We're going where the sun shines brightly (The Sims - On Holiday (Expansion Pack) (PC))

Name: hogsflesh

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Product:	The Sims - On Holiday (Expansion Pack) (PC)
Date:	01.08.02 (467 review reads)
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This is the fourth add-on pack for Maxis' The Sims, which I believe is the biggest selling PC game in the world. Obviously you need the original game in order to install this. All of the original features and gameplay are unchanged, as are the graphics and sound. There are a couple of hundred reviews of The Sims on dooyoo, so I won't say much about it here. Basically it's a god game in which you have little families of people (Sims) who you control using your mouse. You have to tend to all their needs: feed them, make sure they're happy etc. It's kind of like having a doll's house, but more fun.

The first two expansions, Livin' it Up and House Party, were quite basic, only adding extra furniture and bodies for the Sims. The next expansion, Hot Date, was better, as it allowed your Sims to leave their houses and go to a 'downtown' area, where they'd attempt to seduce other Sims. On Holiday is similar to Hot Date, in that your Sims leave their homes and go to a special Holiday Island where they can have all kinds of fun.

There are beach areas, snow areas and forest areas in the holiday resort. You choose which one your Sims go to, although you can send them to other areas at any time. They can stay there for as long as their money lasts (holidays are quite expensive). If you have a family of Sims living together then they all have to go on holiday together. If you have a single Sim then he or she can go alone, or invite someone they are in love with to go with them.

At the various different resorts they'll find lots to do. The emphasis is on letting them have fun, so there are plenty of things like skateboarding or fishing for them to enjoy. They can play volleyball, hire a metal detector or throw water balloons at each other. Simple, honest pleasures. For the adults, there are jacuzzis in which they can canoodle and tents in which they can have sex. They can win souvenirs, and send postcards to ot
her Sims, which is quite cute.

There are a few of those endearingly weird features that I love so much about the game. In each of the locations there are some deeply strange things wandering around. In the snow areas you get a yeti, in the forest areas you get a peculiar Robin Hood sort of fellow with a grotesquely oversized head, and in the beach areas you get, of all things, a chap dressed as a hammerhead shark. You can't actually interact with these characters, but they seem to hang around the children and try to entertain them. Whatever the reason for them being there, I'm glad they are. They make me laugh.

The Sim children are supposed to be more hyperactive and rowdy when they're on holiday (just like in real life, I suppose). They're even supposed to be able to get into trouble by being naughty (to the extent that their actions can supposedly get the whole family expelled from the holiday resort). I haven't managed to get them to do that yet, though.

You can demolish existing resorts to build ones of your own, but I haven't tried that yet, even though in theory it's easy enough to do. As with all the other expansions, there's a lot of stuff on the web that you can download and add to the game - people have created some very effective new items and bodies (although be warned - some that were created for older expansions won't work with this one).

I had real problems installing this. I ended up having to uninstall and reinstall the entire game (with the other three expansion packs) several times before I got it to work. On Holiday requires a lot of spare hard-drive space (700MB for this expansion alone. I think my Sims folder now takes up about 1.3GB in total). A Pentium 2 with 64MB of RAM is required, although I think you'll actually need rather more RAM than that to make it run at anything other than a snail's pace - I have 256MB, and it's still quite slow sometimes.

>Something that really annoys me is how long the game takes to load. A little animated Maxis logo appears (accompanied by slightly sinister sounding laughter - a bit like the end of the Beatles song 'Within You Without You'). I then have to wait for five minutes while the actual game loads. This wouldn't be too bad if it still had the loading music from the original game, which was great in a lounge kind of way, but unfortunately they've replaced it with some dreadful holiday music that makes my teeth itch. Sometimes when it's finally loaded the sound won't work, so I have to re-start it, which of course means waiting for another five minutes. Grrr.

So is this expansion worth having? Hmm, I'm not really sure. It does add an extra element to the game, which is always welcome, as my boredom threshold is low. But the things that your Sims can do when they actually reach their holiday destination are rather limited. You can't have only one member of the family go on holiday, they all have to go, which can be a bit trying. At least this expansion adds some new things for the kids to do, the last one (Hot Date) had absolutely nothing for them, and it seemed that Maxis were starting to put too much emphasis on the adults. But sadly I don't really think that this one is going to keep me on the straight and narrow for too long.

The best thing about The Sims is that it's so easy to be evil. I'll happily spend a couple of weeks playing the game properly. But then boredom will set in. First I'll try to get all of my adult Sims to sleep with each other, turning the neighbourhood into a gigantic bisexual pornotopia rife with jealousy and argument and recrimination. Then I'll start killing them off. For I am a vengeful god, and if the little beggars can't keep me entertained then, frankly, they're wormfood. I expect any new expansion to stave off these destructive impulses for at least a month. Unfortun
ately, On Holiday isn't really doing the trick. It promises so much, but ultimately doesn't quite deliver. I predict that within a week the grim reaper will be putting in an appearance again.

(This, of course, says far more about me than about the game. The world of The Sims is a virtual utopia, and I find myself destroying it again and again and again. I wonder what Freud would say about all this?)

I am ultimately glad I bought this, as it does give me new things to do in the game, but I do think it could have been a lot better.

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