Sims, Or Something Like It.

Welcome back to the beginning of a new week and I'm here to talk to you all about sims.  No, I am not referring to The Sims, but to certain aspects and qualities of simulators and hoo-boy are there a lot of them (on Steam); I specifically refer to Steam as it's my gateway to AAA and indie PC gaming although I know (I'm sure there are; there have to be) other outlets for video gaming out there.  Right?

Last week when I was listening to The Patch (#75 I think), Gus Sorola brought up indie game developer Lucas Pope (Papers, Please) and how he frequently gets requests to make other "Gate-Sims" like Papers, Please but in different departments and how he has absolutely no desire to do another gate-simulator.  This led the cast to come up with other ridiculous gate-sims with Mr. Sorola finalizing that a Drive Through Sim would be great because of how complicated and specific an order could get, which then lead to Ms. Turney stating that there are people who are paid (horribly) for actually taking orders at a drive through.  Would they feel that the game trivializes the kinds of shit they have to put up with from customers?

Which brings me to video game simulators, or at least some games that are sims and one other in particular.

Now, I have a couple of sim-type-style games at my disposal: Papers, Please; The Sims 2 & 3; Civ. 5; Ace Combat X, Joint Assault, Assault Horizon Legacy and Assault Horizon Enhanced Edition; Day-Z; Reus; Goat Simulator. . . you get the idea.  Then there are a slough of games with "Simulator" in the title that I do not own nor have I played: Farming Simulator, Euro Truck Simulator, Ship Simulator Extremes, Digital Combat Simulator World (DCS World), Construction Truck Simulator, Surgeon Simulator. . . more ideas you are getting behind, yes?

Which then brings me to This War of Mine.  It's a game that came out last month (November 14th) that I first thought that I would really like to play.  To put this game into context, in This War of Mine, you play as normal everyday citizens in a war torn fictional country.  You are not playing as a super soldier armed with 184 lbs of guns, equipment and additional rounds of ammunition, but as people attempting to survive everything else around them.

Then I thought of the real life This War of Mine.  In Palestine. In Sarajevo.  In Baghdad.  In every city, town and country that has had some form of major military conflict take place within its borders.  People live their lives surrounded by what this game is apparently trying to represent.

A part of me thinks that I would and should feel guilty about playing a game about people who are living a life where they are afraid to go out at anytime, for any reason, because they could be attacked by either military force or by fellow citizens.  The simplist things in life become a hardship such as finding sufficient food to feed your family or find clean drinking water.  But the real question is why did 11 bit studios create this game?  Was it to glamorize the suffering of people who regularly live in such war-torn communities?  Somehow I doubt that those were their intentions.  

In an interview with Rock, Paper, Shotgun, senior writer for 11 bit studios Pawel Miechowski said that This War of Mine "is not a simulator of atrocities, it’s a take on how people struggle and what are their emotional challenges" and that "We want to raise awareness about how civilians suffer when war is breaking out. We want to show the other side."  If this game had come from, say, Sledgehammer Games (Call of Duty) or EA Digital Illusions (Battlefield), I might question their motives.

When I started this short article (seven paragraphs ago), I was on the fence about buying/playing this game.  Now, I feel that I need to not only play this game, but to experience.  This War of Mine was obviously created with a lot of thought and care to convey the right imagery, tone and sense of weight as opposed to another war simulator.  It's quite a powerful trailer too that 11 bit studios released a while back.

It's settled then.  I talked myself back into it.



~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian
And When Jesus Comes He'll March On With The Winning Side

"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