen sims all but chained to an assortment of odd money-making machines. Quick, someone pass the Sims Fair Labor Act.
SIDEBAR: Tom denies any and all relation to Jack Chick. I would too.
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I gotta see a man about a horse
Actually, Maxis has built into these activities enforced breaks. Because The Sims Online carries over the same needs from the offline version, you'll occasionally have to unmoor your sim and send him to the bathroom so he doesn't pee all over the floor. Whenever your sim's needs get high enough, you'll have to manually walk him through the steps to his satisfaction: sleep, shower, eat, pee, pinball, or some such similar pattern. The interface isn't very helpful here. For instance, you can't tell your sim to clean up the dishes until after he’s finished eating. There's no way to tell him to sleep until he's fully restored his energy. Instead, you have to manage these mundane necessities before you get back to the important business of playing your guitar or carving a garden gnome out of wood.
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The interface is at its worst when it comes to chatting. Chat comments appear as thought bubbles above your sim. When people off screen chat, their thought bubbles appear at the edge of the screen. There's no scrolling back, so if you miss a comment, it's gone forever. You'll probably miss plenty of comments in a crowded room, where the chat is a mad splash of colored text with no indication of who's talking to whom, much of it obscured behind the interface or any private message windows you might try to open.
What you say?
Maxis’ effort to reinvent the chat interface undermines one of The Sims Online's greatest strengths. The criticisms that this is just a graphical front end for chatting aren't necessarily wrong. And they don't necessarily have to be criticisms. The Sims Online can be an interesting way to interact with people in the context of an online society. This is an important part of how the Internet is developing and to write off The Sims Online as a mere chat interface misses the point. A better criticism is that it's not a very good chat interface.
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Aside from the places devoted to "greening up" (i.e. improving skills) or earning money, there are places where The Sims Online is being put to some interesting social uses. Players have built some locations around meta-games, like dance contests or gatherings for some of the game's precious few interactive activities. There's a maze game for two players. There's a set of colored balls that behaves according to a very rudimentary physics systems, allowing for 'see who can kick a ball into this room first' challenges. The latest patch just added support for players forming bands, which requires group interaction to play music and earn money. You might stumble across some sort of godawful poetry reading or maybe even someone's online wedding. This sort of content can alternate between embarrassing and interesting, but they're ultimately insights the greater potential of The Sims Online.
SIDEBAR: The Sims is the best-selling game of all time. Very possibly the game with the most expansion packs as well.
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A place to call your own
After visiting other people's houses and maybe greening up your sim, you'll probably want your own home. So you spend your money, maybe pooling your resources with a roommate, and you build a house. You stock it. Then you sit back and wait for people to visit. Maybe you practice your animations, linking up a handshake with a giggle and followed with the special "Showin' 'Tude" that you learned for humorous effect. You can use this to greet people when they show up. That'll win them over! But since logging off closes your house down, you have to stay online, in your empty house, to wait for people to visit. So you're waiting. Waiting.
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At this point, The Sims Online reaches a level of existential absurdity worthy of Beckett. Actually, that might be giving it more credit than it deserves. It's more like a level of pathos worthy of Tennessee Williams; you're sitting in your new house like the mother and daughter in The Glass Menagerie, waiting for your Lady or Gentlemen Caller. Like as not, he'll pop in and then pop right back out. Maybe you should have named your house something that sounds like a strip joint: “Pleasure Palace” or “The House of Hot Loving” or maybe “Live Nude Girls”. Of course, that promises a certain type of visitor that you might not want.
Ennui online
This is when you realize the value of a level treadmill, or at the very least, intermittent goals. The Sims Online doesn't offer much to strive for, which is completely antithetical to the standard massively multiplayer online pattern, in which players are hooked by being constantly given little carrots to grab for: another level, a higher rank, a new spell, a better sword. The whole idea is to keep you chasing goals so you'll pay for next month. The Sims Online substitutes for this a simple skill system, but it discourages too much emphasis on skills by degrading them over time once they've reached a certain level. The economy, which is tied to the skill system because you make money based on your skill level, is used almost exclusively for building your own house, which is rather pointless without visitors. The whole endeavor is a waste of time, since you can just as easily visit someone else's house for the same effect. The Sims Online is hobbled by a lack of motivation to really do anything beyond noodle around and idly chat with the other players who are noodling around.
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One of the things lost since the original version of The Sims is the importance of AI-controlled Sims. Since everything is the result of a live person clicking on a button, there are none of the emergent behaviors that made the offline game so oddly compelling. You can't throw two people into a conversation to see whether their conversation bubbles will coincide. You can't wall the neighbors into your basement to leave them to starve to death. It's just not the same when you're hitting on someone's wife to see if his little AI will make him react with jealousy. It feels weird kissing a sim when you know there's another person on the other end of that sim, a person who might be bald, 47-years-old, and still living with his mother. It's ironic that these real people behind their avatars often have less personality than the offline AI. Half the fun of The Sims offline was navigating the web of computer-controlled relationships and adding your own family to the mix. You can't build a neighborhood and name its people after celebrities to see whether Nicole Kidman falls for Henry Kissinger or Robert Blake. Watching a room full of people mingle in The Sims Online is less like watching a room full of people mingle and more like watching some ill-conceived internet chat room. Every action and reaction is the result of someone clicking on an icon and activating it. Like Sartre's concept of hell, The Sims Online is other people.
SIDEBAR: Interesting that the first link to a search for ‘Jean-Paul Sartre’ on Google links to an AOL member. Who knew AOLers were avid philosophers?
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Shopper's delight
There is a fair amount of stuff to explore. The Sims Online does preserve the consumer's thrill of building a house and buying stuff to put in it, but the thrill is dampened by the fact that you might as well just go to someone else's house to enjoy their stuff. In addition to the standard items used for eating and sleeping, there's plenty of stuff to goof around with. The dance floor lets you choreograph your own routine by queuing up moves from a few dozen choices. The costume chests and hat racks allow from some pretty outrageous combos. You can swim, play pool, water plants, and feed fish. As pointless as it all may be, there's plenty to do. And Maxis will probably continue to add new goodies as the game goes on.
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Graphically, this looks like a faithful port of the offline versions of The Sims. Which means it's nothing to write home about. The Sims is an aging franchise that caters to the lowest common denominator of graphics cards and processing hardware. It's functional and colorful, but it looks sadly dated next to the latest generation of online games. But Sims veterans will feel right at home with all the bright floors, the loud wallpaper, the gaudy costumes, and the clutter of furniture and goodies. You might find some interesting themed locations, but a lot of players seem to be decorating their homes as if they were trying to make your eyes bleed. To Maxis' credit, there's a wide variety of avatar choices, so most people look distinctive enough to avoid confusion. It would be nice, however, if there were more than one body type instead of everyone being built like a contestant on Temptation Island.
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Lag is often noticeable, but rarely a problem. This ain't Counter-Strike. You use the mouse to queue up orders for your sim and he or she carries them out while you chat away with the keyboard. There are long stretches of the game, particularly if you're building up skills or earning money, when no input is needed. These are the times you can either chat with people, drum your fingers, or do something in a different window if you've figured out how to put the "-w" tag at the end of the shortcut to the game's executable. These are also the times when the pointlessness of the whole thing might bring your interest level crashing down around you. The secret to enjoying The Sims Online is weathering these doldrums without giving in to the urge to run away to EverQuest or give Dark Age of Camelot a try or maybe try one of the other classes in Anarchy Online. The most important skill for a player of The Sims Online is single-minded persistence.
SIDEBAR: Here’s Dante’s vision of Hell. If you’re interested on more information about Dante, try divinecomedy.org
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PROS
Community
Everyone's friendly and helpful. Most people are very willing to chat and it's easy to fall in with a regular group if you log on at regular intervals and frequent the same places. It’s possible to find some interesting types of interaction and meta-games.
Consumerism
True to the franchise, there's lots of stuff to buy and wear and play with. If you've got a lot of money, there's certainly a lot to spend it on. Even if you don't have a lot of money, you can play with other people's stuff.
Animation
The animations of the actual Sims are just as amusing as they were offline. It’s mildly engaging to see what animations you can unlock by increasing your skills. Too bad people don’t use animations to interact more often.
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CONS
Interface
The chat interface is a poorly organized mess. Guiding your sim through necessary activities requires too much real time hand-holding and should have been better automated.
Economy
What economy? Earning money is related to increasing skills, which is a mind-numbing exercise in tedium and micromanaging. However, there’s not much incentive to have money, because there’s not much incentive to buy your own stuff.
Gameplay
What gameplay? Once you're over the "build up skills to earn money" cycle, there's almost nothing meaningful to do. The most interesting content is generated by the players and it can be hard to find.
SIDEBAR: I just noticed that all Random Facts in this article have something to do with religion. Depressing.
| Final Verdict | Page:: ( 6 / 6 ) |