"More like a toy than a game."

I have a confession. I am 24 years old and I still play with dolls.  I build them elaborate houses, spend hours on their hairstyles and outfits, and keep track of their family tree. They have spouses, jobs, skill sets, and pets.
That's right guys, I'm talking about The Sims.
While reading the wikipedia article (because what else am I going to do tonight?) I came across a quote that says that The Sims has been described as "more like a toy than a game," and a light bulb went off. Growing up, I was all about playing with Barbies. I loved making them outfits out of scraps, and I somehow always seemed to come up with an elaborate backstory (I think my Barbie became the manager for the Beatles once. Yeah). It was around the time that I was getting "too old" for dolls that a friend introduced me to the Sims. Suddenly it was okay for me to keep making up silly stories and although the outfits were limited I couldn't complain.

Yes, she will do just fine.

From there, it was just... man. I bought every. single. expansion. for that game. At like $20 each, it meant that almost all birthday and Christmas money went straight to Maxis. I had Livin' Large, House Party, Hot Date, Vacation, Unleashed (you could get pets! come on!), Superstar, and the slightly lame Makin' Magic.  I even downloaded custom content. And then, The Sims 2 came out. My reaction :

Initial excitement, followed by "Wait, what. NO."

 Because guess what? It was definitely not backwards compatible. Which means all the money I had spent on The Sims 1 was essentially wasted if I bought the newer, much cooler looking Sims 2. I vowed that although I would buy the basic game, I would limit myself to one, maybe two expansion packs. You can guess how that went.

...Actually pretty well. 

I purchased the University expansion pack, since in The Sims 1, sims did not age at all; and in The Sims 2 the aging process went like this : infant->toddler->teen->adult->elder. Note the conspicuous gap between teen and adult. Having a sim go to college and go through a "young adult" phase was interesting and novel to me. Aside from being given the Seasons expansion pack by a friend, I only had the University expansion for The Sims 2. Sure enough, The Sims 3 came out a few years ago and is, in my opinion, much more interesting than The Sims 2. 

Which brings me to today. Now that I have more of a disposable income (or at least I did, until I went back to school), $20 doesn't seem like the astronomical sum it used to. However, I have become pickier about which expansions I buy. The most recent one, Showtime, seems like a rehashed version of a previous expansion but with Katy Perry weirdly tacked on, so I didn't buy it. World Adventures, on the other hand, takes the game from being a passive sandbox-style game to a sort of RPG-lite, with puzzles, quests, and mini-games. Definitely worth the money.

So on that note, I'm signing out. I got Sims to create!

-Conklederp