I've always been one for video games. I had a Megadrive when I was pretty young, followed by a few other Nintendo consoles, but I've also been quite a fan of games for the computer as well. I particularly enjoy simulation and strategy games, and so The Sims was something I was desperate to get when it first came out when I was about ten. Unfortunately, our computer wasn't advanced enough to play it and it couldn't be installed when my parents kindly bought it for me. I was heartbroken, but luckily my dad was planning on buying a new one for work fairly soon anyway, so I did get to play it after not too long. My love of The Sims then lasted a few years, with me buying all the expansion packs not long after they came out, as well as its sequel, Sims 2, and its expansions as well. Today's review will focus on the very first game of The Sims without any extras or add-ons, but I do plan on writing reviews of the expansion packs soon.

== The Sims ==

The Sims is a people simulator from Maxis, who also made SimCity. You create families of people, called Sims, and get to control their actions and lives. You can help the children to get good grades in school by making them study and get the school bus every day, and you can help your adults to get good jobs and promotions by building their skills and helping them to make friends. Their jobs earn them money, with which you can buy them items for their home, and you can even design the houses they live in down to small details. In The Sims, you get one neighbourhood with ten plots of land (some of which have houses on, some of which don't) into which you can move your Sims families. Each family can then make friends with their neighbours by inviting them over to talk or eat or by calling them on the phone. You can let your Sims get on with their lives as they please with some input from you, or you can use settings that mean they have no free will whatsoever. If they need the bathroom, you have to send them there. If not, you'll have a puddle to clear up.

== What I Thought ==

I thought this was an absolutely genius game when it came out and still do. I loved having my own families and having them interact with each other. What you do in the game is basically up to you and it is very open-ended - there is no way to 'complete' this game, per se. That's not to say that there aren't little challenges, and my favourite thing to try and do was to get my Sims to reach the top level of every career path by building up the right skills and making enough friends.

There are a lot of great details in this game that made it very enjoyable as well. I liked that in order to build a Sim's 'creativity' skill level, you could have them paint or play the piano. They would start off badly at both but the closer you got to ten full points, their tinkering would be more tuneful and their painting more professional.

The option to control the lives of fictional people and play God, as it were, is a very appealing one and it's definitely fun to be able to act out the basic human desire to want to control people and our surroundings in a harmless manner. Yes, you can kill the Sims, but don't worry if your child purposefully lets one of them die - it's natural to see what you can do in a game and is a bit of a release to be able to do things that you wouldn't ever do or even want to in real life. You can also customise your Sims' appearance and choose from a reasonable range of heads and outfits, meaning that you can vaguely recreate people or families you know, should you choose to.

== Conclusion ==

This is a great, original game that has inspired two full sequels in Sims 2 and The Sims 3, as well as a few other similar games. The Sims has many expansion packs, which can expand the enjoyment and lengthen the amount of time you can spend playing the game. I really enjoyed a lot of these and bought them as well, so expect some more The Sims reviews to follow. Highly recommended for seven or eight years up.