Expert’s Rating
Pros
Cons
Our Verdict
The Sims and The Sims 2 are EA and Aspyr ’s fabled series of simulated life games that put you in the part of an omniscient and more or less omnipotent perceiver of the lives of hoi polloi , called Sims , who go about their casual lifetime . You help them find occupation , grace their home , make friends , and finally establish relationships that lead to families . Now Aspyr and EA have pushed the franchise in a unexampled direction withThe Sims Life Stories , which is sort of what happens when The Sims meet an afternoon goop opera . It ’s an entirely unexampled game , not an expansion pack .
Some can argue — successfully — that The Sims franchise is soap operatic enough , with eternal dramas blossom out in the lives of your Sims as part of the open - ended gameplay . What they ’ve done here is consolidated the gameplay to come a more linear flow , orbiting around the lives and loves of two specific Sims — Riley Harlow and Vincent Moore . Riley ’s looking for on-key love , some measuring of financial success , and artistic fulfillment , while Vince , a successful enterpriser , is suffering his own setbacks in his personal life . You spend half the secret plan leading one character , half the game leading the other .
The Sims Life Stories — the first game in the franchise to be originally recrudesce by Aspyr , rather than just ported to the Mac — is billed as being favorable to laptops and low-pitched - close car that might not be able to launch the full version of The Sims 2 . conceive it or not , The Sims 2 , despite its reputation as a “ daily ” game , has some of the most demanding system requirements of any deed out there , and can easily bring even a high - end Mac to its knees , thanks to really innovative AI and sophisticated graphics features .
Spinning a YarnRiley prepares dinner party for her new friends as one of them weaves an intricate story involve UFOs , ghosts and kitchen appliances .
Aspyr ’s positioning as this game ’s original developer is also the reason why the Mac version of The Sims Life Stories only trailed its PC counterpart by a few week , rather than the months that Sims 2 sports fan have come to require . Hopefully Aspyr will be able-bodied to shut down the gap even further in succeeding installments and release new games simultaneously with their microcomputer counterparts .
So The Sims Life Stories seamster the game engine and some functionality a bit to hightail it better on lower - ending ironware . Still , the game offer an authentic Sims 2 - style port and really impressive graphics , even if you ca n’t have quite as many Sims on screen as before , or quite as huge a star sign , or , for that issue , as gravid a neighborhood . You ’ll get a line the same styles of music and the same falderol “ Simlish ” language that you ’ve take heed in other biz .
I mentioned earlier that The Sims Life Stories employ a more elongate gameplay mode than The Sims 2 does . That ’s not to say that you ca n’t execute the Sims Life Stories in the same “ classical ” open - ended fashion you ’re already habitual to : you may create your own Sims from slit , build a home for them , and lead them through the test and visitation of Sim life history . But you ’ll find that The Sims Life Stories is considerably more limited in terms of what you could do , what you could build up , and where you could go — it ’s all acquire to do with the game being designed to be well-disposed to low-spirited - end hardware than its gargantuan herald .
By the way , this is only the first in what EA and Aspyr program as an entirely young franchise for The Sims . Already they ’re hard at employment on The Sims Pet Stories and The Sims Castaway Stories , coming later this class .
The bottom line
More limited than The Sims 2 , The Sims Life Stories helps condense and consolidate the Sims 2 play experience for users who might have been leave behind out thus far because of slower Macs .
