Things'll be great when you're downtown (The Sims - Hot Date (Expansion Pack) (PC))

Member Name: hogsflesh

Product:	The Sims - Hot Date (Expansion Pack) (PC)
Date:	22/01/02 (4197 review reads)
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The Sims: Hot Date is the latest expansion pack for Maxis's hugely popular series, The Sims. You need to have the original game in order to play this one (which isn't a game in its own right, but an 'add-on'. It 'adds' bits 'on' to the original game, you see?) In order to write about Hot Date, I'm first going to have to write a little bit about The Sims itself.

The Sims is a 'god game'. You control one or more 'Sims', little people who live in a little suburb (presumably in Sim City). You order your Sim around by clicking on simple commands, and basically try to make it live its life in the most fun way possible. That, in an extremely small nutshell, is the essence of the Sims.

When I first started to play The Sims I thought it was one of the best games ever devised. You get to set up your nice little person in a nice little house, and look after it. When it's hungry you make it eat, if it's depressed you make it 'have fun' (by watching TV, usually), when it's dirty you make it wash. And so on. The game interface is extremely intuitive and easy to pick up, so it only takes about 20 minutes to know all you really need to know to play. There are some nice features, like the tasteful blurring effect that protects the Sims' modesty whenever they have to take their clothes off (although obviously someone has posted a patch online to remove the blur. Then, when it turned out that underneath the blur the Sims looked kind of like naked Barbie and Ken dolls, some enterprising perv managed to create more realistic-looking naked bodies for you to download - some people have far too much time on their hands). Another cool feature is the made up language the Sims speak, which actually sounds quite convincing. (All the features from the original game are preserved in Hot Date.)

You need to find your Sim a job so that it can earn money, and get it to make friends with other Sims
who live in the neighbourhood. Eventually your Sim might even become extra special friends with another Sim, and they'll move in together. When you make enough money you can buy extra things for them, new ornaments and furniture, and you can build extra bits onto their houses.

If your married Sims are getting on really, really well then they'll have a Sim child or two. (Which isn't always a good thing, as they cost money and are a bit of a pain, and while they're still babies one of your Sims will have to give up their job to look after the little mite. You can get round this by trying to encourage your Sim to fall in love with a member of the same sex, as that means they get to choose when to adopt a baby rather than having one by accident. All Sims seem to be cheerfully bisexual, so this isn't as difficult as you might imagine.) You gradually move them up the career ladder and buy them even nicer things to play with, while the children go to school and are rewarded for good grades. Sadly, the Sims don't seem to age, and the kids never grow up. I'd love to play a huge, multi-generational epic game in which a mighty Sim dynasty was created. The game never ends, of course, you can't win, or finish, or anything like that. It just goes on and on.

And if you get bored of your first Sim family, you can always fill the neighbourhood with new families to play with. And it's all great for a while. Eventually the novelty of trying to get them promoted at work wears off a little, and so then you can start playing evil games where you get your Sims to have acrimonious fights with one another. If one Sim makes a pass at another Sim's husband or wife while that Sim is around, then someone's going to get slapped (at the very least). And when you're bored of that you can experiment with killing them. Making them jump into a swimming pool and then removing the ladders that they use to climb out is the best way, as th
ey're none too clever, although a crueller, rather longer method involves having them go into a room and then removing all the doors so they're trapped there. They starve to death, which takes a long time. Another method involves catching fatal diseases from a guinea pig, and you can contrive to have them burn to death fairly easily. When a Sim dies, the Grim Reaper turns up to take them, and their ghost will haunt the house in which they died.

But even the novelty of that wears off eventually. Happily, by the time I first started to get bored of the game, Maxis brought out the first add-on, Livin' it Up. This added enough new toys and different types of careers to enthuse me again. And there was an important new element added: sex. You could now buy your Sims a ludicrous-looking vibrating 'love bed', in which they can 'play' with one another. So, this time when I got bored of the career building side of it, I decided to try and make all the Sims in my neighbourhood sleep with each other. This kept my interest up for probably an extra week or so. Then, of course, the novelty wore off again, and I idly tried to find new ways to kill my Sims while waiting for the next add-on.

It was called House Party. I didn't buy it, because I didn't think my PC could handle it. I will get it soon, now that I've bought more RAM, although I need to get myself some new hard-drive space before I do. So I left The Sims for a while. Then Hot Date came out.

One of the main reasons that The Sims becomes wearisome is because your Sims are effectively stuck in one place. They can't leave their house. Sure, they go to work, but you just see them drive off in a car, and then return a few hours later (hours in The Sims pass very quickly). And while you can invite other Sims to your Sim's house, your Sim can't go to their houses. This new expansion finally allows you to take your Sims out of their homes, and transpor
t them to 'downtown', a new area in which you'll find restaurants and shops and entertainment (and a nightclub if you've bought House Party, but as I say, I haven't yet).

So now there's a huge new element been added to the game, and I love it. When your Sim is alone, and life is making him lonely, he can always go downtown. There are loads of new Sims there for him to interact with, and lots to see and do. My one complaint is that the things to do all involve romance. The game isn't called Hot Date for nothing. Basically the idea is that your Sims prowl around the downtown area like it's some kind of sleazy pick up joint, and try to pull. That is, in fact, the only real purpose of going downtown - trying to persuade another Sim to go home with you, presumably to use the love bed.

Actually, I worry about this a little. Even though the game claims to be appropriate for teenagers, it does seem that the focus is becoming more and more adult. First there was the love bed, and now this. The Sim children are being neglected. They're not even allowed to go downtown, and there's nothing new for them at all in this expansion, apart from absentee parents.

Other new innovations include slightly more 'adult' looking ways for the Sims to snog and touch each other up, and, most entertainingly tawdry of all, a heart-shaped 'Love Jacuzzi', in which Sims can again 'play' with one another. I don't mind any of this - making tiny pixellated figures on my computer screen have tiny sex does have a certain comedy value. But I do hope that the game series isn't going to degenerate into dodgy semi-porn, for which I suspect there would be a substantial market. Maxis would probably deny that this is what they're doing. In Hot Date they did fix the bug that allowed players to remove the nudity blur. Or rather, they claimed that they fixed it. Unfortunately, within hours of the game hitting th
e shops, someone had already figured out how to remove the blur, so we can still see the Sims get naked, but now they have even more things to do while they're naked. I fear that an 'adults only' version may not be too far away.

As with your Sims' neighbourhood, you can build new buildings downtown if you so desire. Sadly there aren't many different types of place you can build - only really shops, restaurants and bars. I haven't tried this yet - my attempts at building new houses for the Sims have all been pretty shoddy, cack-handed affairs, so something as complex as a restaurant would probably defeat me completely.

There are a fair few new objects added in this expansion for your Sims to buy or use. They can have fun by racing small remote controlled boats around a very small pond, for instance. There are lots of characters with whom you can't really interact (waiters, shop keepers etc), rather like the maid and gardener in the normal version of the game - they're just there to serve a specific purpose. There's a fantastic cheesy singer who wanders around bothering clients in the restaurant. And there are several new social interactions for your Sims to try out on one another. Along with all the exciting new ways they can kiss each other, there are a few other cool bits and pieces. If a fellow Sim is miserable about something, your Sim can try to cheer him or her up by waving a hand puppet under their nose and making squawking noises. That one makes me laugh. The general ways in which relationships work have changed slightly, too, as there are now long-term and short-term relationship scores instead of the generic (short term) one in the previous versions.

A great thing about the Sims is the online stuff. People with better graphics software than me make new items, ornaments, bodies for the game and post them online for you to download and add. I'm especially fond of the new bodies (or 'skins&
#39;), which include a wide variety of novelties and celebrities. I currently have Darth Vader and Skeletor living together in a house, and I'm hoping they'll become lovers before too long. That's my current goal, although it isn't going too well. Darth seems quite keen, but Skeletor is, as yet, having none of it. Perhaps Darth should buy him some chocolates. The more skins you download, the weirder things get. When I send my Sims downtown I notice with great pleasure that there's a fellow wandering around who has the head of the old Marvel comics supervillain Dr Doom. And all the other Sims completely ignore him. There's also a chap who wears some kind of Ancient Roman armour, although I can't remember ever downloading that, so it may be that this is intentional.

The game does take up an awful lot of hard-drive space. On top of the 300MB needed for The Sims, Hot Date requires 600MB. If you have both of the other expansions, you're looking at something more like 1.3GB. And do make sure you have a lot of RAM, as it will really slow to a maddening crawl if you don't, especially in the downtown areas where there are lots of other Sims wandering around. 64MB is the recommended amount, but I wouldn't trust anything less than 128. And I did have problems installing it - I had to completely uninstall The Sims and Livin' It Up, then reinstall them and Hot Date before it finally deigned to work. I've also read reports of people having major problems getting it to run at all, and trying it on any version of Windows later than 98 might well cause problems. Sometimes the sound doesn't work, and I have to restart the game. There is a Macintosh version, but seeing how my Mac at work often crashes when I'm using something as uncontroversial as Simpletext, I'm not sure I'd trust it.

There are a few irritating little problems with the gameplay - Sims seem to need a silly amount of space around them in
order to get through doors and other smallish spaces. There isn't actually that much space in the downtown areas, and Sims keep bumping into each other, stopping, waiting patiently for the other Sim to move, waiting another minute or two, and then finally carrying on with what they were supposed doing. I either find this very funny or very frustrating, depending on what kind of mood I happen to be in when I'm playing.

They can get trapped quite easily, too. I once had to exit the game without saving when one of my Sims got stuck in a toilet in a restaurant. She couldn't leave because there were about five other Sims blocking the doorway. For some reason, they all seemed to have been frozen to the spot, and refused to get out of her way. This kind of thing is very annoying. And it still takes Sims too long to do certain basic things. Going to the toilet takes them about half an hour (Sim time, not real time).

Anyway. If you're a fan of The Sims then you will almost certainly enjoy Hot Date. If you have The Sims but are bored of it, it's worth getting as it's an expansion that genuinely expands the game immensely. If you don't like The Sims then you've probably saved a lot of money. The next expansion (something to do with holiday resorts) is apparently out this spring.

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