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Not Recommended.

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 22 / 23
Date: January 14, 2003
Author: Amazon User

This game is NOT what is advertised. The advertising is false and at the very least misleading.

The game is boring, Maxis is not listening to it's players suggestions for the game and all in all were just looking for a christmas cash cow.

The game is advertised as "The only limit is your imagination".

The limits are as follows:

Object Limit - A Sim can only own 101 items
Property Limit - A property can only have 950 tiles used for objects.
Property Restrictions - Depending on what category your property belongs to, certain items cannot be used or purchased on that property. ...The band item on the back of the box in the top right corner has been in development for over two months, with no sign of it being implemented into the game.

Save your money, DO NOT purchase this game. You WILL regret it.

Sims and false advertising

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 22 / 23
Date: January 30, 2003
Author: Amazon User

If you like the regular Sims game and hope that this will be exactly the same, keep playing offline.

If you believe everything the description says, and everything you have seen advertised about the game, you will be very disappointed.

You CANNOT open shops like in Hot Date, though the description says you can build "the trendiest boutique". Supposedly, you will be able to...someday.

You CANNOT have a casino, as the casino objects are also not available.

Most time is spent in the game building up skills, which is a long, tedious process (no fast forward), and working to earn money.

Despite the system requirements on the box, if you use a dial-up connection, you WILL have a bad time with connection and lag.

I have been playing this game since October, when it was still in the testing stage, and in my opinion, it still is in testing. I think if you wait a year or so, the game may work as advertised, as of right now, it does not deliver what is promised.

Shame on Maxis for lowering it's Standards

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 22 / 24
Date: January 07, 2003
Author: Amazon User

This game is not all it's hyped up to be. I got it for Xmas for myself and my daughter (she's 14). She played for about 5 days and got bored. I made it a little over a week, and boredom hit me (I had to work so I didn't play as much).

I loved the original series, but this is by no means an improvement on the original Sims. They took everything addictive about The Sims, and removed it. In it's place they added a chat interface with Private messaging and Email. So, what you end up with is a graphical chat room with a Sims 'skin' overlay.

There is just no substancial point to the game. You spend upward of at least 15 hours just getting to 10 in one of the six skills. Then you spend the rest of your time working with these job objects to get enough money to build an even humble house for yourself. And the terrible part is during this whole time you just stare at your monitor while your sim does their thing. Sometimes there are people you can talk to, but most of the time every else is away from their computers while their Sim does their thing.

What kind of a game makes people want to leave their computer to find other entertainment, read a book, watch TV, or do housework while you play? That doesn't say alot for its fun factor right there.

Saddened to say that my local retailer gave me alot of hassle about returning the game because it was opened and registered. I had to argue with the manager before we would allow me equal store credit. How else was I going to 'try' this game if I didn't register it, that really made me mad. I may never buy another Maxis Product again, this experience just jaded me.

Painfully Tedious, Frustrating, and Expensive Chatroom

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 20 / 21
Date: January 11, 2003
Author: Amazon User

I'm a long time fan of the original sims, and have bought every expansion on the first day of release. I enjoy creating new items for the pc game. Unfortunately, I can't recommend this game - having played it, I only wish Amazon had a zero star rating.

Inexplicably, the developers removed everything that made the original games fun.

Decorating is made very hard: It is hard to build a unique dreamhouse (probably impossible for the casual player). You get much fewer objects and skins than are available in the pc game. The game items that exist are made outrageously expensive so that players have something "to hope for". Tens of thousands for a stereo? It can take a week (or weeks) of casual play to buy a nice double bed. Most live in 1-room shacks or seek already built houses.

You're only allowed to buy 100 items. You can't buy some furniture if you don't have the right kind of business. There is no photo album.

You can't change permanent clothes or heads.

Frequent bugs often cause items to randomly disappear and make it impossible to enter the houses. No reimbursement is given when a bug wipes out your items.

The thing I like least about the game is the oppressive, rat-race environment. The game design forces you to spend HOURS sitting passively at the screen watching your sim do the same tedious "work" animation over and over and over to build skills.
Though you spend days building skills, the game makes your skills "decay" any time that you are not building skills. So if the sim stops building gnomes to chat, play, eat, etc, your hard-earned skills begin decreasing rapidly, forcing players into a stressful rat-race. The player cannot leave the screen easily either, because the game logs you out and there is no "buffer" to see what people said to you while you were gone. As if that were not enough, when you buy items they not only depreciate rapidly in value, but they break constantly. Every day, you must click amidst your hundred items to find broken things and pay high prices to fix them. Unless you are a hard core gamer, you can easily spend more money in repairs than you make.

You also cannot choose your style of playing. Your sim gets depressed and cries if alone for too long, so you *must* find and interact with others. You cannot just decorate in peace. The costs for a solitary homeowner and object restrictions also mean that building a house alone is a tremendous disadvantage.
The game rewards people who interact in very large groups, so very few players will choose to visit your business unless you have managed to attract a crowd of 6-18 people who are studying/earning money. The result is that only the biggest, oldest houses get many visitors.

Unfortunately, most people in big groups idle while their sim works so you sit in silence at your screen, watching your sim use a chessboard,paint, or carve a gnome for hours. It seems to squelch creativity rather than allow expression of it. Other group problems have been massive spam (endless socially-challenged people trying to solicit sex, people asking for money, people asking for roommates) and a never-ending competition to get visitors. I didn't see my dreamhouse including a random stranger coming to my "home" and offering my visitors money for sex or begging them to leave my house or visit another place.

I have enjoyed meeting new people on the game, but I am disappointed to have spent "money" on it. The "idea" of the game is good, but so far I think it is not worth buying or paying a subscription free. Beta testers for the game were vocal in saying that the game was not ready for release. Perhaps several months from now, it may get better.

Most Disappointing Piece of Junk Ever Released

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 26 / 31
Date: February 13, 2003
Author: Amazon User

This so-called "game" is the most disappointing piece of junk I have ever played. At first, it seemed fun for the first two days. However, after the first two days the game become a tedious chore that was too close to work that I decided this was a waste of my life and my time. It is now two weeks into my subscription and I have just cancelled my subscription even though I had two weeks left.

This game is at best a poorly developed beta-version that still has many unresolved bugs. Customer support is poor, and if you try to report any player for hateful or profane language, you will just receive a response which roughly translated is like this: "We don't care." I filed a report on an abusive player who was using harrassing and hateful language. In less than five seconds, I receive a response on my screen with the following message: "Issue Resolved. Inconclusive evidence." The lazy customer support technician who didn't even bother to investigate was called Benjamin. So don't expect customer support to be like AOL who will actually spend the time to investigate abusive incidences. These people are greedy money-mongers who want nothing but your money. They have no morals. They don't care if you are abused during game play. They want to keep subscriptions up while sacrificing quality and ethics.

Moreover, this game is nothing but a bold-faced lie. They claim you can be whatever you want to be. What a joke! All you can do is make pizza, can jam, or make a gnome which is a pathetic lawn ornament. The restrictions on what you can do are overbearing to the point where playing this game will make you feel as though you are performing chores in prison. The objects in the game are also excessively priced. The purpose of this is to keep you working so that after two weeks you will have accumulated enough simoleans to purchase that 10,000 simolean TV set or that 85,000 simolean fountain. Note you will only make about 80 simoleans in 10 minutes of real time canning jam or making a gnome. This translates to inordinate amounts of time doing tedious jamming or gnoming.

I would like to comment about the lag and server problems. The lag that this game experiences is ridiculous. If you enjoy playing in slow-motion then perhaps this game is for you. Their servers are constantly "under maintenance" and often times you are booted from the game and subsequently unable to log back on for hours on end.

There are also countless bugs in the game, such as disappearing objects, sims that just freeze, and so on and so on.

In conclusion, if you have nothing better to do with your money and have lots of time to waste, then by all means purchase this piece of junk. On the other hand, if you value your time and would rather do something that's fun and enjoyable, then please go purchase anything else but this.

You can take a good thing too far

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 19 / 20
Date: December 21, 2002
Author: Amazon User

They should have left the Sims where they were. I'm an avid Sims fan. I have all the expansions and love them all. If you liked any of the Sim's games, you'll hate Sims Online. It takes away all the "real life" freedoms that you had and confines you to a boring, never ending cycle of pursing money through boring ways (no jobs), and constantly working on skills. It has a terrible feel to the whole game...you'll find yourself getting frustrated and asking yourself why am I playing this? Stick to the original sims, unless you want a chat room with a face.

If you love The Sims, you won't like The Sims online.

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 19 / 20
Date: December 28, 2002
Author: Amazon User

As someone who has played The Sims from the beginning, I really
looked forward to the online game thinking it was going to be just as fun and creatively inspiring.

Unfortunately, this is one birthday gift I regret recieving.

Except for teleporting back and forth to the various players residences in the various so called 'worlds', there are no downtown areas, and in fact there really isn't a Sim World to explore.

And to see players, (adults even!) engaging in gross bathroom humor while trying desperately make a game out of the very little game content provided is truly laughable.

This game is definitely a huge disappointment.

I am not going to pay a monthly fee to just chat and engage in tedious tasks to keep my Sim happy. There has to be more than that for me to be willing to part with my money and I am offended that the developers of this game would create something so shallow.

Play tester to non-purchaser - HERE'S WHY:

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 19 / 20
Date: December 29, 2002
Author: Amazon User

Too much work - You need to spend hours building up a skill (i.e. mechanical, creativity, logic) and then use it to make money on one of the money making games in people's houses. Then the money is not enough. People on the game are struggling just to survive. You make a marginal amount of money playing for a couple of hours then some of the objects you need cost $20k plus. This is not why I play games.

Not for the loner - those that like to own their own place will not be able to afford to do so. Those that like to take brakes from socializing to decorate their place or hang out by themselves will become "depressed" forcing you to go talk to people that you really don't necessarily want to.

Too much real life money - $... + $... a month is excessive. Put it this way - $... a year for the first year, $... after. If I was floored by this game I would be cautious of putting that much money into it.

Conclusion - I wanted to like the game - I think the idea has real possibilities, but it is either boring if you take it easy, or frustrating if you try to work hard at things. Add in a costly prive tag and there is no reason to buy this game.

Think very carefully before buying this

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 19 / 20
Date: January 10, 2003
Author: Amazon User

I did NOT like this game at all.

The sad thing about this is, that I always thought The Sims Online was a great idea and was truly looking forward to this game, but this is definitely not the type of game I envisioned and its mostly certainly not the type I want to play.

The developers took a great concept and turned into a shallow, boring game that relies heavily on social interaction than actual gameplay.
While other online games require socialization, there is at least an actual game to them.

It's basically just a chat room and that's it. Most of the advertising is extremely misleading.

For instance you can't own more than 100 objects and your whole lot can't use more then 950 tiles of its 2116 maximum tiles, yet its advertised that there are no limits.

You are forced to have MULTIPLE roommates in order to get anywhere in the game and all there is to do is work on skills, chatting and making money.

And no, there aren't any downtown areas, and no places to walk around. The Sim World is no better than a 3D chatroom.

In a few days I hit the object limit meaning there is nothing to spend my money on and no reason to work on my Sim's skills anymore either.

You can't build big houses because of the object limits.

You can't even really decorate the house you can build because there are only a few objects actually in the game.

There really isn't an economy and there are only 3 types of places players build: Skills Centers, money making centers and Dance Clubs.

You're basically going to pay for a monthly chatroom to hang out with other Sim players and thats it. I heard it cost $25 Million to make this game which absolutely floors me because there really isn't much to look at or do. Promises are being made about more content being added in the future which means lots of patches and future expansions to invest in and I for one have no intention of waiting around.

Being a fan of The Sims, I can't begin to describe my disappointment.

So like I said, please do research before forking over the cash to invest in this. Carefully read all the reviews on this site.
Look up other reviews elsewhere. Write down the pros and cons, like do you have the time to devote to this game, (because in order to get anywhere you'll have to play at least 20 hours a week) will you be able to handle some of the boorish behavior that goes on in the game, etc.

And make sure you look up Amazon.com's return policy ( or at whatever store) before you purchase.

GAMERS CHECK IN, BUT THEY CAN'T CHECK OUT

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 19 / 20
Date: April 03, 2003
Author: Amazon User

I recently decided to cancel my Sims Online account. I have no real problems with the game; I simply don't enjoy (or play) it as much as the off-line version. So I tried to cancel online, but got a message saying I had to call EA and speak in person to a customer service representative -- even though I'd signed up for the account online, automatically and immediately.

The first three times I called, I was put on hold, and when I was finally patched through to an actual person, he or she could not hear me. "Hello? Hello?" they'd ask -- then they'd hang up on me.

On the forth try (after waiting for a while on hold again) I got through to someone who could hear me, though "only barely." Instead of canceling my account as I requested however, the sales rep instead went into a telemarketing-style spiel about all the "fun new content" that would soon be added to the game.

Be aware of this disrespectful marketing tactic-- if you've decided to play this game, use a pre-paid subscription card.

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