MySims Review - Wii

3.5

Gameplay: 4
Graphics: 7
Audio: 6
Innovation: 6

Introduction

Games like MySims should be encouraged. The Wii needs dedicated efforts built from the ground up for the system from companies other than Nintendo. Unfortunately, EA’s MySims is an uneven effort that capitalises on the platform’s quirks in some instances, but trips up in others.

Gameplay

The game starts you off by letting you name a town and design your character, which is done by rather clumsily cycling through outfits and facial features. This ‘press A for forwards and B for backwards’ style of circular selection permeates the entire game, but when you’re just looking for that one piece, you need, it becomes a bit simplistic and you’ll most likely be crying out for some sort of menu system or panel to choose from.

Initially, I was a bit confused and disappointed that my character was a girl and it hadn’t let me choose between male and female, but after I restarted the game and it spawned a male character, I started toggling through the outfits and made the creepy discovery both male and female characters use the same character model. Their clothes are the only things that differentiate them. Anyone else find this a little weird?

The Sims of MySims are different from the norm, in that they don’t have needs. Sure, when you talk to someone and make them happy, they smile and a green ++ floats above their heads, but you don’t need to feed them, bathe them or make your character sleep. Interaction with the world is easy thanks to the IR capabilities of the Wii remote, while the nunchuk lets you move. The camera is controllable with the D-pad, and a simple press of the A button is usually enough to initiate a conversation with a character. Your conversation options range from the simple ‘talk’ command, to buttons for making the person happy or mad, and a button that lets you give them a present. It’s pretty straightforward.

Anyway, after you’ve designed yourself, you’ll be introduced to the mayor of your downtrodden town and set to work restoring it and attracting residents. To do this, you’ll build houses and businesses for potential villagers that arrive daily at the hotel. And no, unlike Animal Crossing, time does not sync with the real world – it’s much faster, and indeed you can ‘sleep until day/night’ just by lying down on a nearby park bench like a hobo. Your hotel visitors come in two flavours – residential (useless) and commercial (not entirely useless) Sims. You can invite anyone in the hotel to live in the village just by talking to them, at which point you find a vacant lot of land and start building.

Construction is the heart of MySims. When you choose to move in a Sim to a lot, you initiate the building mode. This provides you with building blocks, doors, roofs, windows, chimneys and more, in various styles. You put them all together using a simple system of blue dots that show where each piece can be placed. There’s a grid (continued next page)