Having only just reviewed Sims for the Wii, I was quite surprised to find MySims being released so soon afterwards. However, with My Sims, it is better to look at this as a complete overhaul for the Wii market rather than just another update.
As with other Sims titles, your job is to bring happiness, but rather than concentrate on your own Sim, you are responsible for a whole town. Early in the game you learn that a previous resident who had special powers has left the town, and now it has run itself into the ground with only a few residents left, and they are not too happy either. The talk of the town is that there is a new visitor who also has special powers, and they hope that you can bring happiness and prosperity to the town again. This is where you come take over, after naming the town and your character, you are told that you have the power to use essences, and with this power you are able to build and design almost anything you want.
Once you have met the remaining residents you are given simple tasks, this is pretty much a training period in the game. The Essences are found all around you, you can pick up fruit from trees, fish in the local pond, prospect for materials and also talk to people. An Essence is basically a building block that can be used in the workshop. For example, you can either build a table and put an apple on it, or use the essence of the apple and use the print to colour the furniture.
When building, be it a house or furniture, you are taken to screen with a grid on it, at the bottom of the screen are your basic blocks, you can scroll through to find other parts and then colour in as you see fit. When building furniture you will use a blueprint, this is a ghosted out image of the finished product, your job is to locate the parts on the list at the bottom of the screen and place them using the Wii-mote. A very cool feature is that you don’t have to stick to the blueprint, meaning you can create your own artwork to put on the walls, weird looking chairs or apple printed cookers with fish and skulls hanging off the side, I can happily say the only limit is your imagination.
As you progress through the game, the town will get busier and you will even open larger, new areas to tame and build on.
MySims is very much a collect and fetch game, a resident will say they are not happy, you will talk to them to find out what will make them happy, you will then locate the essences required, build what they want and put it in their home. The more happy residents you have, the higher your star rating, and the higher the star rating, the more areas you are able to unlock.
The characters are very varied from the local Goth, morbid museum owner, to the perky club DJ and wannabe arcade owner.
The control system is spot on for the Wii, the Wii-mote controls the cursor, allowing you to select actions like talk and enter, and the nunchuck will control the screen view and zoom. When building the control is very initiative and gives you a real good feel of actually picking up items and building them up like a virtual Lego kit.
If you are always worried that you children play too many games and are not being constructive, give this a try and let their artistic skill flow.
Yes the graphics are quite cute and this title is aimed more at females and younger children, but don’t let that deter you, if you enjoyed the great Animal Crossing, you will love this. I found this title very hard to put down once I started as the interface is very simple and you always want to know what will happen next.
