4/28/2023 0 Comments Paralives early accessFast-forward a couple of decades and I’m frowning in bemusement at my screen because none of these faces look exactly right, and that’s unacceptable! I didn’t start this article expecting to be arguing that detailed character creators are the death of imagination, but here we are. None of the skins in The Sims 1 remotely resembled them, but I was able to read onto them the references I wanted. As a 10-year-old, I went in already wanting to use The Sims to re-create my favourite characters from pop culture. It may be embarrassing to admit this, but my play-style in The Sims hasn’t changed a huge amount in the last 20-odd years. It reminded me of how, perversely, technical and graphical improvements in games can actually be limiting our creativity in a way. Even though I remembered the process of the original CAS, I was honestly surprised by how limited I felt while picking just two skins - combining a pre-set head with a full-body multi-purpose outfit - for each character. In recent years I’ve lost entire days to The Sims 4’s Create-A-Sim, tweaking everything from facial features to outfit accents in minute detail. I remember when this was my everyday life, oh I do.īut it’s hard to escape from the fact that even starting a new game of The Sims 1 in 2023 feels… off, if you’re a fan of the newer games, even if you’ve been with the series from the start. And in performance terms, if it’s a little creaky at times (and my return did include one particularly distressing two-hours-of-gameplay-down-the-drain crash), it’s certainly no worse now than it was back in the day. What I mean is that it looks nearly as good as I remember it, which is actually impressive when you think about it. Still, it’s true that the original graphics still look surprisingly good: stylistically it’s properly retro, as in it’s what a retro-inspired artist would probably put together today. Even though the computer was old, the game was even older thus it was a little over-specced, and the game didn’t look or run quite as fantastically as it did in its prime. I elected, on this occasion, to install The Sims on a Windows Vista machine from 2008, five years after the game’s final expansion/update. Luckily, I had the presence of mind to hang on to those original CD-ROMs, so revisiting the franchise’s origins to see how it’s holding up these days was comparatively easy. As a pre-teen, I eagerly awaited the biannual visit to Toys R Us that would see me return home clutching my latest digital plaything. It wasn’t until Maxis was acquired by Electronic Arts in 1997, and EA expressed interest in an expanded SimCity franchise - on the understanding that paid add-ons would be quickly forthcoming if the concept proved popular - that development on The Sims really got off the ground.įor most of The Sims’ four-year lifespan, I was in lockstep with every new expansion pack release. LCP also doesn’t seem to have met sales expectations, judging by the fact that a series of planned add-on expansions never ended up getting made.Īfter Little Computer People fizzled, there seemed to be little appetite among developers for returning to the “virtual dollhouse” genre, and Wright’s higher-ups at Maxis were unsure whether the idea was worthy of investment when he first pitched The Sims to them in the early ’90s. This Activision title was reasonably well-received in its day, but largely dismissed as a low-challenge educational game suitable only for young children. Social simulation wasn’t an entirely new genre, and indeed Wright drew inspiration from 1985’s Little Computer People (alternatively known as House-On-A-Disk).
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