The Sims Online

(Editor's Note: Due to the nature of massively multiplayer online games, it was necessary to review this game in patched form.)

Wash dishes, take a shower, go to work, fall in love. Day-to-day living or the best-selling computer game of all time?

Unless you've been living under a rock for the last three years, you're well aware of the phenomenon that is The Sims. And, shortly after Maxis and Electronic Arts found out that Will Wright's brilliantly simple (and simply brilliant) idea was a smash hit, they immediately began working on an online version of the game. Friends would be real. Kiss someone too soon after meeting them and maybe they'd slap you, or maybe they wouldn't. Watch your sim make money instead of sending him off to that invisible job. The idea was fabulous and The Sims fans all over the world drooled with anticipation. Unfortunately, the execution isn't as exciting as we'd hoped.

Starting The Sims Online is easy, but a potentially time-consuming affair. After installing the game and setting up an account, you'll be asked for your user ID and password, at which point any patches the game requires are installed. Depending on the size of the patch and the speed of your connection, this could take anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours.

Once in the game, you'll see a screen to let you create or select a sim. You can have up to three sims at a time, but they can't exist in the same world -- you can only have one sim per server. In The Sims, in addition to selecting a head, body, and skin color, you would also assign points to several personality traits. Now your sim has whatever personality you deem it to have, so those traits are gone. After giving your sim a name, you're all done.

Workin' For Da Man

You're given ten-thousand simoleans (the currency in the game) to start. Now you can decide whether to purchase a lot, find a place to be a roommate, or just hang around other lots. You could get by with never living in a house pretty easily just by visiting different lots. The initial ten thousand is just enough to buy a lot and make a small one-room house filled with the basics, at which point you'll be broke then and have to earn money.

The Sims Online provides two ways to earn money: solo or with a group. Group objects require two to four people, depending on the object, and each station needs a person with points in a particular skill. The higher the individual's skill is on the particular station, the more money each person makes. The players communicate with each others in order to complete the task. While this sounds like a potentially interesting idea, the reality is a repetitive chore that is both boring and requires you to pay attention.

Solo objects have only one associated skill with them. The better you are at that skill, the more money you can make using that object. You can also make more money if you work at similar job objects with other people. So, you'll make more money working on a chalkboard (a logic-based object) in a room full of other people working on chalkboards than you would working on one at home alone. The same goes for increasing a skill. Below the usual green bar that lets you know how far you are away from raising a skill to the next point is a percentage that tells you at what speed you're learning that skill. The result is that trying to raise a skill at home alone is useless. Why stay home and increase a skill at a rate of 16% when you can jump over to someone else's house and increase it at 116%?