I’ve been playing The Sims forever. My sister, my cousins and I would spend hours on the GameCube creating a crazy life. The Sims has come a long way from those days. With every new game and expansion pack, it gets better and more realistic (or more crazy, depending on how you see it). While the game has changed a great deal, my sister and I are still hooked. We still spend hours in front of the computer causing drama with our Sims. I highly the game and here’s why.
- Creating a Sim
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Creating your Sims is one of the best parts of the game. You can let your imagination run wild. You get to create yourself, your families and friends. You want to get a new hairstyle but are scared that you won’t look okay with it? Create yourself and see if you like it! If you play it with your friends you can create each other and laugh about how wrong it turned out. Now with the Cats and Dogs expansion, you can also create your pets! You want to marry a celebrity, but you know that’ll never happen? No problem! You can create a lookalike, woo them and marry them to your heart’s content. Sims 4 has made possible for the Sims to look even more real. You can change the proportions of their bodies and their face to make them look exactly as you want. Create whoever you want!
For those who like to write, Creating Sims can come really handy. Sometimes you get stuck on how you want a character of your story to look or simply want more physical proof of your ideas. If you can’t draw to save your life, Sims is what you want. Mold the character to your liking and save it to your library. In the future, you can look at it for reference or edit it to your new image of it.
- Build Mode
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If you’ve ever wanted to become an architect, the build model is where it’s at. You get to build the house of your dreams and change it whenever and however you want. You also get to decorate it. You can spend hours playing with patterns and colors and moving stuff around the screen until you’re satisfied with it. It can be anything from a small two bedroom house to a mansion of three floors (basement included!). Creating your house is only part of the fun. Edit the establishments that are already there or create new ones. You can make restaurants, pubs, gyms, art galleries or whatever else you want. If you need inspiration or base place, you can download one from the gallery and edit it. Just like Creating the Sims, this can help writers to get their ideas straight. Make the place you are trying to describe and bring it to life.
- Live Your Wildest Dream
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On the Sims, you can be whoever you want to be. In the professional part, there’s a big range of things you can do. Want to be an astronaut and see aliens? Go do it! Want to chase criminals? Join the Detective career! Want to be the master criminal that escape the detective? Do it! You can be anything from a famous actress to a fortune teller. You can also choose not to work and win money by going to a gaming contest or selling your paints. You can also acquire a lot of skills that you don’t have but always have dreamed of having. Watch your sims as he learns how to play the piano or gardens the backyard (God knows that I can’t play an instrument or nurture a plant to save my life and is not for the lack of trying). Now you don’t even have to be human! Be a vampire and have fun enchanting others sims to suck their blood. Be an alien and rock your purple skin. Turn yourself into a Simplant and have a cow plant! (Just remember to feed it, or it will eat you).
- It’s A Great Life Simulation
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The Sims was created to simulate life. Every time a new game comes out it gets more realistic. With the last one being The Sims 4, your Sims have more expression and their own little quirks. You can modify everything from laughter lines to their voices. The expansion packs also help with making the game a more realistic one. Like for example, the Four Seasons expansion pack that brought weather changes and holidays to the table. Just like any human, the Sims have needs and they also have emotions. You have to tend to your Sims like they’re humans beings, be sure to do it or they are going to be moody, just like any person that doesn’t get food or sleep hours. They age and die, have birthdays, and life goals. They also have responsibilities. They have to pay bills. While these faux-bills come less regularly than in real life, they can get really expensive. They have to go to work or get fired. They need to do homework and clean. Parents need to take care of their kids’ stuff or the kids will be taken away by the social worker.
Speaking of children, in The Sims, you get to prove yourself as a parent and cry while your baby cries, your toddler makes a mess and your child doesn’t get good grades… but also be happy because they are growing up and they are good kids. Another thing about the game is that just like real life, it can be highly unpredictable. One minute your Sim is cooking and the next your house is on fire.
- The Drama
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The Sims can give you the perfect life you’ve always dreamed of, but sometimes perfection is overrated. Having the perfect family with the perfect job and perfect relationships can get boring really quickly. So if you get bored of having a perfect life, you can create a chaotically dramatic one. Start creating chaos by being mean and getting in fights. Have mortal enemies and poke them for fun. Make your Sim a master on mischief and have voodoo dolls of half of the city. Create romantic messes. Drop your partner and get a new one. Quit your job and change careers. Be ghost and scare everyone, posses and break everything. Find new ways of playing, like making a party and killing the people in it…just for the sake of drama.
- The Cheats
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While the game’s purpose is to simulate life, cheats can make the game easier. For example, you want to create your dream house at the start of the game, but don’t have enough money to do it, you can motherlode a couple of times and get 50,000 simoleons. When you’re in building mode sometimes things don’t want to fit where you want them to fit, so you can use cheats like bb.moveobjects and be done with it. You lost control of the game and your sims are a mess? Use testingcheats true and make them happy. You can also download mods and content from the internet to make it more interesting. The good thing about is that the game actually encourages you to cheat and get creative with it.
- The Challenges
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If on the contrary of cheating, you like making things difficult there are challenges that will difficult the game level. All the different challenges have their own list of rules. To win the challenge you must follow them and the winning price is just satisfaction. Some of the challenges are:
100 baby challenge:
It’s a challenge where you make a matriarch and have 100 babies with 100 different people. You have to push through the difficulties of taking care of all them and move them out as adults to make more space for more babies.
Rags to Riches:
You move your Sims to an empty lot and take away all their money and make him survive until you start moving up the world and end up rich.
Legacy Challenges:
This challenge is all about family. The goal of it is having a successful lineage.
Asylum Challenge:
You move eight Sims with the madness trait but only can control one of them. The house can’t have the right quantity of stuff for the Sims living in it.
There are other challenges based on reality shows like Master Chefs and Big Brothers. If you can’t find a challenge to fit your needs you can always create your own and share it with other simmers.
The Sims is a game that keeps evolving and getting better. It lets your creativity flow and helps you relax. Go play it, make stories and live different lives. If you are interested, but, like me, are a broke college student don’t fret. Make yourself an Origin account and wait for the right moment to buy the game. During Christmas times or on special dates, the game gets discounts and that’s when you strike. Now, if you are fellow simmer, what is your favorite thing about The Sims?