Customer Reviews

MySims

5 star:		(25)
4 star:		(31)
3 star:		(17)
2 star:		(10)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

My Sims is not like a normal Sims game. Personally, I love the anime style, and relaxed game play. You work on tasks you want to do, instead of trying to make sure your Sim stays happy and alive in previous games. You design houses, furniature, and decorate, as well as collect "essences" that are used to do pretty much all of the above. You ask new Sims to move into your town. The music is pleasant, and the "voices" of the Sims is adorable. It would have been nice if this game was wifi compatable, but it is not. I also was a bit disappointed with the number and amount of loading times for a wii game. However, its overall a cute game, that has been keeping me entertained. If you like games such as Animal Crossing, where you basically chat with neighbors, collect things, and customize your pad, you'll probably enjoy it. :)

My Sims has a lot in common with Animal Crossing and Harvest Moon -- it takes a while to play and you're not blowing things up with laser guns, both of which I feel are GOOD things.

You arrive in town and meet the mayor and get a tour of the town, then you design and build your house using the Wii controller and nunchuk by rearranging blocks and clicking them into place. If you don't like designing and building things, you might not like this game.

Other Sims games I've played on the computer or other consoles have struck me as being kind of creepy and not so much fun. I like My Sims MUCH, MUCH better than the other Sims games. The graphics are good and the overall spirit is much lighter and kinder. There's a sense of humor throughout the game. I still like Animal Crossing better, but this is a VERY good game and I recommend it if you have a Wii!

The game, while cute and fun, can get monotonous rather quickly, and is not as open ended as I'd like. When I bought it I thought you'd actually get to design the layout of the town, not just what the houses and furniture look like. The game can be relatively endless if you choose to chase every single blueprint and uber sim. Also the colors/patterns/shapes that are available make creating furniture fun. It's a great game for children or parents that have kids.

Pros:
-Easy to learn
-Fun to play
-Lots of people/tasks (I think 84 people)
-Hidden stuff/unlockables

Cons:
-Can be monotonous
-Not enough space (Only 29 spaces, of which 4 are already taken)
-Takes up huge blocks of memory on the Wii

Overall:
I enjoyed it, it's pretty good.

MySims should be a fun game.

Unfortunately, it's a very poorly programmed game. It's the first Wii game I've played that is absolutely loaded with "Loading..." screens. Although MySims isn't as graphically rich as Zelda: Twilight Princess or Metroid Prime 3, it somehow manages to display "Please wait" at least ten times as often as either game. Entering a house? Please wait. Want to edit the wall pattern? Please wait. Go fishing? Please wait.

In the meantime, the Wii's optical drive can be heard chugging away, constantly seeking and loading data. I'd never been conscious of the Wii's drive until I played this game. At first, I thought that I had a mouse infestation from all the scrabbling. Then, I realized it was this game. I now fear for my Wii -- I worry that this game is leading my Wii's optical drive to an early death.

As you progress in the game, the loading screens aren't enough; the game begins slowing down and becoming non-responsive as you try to play it, especially when you're "prospecting."

The game's concept and graphics are streamlined, and don't seem like they should push the Wii's limits. In reality, this game makes the Wii feel underpowered. I wonder if the programmers expected it to be played on a console with a hard drive? The Wii is capable of playing a game like this -- MORE complex than this -- without these glitches. It speaks poorly of EA that the game has these glitches.

My Sims is a promising installment in the sim genre, and a serious contender with mainstays like Animal Crossing and Harvest Moon. It is not a game for your "Mii"s, or a cute-ified version of The Sims, but a concept to itself. Your customized avatar rebuilds a town of your naming by enticing new neighbors into town and building them customized houses and furniture to suit their tastes. There are "essences" scattered around the town - growing on trees, swimming in lakes, and so forth. You gather these and reuse them as objects or paints to give furniture a special appeal: cute, fun, spooky, geeky, studious, and tasty. As you complete furniture requests for your residents, your town grows in popularity and adjoining areas open up with new places to explore and different essences to gather.

I like having specific quests to complete for my neighbors, rather than just giving them things that you think they'll like. It gives the game more of a linear progression, so you feel like you're actually progressing through the game. You can give random gifts and redecorate their houses and your own, so you're truly omnipotent. Apart from collection, the game's all about home design.

With any new franchise, there are design issues. When you're building furniture, you're doing it piece by piece to a blueprint on a grid, with different sized blocks in different shapes. The blocks you need for each piece are highlighted and snap into place when they're close to their location on the grid. But because the furniture is 3-dimensional, it can be very difficult to place all of the tiny pieces properly, especially if you're going against the plan. It can be very time consuming to make an intricate piece of furniture exactly the way you want.

There are also some problems with the menus. When you have a few essences, you can access them easily, but as the game progresses and you get more essence types, you have to scroll through all of them to select the one you want. If the essences were organized by type (geeky, cute, etc.), this would drastically cut down on that frustration. The Sims games do this for their "collections", so I really wonder why they rejected this feature for My Sims. The furniture and building pieces have a similar scrolling setup. When building, you have to leave and re-enter your workshop for each piece of furniture. If you want to redesign a neighbor's furniture, you basically have to steal it from them and take it back to your workshop to edit it. It would be better if there were some way to edit furniture directly in the houses.

But many of the design mechanics are impressive. Some artist obviously spent long hours making sure all of the essences in each category were complimentary to each other, and there are four different paint types for each essence you collect - generally, two patterns and two solid colors that represent the item you picked up. The variety of essences, blocks, and other objects is truly astonishing. Each neighbor has their own subset of decorations, and you can unlock new designs by giving them gifts of furniture that match their tastes.

My Sims will be instantly addictive to anyone who's ever played a sim game and wanted to design the town down to a micro level. There's a wealth of content that pushes the game past a stale freeplay sandbox and into a joyous explore-and-collect expedition. I hope they release a My Sims 2. With a few more features and some improvements to the interface, this game will solidify its place as a franchise to be reckoned with.

We love this game! There is a lot to do, I don't get bored like I did with Animal crossing, Sims game for Wii moves along a lot faster.You can choose who you have move in to your town & they don't leave unless you kick them out. There isn't a lot of waiting like in AC because the days aren't real time. I recommend this game for families.

I have played virtually every Sims game since the original SimCity game, and I think MySims fits nicely into the series. It is, above all else, simple. The graphics are 'cute' and attractive, not realistic. As other reviews have indicated, the 'social' aspect of the game is less important than it was in the previous Sims games. It is really about building and creation -- a hybrid of SimCity and the Sims, with an anime look. I do wish the character interaction was more developed, but the game is really quite fantastic -- and addicting. The goal of the game is really rather mundane, to construct buildings and 'stuff' to revitalize the town, but it is really great fun. Highly recommended, if you can get past the simplicity of it all. For the first time in MANY years, I am addicted to a video game.

Let's get it out of the way - MySims is not much like Sims. It's more Animal Crossing lite with an extremely detailed crafting and customization section. You won't get deep relationships and such out of this, what you will get is an amazingly adaptable game that can be compelling - if crafting is your cup of tea.

Essentially in this game you have the ability to use "essence", sort of spirits of various items, to customize furniture and objects. These add personality to said objects, and you use them to help Sims furnish their homes. However, you also get to design their homes, decide who moves in where, and even unlock new options for outfits, hairstyles, and more. Soon you're able to voyage to the far ends of the town in search of rare essences and new fronteirs.

The game is highly, highly crafting-centric, doing so with a surprisingly good engine that's overall pretty intuitive - and is like using building blocks. The level of freedom is amazing - you can take that simple Chair blueprint and turn it into a skull-bedecked throne, or give a Beat Box an Egyptian feel with some color choices. I myself even built an Interoceter from "This Island Earth."

This is all presented in a colorful, charming, cartoony manner with memorable characters and some amusing jokes (the band "Nothing But Drums" figures prominently). The Sims, which are pretty pre-programmed, are still endearing.

Frankly, this isn't a game for anyone who didn't enjoy building blocks, model building, and other crafts. Its not quite Sims really - but it is a lot of fun for people that do.

Okay. This is not a typical sims game but that is okay. I have been addicted to the Sims from the beginning on the computer but HATED the console ones. This was such a breath of fresh air for me. The console games were always too complicated to play with a controller and the tasks were too hard. I have only played for one day so far but this is a nice leisurely game to play with little frustration. I love the look and feel of the game and the tasks are so far nice. I rented and now am definitely going to buy this game as it appeals both to myself and my kids which is hard to find.

I'm a 29 year old female and I love playing MySims. I love it so much I bought the MySims game for DS (which is NOT just the same game on the hand held but different enough to warrant the buy) and the new Wii MySims Kingdom game. I have played The Sims game on the PC before and kind of enjoyed it but it only kept my interest for so long. I hated the fact that I always had to keep paying attention to the sims and taking care of their basic needs. Even if I made the sim have a lot of "neatness" he/she still threw trash on the floor and sometime forget to flush the toliet after using it or didn't wash his/her hands. I felt like I was taking care of a bunch of kids.

MySims is completely different. First off you only create one sim that you control directly like an avatar which made me feel more like I was actually IN the game versus just playing around with an elaborate dollhouse. The premise is that you just moved into a town that's run-down and the mayor asks for your help to make the town 5 stars again. You do this by building houses and furniture for other sims in their favorite "interests". There is 78 different sims you can move into your town or kick out if you want (Mayor Rosalyn, the hotel bellhop Buddy and the ghost Cassandra are always in town and can't be moved in or out which makes a total 81 sims to meet). Each of the sims has two interests they like and one they hate. When you build the houses for the sims you can use certain items (like windows, doors, flairs, etc) that have the same "interest" as the sim or when you paint the furniture you built you can use essences (apples you gather off of trees, stone you prospect out of the ground, fish you fished for) of the same "interest" to make the sim like it more.

The more furniture you build for the sims in their interests and the more you are nice to them, the more they like you. When you become the sim's "best friend" they will reward you with either a new blueprint or an item you can use to decorate your own house. You can always go back and remodel a house or kick one sim out and move another sim in or build different pieces of furniture to make your town exactly how you want it.

Controls:
Over all I found the controls very intuitive and not hard to use. However, when building or fishing for a while my wii remote hand would start to ache from using the B Button so much. Also, I would occasionally get frustrated building the more complicated furniture pieces but that was more the nature of the task was difficult not necessarily a flaw in the controls themselves.

Moving Around -- I found moving around town very easy. The joystick on the nunchuck is used to move your avatar around town. To harvest a tree you point at it with the wii remote, press and hold the B button to "grab" the tree and just wiggle the wii remote from side to side to "shake" the tree. When you are by something you can interact with like another sim, a tree or while prospecting you will have different interaction options displayed at the bottom of the screen. You just point at the option with the wii remote and press the A button to select (or you could cycle forward through the options with the B button or cycle backwards with the Z button and then A to select).

Fishing -- By bodies of water there are usually docks with a fishing bucket and a fishing rod where you can select the option to fish. After you select that option your avatar will throw the bobber into the water. You can move the bobber around with the wii remote. When you see bubbles on the surface (indicating a fish), you move the bobber over the bubbles, hold down the B button to "grab" and then pull up with the wii remote to pull the fish out of the water. I do find that after a period of time, my wii remote hand starts to ache a little bit from holding the B button.

Prospecting -- In certain areas you can select the option to prospect for different essences. In the prospecting mode, your sim will be holding something that looks like a metal detector that gives off circles of light of different colors (and makes a beeping noise). This is like a hot/cold game, the circles will be blue when you are far away (cold) and gradually turn to red as you get closer (hot). After you found something, you will get the option at the bottom of the screen to dig which again you can select by pointing at it with the wii remote and pressing A to select (or just pressing A since it's already selected).

Construction -- Building houses and building furniture use basically the same controls. For simple items I found the controls relatively easy to use however once I started making more complicated items it got a little tricker but still okay considering how intricate some of the pieces of furniture can be. You point at a building piece with the wii remote and press A to select it. Then you point to where you want it and press A again to place. If you change your mind about placing a piece you are holding you can press the B button to delete the piece (note: it's just the piece you're holding that gets deleted, you can still selected it again if you want to). The D pad is used to rotate the building piece you are holding. The nunchuck joystick is used to rotate the house/piece of furniture you are building (left and right) and to zoom in and out (up and down). There are more controls than I've listed here that allow you to do things like able to place multiple of the same piece in a row, turn off the ghost image, turn on/off slide under mode, etc. This is a case where I would definitely recommend reading the instruction manual especially once you try to build more complicated pieces.

Cons:
Other people have mentioned the loading times. Every time you go into a house or into a new area (or back to an area) it needs to re-load so it does take a little bit of time. Overall, I didn't think the loading time was too bad but I knocked a star off more because of the slow down and stuttering AFTER it was done loading. I especially noticed this as I got farther in the game. I started waiting ANOTHER 20 secs after it was done loading just for it to catch up and finish reading the disk. Also, every time it changed from day to night or night to day it slowed down for a little bit. Occasionally when I was prospecting it was so stuttery I had a really hard time selecting the "dig" option (to fix that I would just go to another area and come back to make it load the area again).

By the way, the MySims DS game and the new MySims Kingdom Wii game do NOT have these same loading/slow down issues.

Conclusion:
Even with these issues, I love the game so much that I don't mind dealing with them just so I can play the game. On the bright side the loading times give me time to plan out what I'm going to do in the area before getting there :) I think I'm over 80 hours now and even though I got to 5 stars a while ago I still have things I want to do. I have met all 80 sims but I still haven't made best friends with them all. I've found all 84 essences (14 for each of the 6 interests) but I haven't gotten all 147 blueprints yet. It might be fun to have a whole spooky town or a cutesy town or .... The possibilities are, if not endless, then pretty darn close to it.