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 Having a snack |  Watering the plants |  Shooting hoops |
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 Girls gotta eat |  Boring conversation |  Livin' it up |
The Seinfeld of the videogame set, The Sims is pretty famous for having no plotline. No story progression, only what the player creates in their own imagination. Like the old tagline went: "Run their lives or ruin their lives".
When am I not playing The Sims, right? I mean, for real, I've been playing this game pretty much everyday since I got it in 2001. It was my very first computer game that I needed a CD-ROM for, not that there were many. I didn't really care much for computer games, since N64 and GameCube games were so expensive. Anything after that, though, the family computer was too outmoded for, and my Windows XP laptop couldn't run much because it didn't have really any RAM to speak of. The only other games on CD-ROM (later DVD-ROM) that I ever played were Golf Resort Tycoon and 007 NightFire. And, of course, the SimCity and Sims games.
I think my views about this game are pretty well-documented elsewhere on the site at this stage. However, in amongst the various things I haven't talked about is the game's online Exchange. While the most common use for The Sims Exchange was to publish graphic novels that you'd made in-game with the snapshot feature, the database's other use was as an ad-hoc free file host for most kinds of custom content. When you uploaded something to the exchange, you didn't just put up the story (variable-quality JPEGs with attached TXT files)—the game would also export the house, including any custom wall or floor textures used in its construction, and all the sims in the household, including any custom meshes, heads, and skins they used. Custom furnishing objects and roofing tiles were ignored, but skinners, meshers, and builders who couldn't afford their own domain would use the Exchange as a free showcase of their talents.
Another thing that happened very often was that the Exchange was used to share premium content from pay-to-download sites like SimFreaks and Killersims. While Maxis forbade uploading any content that was blatantly sexual or violent, they really had no way of preventing players using the Exchange to launder other people's CC. How did this work? When a creator put their CC up for download on their website, they would do so in a ZIP archive containing the content itself as well as a readme file detailing the permissions they granted to anyone downloading their work. Usually, established creators who were parts of well-known fansites would include a non-upload proviso in their readme, but whether you honoured that request or not was entirely up to you. When an item was uploaded to the exchange, it copied the necessary files directly from the gamedata folder on the uploader's hard drive, necessarily separating the CC from everything that could identify who made it and what you were allowed to do with it. Later on, people started signing their skins in the unmapped bits of the image file.
10/10 would recommend. While pretty powerful for its day, the architectural simulator has been handily eclipsed by The Sims 4, but you don't play the game for realism. If your first introduction to The Sims was 2, 3, or 4, you'll probably get frustrated by the rather simplistic gameplay. Gen 1 sims don't have memories, which can help during socialisation, but it also makes it difficult to simulate jealousy and anger. I guess you could say Gen 1 sims are nicer to each other for this reason. Somewhat more personally, Gen 1 sims also have no familial connections. You can make a household with a man, a woman, and 2 children, and they are not automatically a family. Internally, this household consists entirely of 4 strangers whose only relationship with each other is a 20-point bonus for living in the same house. As with everything else having to do with the game, it's up to you to imbue the sims in the house with familial relations in your own imagination. Of course, you'll have to help your married couple along with their interpersonal scores so they don't turn their noses up at sleeping in the same bed, ideally before it's time to go to sleep. Basically, don't think of The Sims 1 as a life simulator, think of it as a virtual dollhouse.
Now, how to run this game? It's a 25-year-old computer game, intended to be played on Windows Me, so obviously it needs special considerations to run on modern computers; but it can be done!
