Most games in the Sims series place you in the role of a god with a budget. My Sims puts you in the role of a single, specific person with boundary issues. Your main job is to create housing and build furniture for your demanding fellow citizens, who have apparently never heard of Ikea.
"Building furniture" is literal in this case. When one of your friends demands a chair or a couch, you assemble it from blocks using a frustrating and buggy interface. The game presents a 3D outline to fill in, but you can to flip convention the bird and design your own furniture if you so choose. Unfortunately neither option is very satisfying.
The other main aspect of the game is collecting "essences." If you shake an apple tree you can get "red apple essence." If you go fishing you can get "clown fish essence." If you go prospecting you can get "purple crayon essence." Yeah, I don't get that last one either. Essences are incorporated into furniture either as a weird pattern, a solid color, or as actual apples, fish, and crayons that you can build into the furniture in place of blocks.
The essence system is almost, but not quite, enough to make this a solid, if flawed, game. There's an enjoyable "catch them all" aspect to wandering the game looking for strange new essences like "bacon" and "voodoo doll." Being able to build a refrigerator out of bacon is admittedly pretty rewarding, but not worth the hassle.
You also have the option to interact with your town-mates in other ways, hugging them or dancing with them or telling them to get out of town, but in the end it always comes back to the damn furniture.
--Lore Sjoberg
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WIRED__ Pulling bacon and cake out of the ground is more fun than it sounds.
TIRED The video game world was not crying out for a furniture-building simulation.
Price/maker: $50, EA
Rating: 
