Good Neighbor
Standing at the forefront of the title's appeal is its stunning cuteness. Closely resembling the Wii's Miis (which are the bee's knees) and drawn in the style of Animal Crossing, MySims Sims are blocky, simply animated, and adorable. Even when the game starts and you're tasked with bringing a run-down ramshackle town back to its feet (rather than the DS' resort town), the broken-down town elicits an "ah, adorable!" from all but the most callous player. The grass is green, the sun is bright, and even the ruined frame of a home seems more hopeful than depressingly run-down.
Before you start playing, though, you'll get to customize your Sim. Simply point at a part of the Sim's body and you can cycle through the available choices, changing articles of clothing, facial features, hair styles, and colors. Although this seemed like a great way to create amusingly bizarre combinations with the "random" switch, we'd really like to see a menu system that brings up all available choices in the final build. Cycling through a still undecided but "very, very large" list of clothing options one at a time instead of being able to just point to what we want in a menu seems like a waste of the Wii Remote's abilities. It's understandable that EA wants to keep the game approachable and is therefore leery of any big, scary menus, but honestly, a menu is a lot more approachable then cycling through shirts for 20 minutes to find the one you want.