Af Wubbas Do (Or: Evil in the world of The Sims)

So I bought The Sims 3. So I like The Sims, and have done since the first one. So I usually buy most, if not all of the expansion packs. What of it? Huh?

If I sound defensive, it is of course because The Sims is seen by many as one of the banes of the hardcore gamer. I’ve found it fascinating over the years, though. Ever since first playing Sim City, then being able to fly around a Sim City 2000 save game in Sim Copter, I wondered for the longest time how cool it would be to get right down to the “personal” level… and the original iteration of The Sims delivered bigtime. It became a social event, too – I was living in halls at university at the time, so inevitably I made all of the people in our flat as best I could. Everyone came by regularly to see what was going on and laugh at who had pissed themselves or passed out from exhaustion that day (hey, managing six people is tricky!) and it is a source of many fond memories.

Fast forward to today, and we have The Sims 3. Some things haven’t changed much (the basic gameplay still involves bossing your Sims around and making sure they don’t shit themselves, though this has been played down a little in favour of “Moodlets” – mood “buffs” and “debuffs” – this time around), and others have changed a great deal. The biggest change is the much-vaunted “open world” design of the game. In practice, this means that Sims can walk out of their front door, walk down the street and go and visit someone else. The difference this makes is enormous – no longer are you confined to your own house or specific “community lots” – now you can actually explore the world, and there’s a bunch of gameplay elements to reflect that. You can go fishing, collect things, find “treasure” – in many ways, the design of the game is getting closer and closer to something along the lines of an MMORPG.

Anyway, this time around, as usual, I made myself and my wife and am playing them “straight” – that is, attempting to be as successful as possible and maintain the family bloodline. As such, as Sim Pete and Sim Jane enter their twilight years, their two kids are growing up nicely and developing into fine young men. I just hope they don’t die before the kids reach adulthood, which is, of course, a possibility!

Having read some articles online, the Prima official guide (which is a good, fun read if you’re interested in the game and its mechanics) and, most notably, this touching and heartbreaking blog about two homeless Sims, I was intrigued to try out a completely different kind of Sim, using some of the more… shall we say “unpleasant” Traits on offer at character creation. Here were the results:

Screenshot-2 This is Lars. As you can probably see, he’s a miserable git. Maybe people laugh at his Sephiroth hair and overuse of man-makeup. Whatever the reasons, he’s become a bitter and twisted individual. He’s Grumpy pretty much all the time, which makes it difficult to keep him happy. He’s also Evil, which means he delights in the misfortune of others.

Screenshot-5 Naturally, he has an evil-looking house surrounding by a grungy-looking moat/swamp combo. He deliberately designed it to annoy his neighbours, who have a very pleasant-looking house.

Screenshot-10 Lars wanders over to pay his new neighbours a visit and is confronted with Roxy, a young woman whom he takes an immediate dislike to due to her looking “a bit hippie”.

Screenshot-15 The conversation turns sour quickly. Roxy recoils in horror as Lars starts yelling at her for no other reason than he felt like it. He insults her appearance and her house. (Most of this was without any intervention from me.)

Screenshot-20 Lars decides enough is enough and spontaneously decides to attempt to punch out Roxy. He fails once. Humiliated, he tries again and is victorious. Both sims are left feeling faintly ashamed, but Lars is pleased that he’s caused some misery.

Screenshot-22 Dusting himself off, Lars turns to Roxy’s roommate, who has been watching in horror at the sideshow unfolding in front of her. Lars is sweetness and politeness, though, and uneasily (and some may say foolishly) she allows him into her house. Roxy is not happy.

Screenshot-24 “What a nice house,” thinks Lars, his Kleptomaniac Trait itching. He restrains himself for the moment, as people are watching and he’s already made a… memorable first impression.

Screenshot-28 In an attempt to ingratiate himself with his hostess (and perhaps build up some misplaced trust which could come in handy later…) Lars decides to tell the one about the broccoli, the tomato, the carrot and the pepper. Roxy’s housemate isn’t sure what to make of Lars’ aimless ramblings. But then there’s a clattering thump behind them.

Screenshot-30 Roxy has passed out on the floor. Evidently the exertions of meeting Lars for the first time were too much for her. Lars, Roxy’s housemate and Madame Dungarees all have their own thoughts on Roxy at this point.

Screenshot-37 At this point, the household gets another visitor. Lars doesn’t even bother to find out her name before he starts spreading gossip about how unlucky Roxy is. “She sure was unlucky to meet me today,” he cackles.

Screenshot-41 The visitor is unimpressed. Lars sneers, knowing that the poison has been dripped. Roxy blushes as she listens to him carry on.

Screenshot-45 Lars starts on Roxy again, who looks close to tears. Roxy’s housemate, getting rather fed up of this, starts thinking about going to bed and just leaving them to it.

Screenshot-47 Roxy decides to stand up to Lars and squares up to him. Her housemate stares into space behind the quarreling pair.

Screenshot-50 Finally, as Lars goes to give Roxy a good slap around the kisser, Roxy’s housemate finally decides enough is enough and politely asks Lars to leave on account of his “misbehaviour”.

Screenshot-51 He graciously leaves, bidding his hostess farewell. Then he tips their trashcan over…

Screenshot-58 …and steals one of their porch lights, not because he needs one, but because he can.

Screenshot-54 Tired and hungry, Lars heads home to contemplate the evil he has committed that day. Preparing himself a piece of toast, he suddenly realises that his house doesn’t have any chairs in it, so, unprompted by me, he decides to settle down on the toilet to enjoy his toast.

I was laughing hard by this point. This was such a different experience to anything else I’d done in The Sims before. Sure, you could play an evil God and kill them off by rebuilding their houses in ways that, shall we say, weren’t to their advantage, but the “negative” social interactions were always seemingly discouraged. By playing an Evil Sim, you’re actively encouraged to be mean and nasty to as many people as you can. The Sim’s Wishes reflect that, showing their heartfelt desires to go out and steal candy from a baby, or slap a special someone.

The expressiveness on the faces of the Sims has developed a lot over the years. Check out the faces that Roxy pulls as Lars is mean to her. I also found it pretty funny that Lars did a lot of the unpleasant things to Roxy completely of his own volition thanks to the “free will” option. He obviously felt an uncontrollable urge to make his presence known to his new neighbours, so I just kind of went along with it. It was fun, in an ever-so-slightly wrong way.

Give it a try. Playing an unconventional, flawed character presents some interesting challenges that you’d never come across if you were playing relatively “straight-laced”.

TWANG! Waggle! Kick! Punch! It’s all in the mind!

Those of you following me on Twitter may be familiar with my Jedi Health Kick blog. Perhaps you’re reading it already, in which case you’ll know I recently picked up a copy of EA Sports Active in my latest attempt to hammer and chisel my woeful body into a shape vaguely resembling human. It’s good stuff, and for anyone doubting the value of Wii Fit as an exercise programme, you can rest assured that EA Sports Active gives you much more of a battering than Wii Fit ever did thanks to the fact it actually takes you through set programmes (although, of course, you can create your own also) rather than leaving you to your own devices and relying on your own self-discipline which – let’s face it – your lack of is probably the reason you came to titles like Wii Fit in the first place!

The thing I like about it is how “videogamey” it makes the whole experience. Being a supergeek as I am, I like anything that rewards achievement in a noticeable way. I’m a sucker for slidey bars, percentage markers and trophies. Ironic, really, that I never got into sports, since sports are also filled with slidey bars, percentage markers and trophies. Anyway, the fact is that EASA is full of these things. You get trophies not only for successfully completing workouts, but for smaller things like doing a certain number of laps around the virtual track across all your workouts, doing a certain number of squats, burning a certain number of calories and the like. These are all goals that you would probably set yourself if you were one of those people who are “into fitness” and can motivate themselves, but for the gamers (or the lazy) amongst us, it helps to have something to remind us that even smaller achievements are worth celebrating.

Anyway, to cut to the tenuous link: there’s been a lot of discussion surrounding motion control and full-body control recently, particularly after E3. Some seem to think that it’s “the way that games are going”, with the idea of us standing up to play games and running the risk of hurricane-kicking our TV a very real possibility. Others are very much a fan of the traditional controller, believing that it is something fundamentally “gamey”. I’m inclined to fall into this latter camp, but the motion control thing has some obvious health benefits which are clearly demonstrated by titles like EASA.

The question is, of course, do you want something that is primarily an entertainment device to provide health benefits all the time? Look at other media. TV and books offer health benefits sometimes – you can watch a yoga DVD or read a lifestyle book – but for however many of these there are, there are an equal if not greater number of “junk” items to enjoy – pure, unadulterated enjoyment with no pretense of “doing it for your own good”. In this sense, while motion controls are cool and groovy, I’d like to hope that the controller isn’t dead just yet.

A key part of the experience is tactile feedback. While motion controls allow you to feel your own body moving, when it comes to actually touching or hitting something, you don’t feel anything. This is also a problem with touchscreen controls – a joypad on a touchscreen will never match a real joypad until a technology is developed where you can “feel” it. I also question how some genres would work with motion controls – take an FPS, for example. How do you look up? If you REALLY look up, then you can’t see the TV any more, so unless Halo Natal comes with some sort of 360-degree “vision ball” that you have to stand inside to play (which would be awesome, incidentally) then you’re resorting to flailing your arms around in some arbitrary gesture or pointing something at the top of the screen.

I think there’s work to do – and I just hope that people aren’t going to embrace these new technologies too completely. I very much like them and think they’re going to be a lot of interesting fun to play with – plus I think all of them provide plenty of scope for further titles like EASA and Wii Fit to improve gamer lifestyle, which can only be a good thing – but let’s hope the controller isn’t dead just yet, hmm?

Microsoft at E3

Just finished watching the Microsoft E3 presentation. As most people could have predicted even before seeing what was on offer, reception was somewhat mixed.

Predictably, everyone creamed themselves over the Modern Warfare 2 trailer and gameplay footage which I, ever the rebel, remain relatively indifferent about, though it is remarkably pretty. Halo fanboys spooged copiously over ODST and the “secret” Halo title, Reach. This I am completely indifferent about. When Bungie said they had a “top secret” project to announce, I was hoping they were going to show a new Myth game or something like that… but no. Bungie make Halo and nothing else now, it seems. Fair play, it’s made them an awful lot of money but seriously guys, something new once in a while really wouldn’t go amiss.

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Other notable mentions went to Crackdown 2, sequel to the underrated open-world funfest from a while back – and for my money, one of the best implementations of co-op (or perhaps it should be more accurately called “concurrent play”, since you can both happily charge off in opposite directions if you want to) I’ve ever seen.

Then there was Splinter Cell: Conviction, which does look like it’s trying some revolutionary new tricks with presentation. Rather than having mission objectives and cutscenes taking players out of the action, many things appear “projected” on the walls, be these instructions or even flashback cutscenes. It was a really interesting approach, and the game looks to be supremely cinematic because of it. It’s certainly enough to get me interested in Splinter Cell again, a series I haven’t touched for quite some time.

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Then there was Alan Wake, a game which many were worrying had fallen into the abyss of vaporware. But no – we saw it, including some gameplay footage. It looks to be something of a cross between Max Payne and Silent Hill, with, like Splinter Cell, some interesting presentational features. Wake’s narration of the action hearkens back to Max Payne’s overblown drawl from his games, and the use of light and dark is reminiscent of some scenes in the Silent Hill series. It certainly looks incredible, too, and could well be the thing that makes 360 owners feel a bit better about not having Heavy Rain to play.

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Kojima also snuck onto stage and dropped the fact that a new MGS game starring Raiden would be hitting 360, and Square showed off some FFXIII footage. Both will likely be great, but there was nothing there we hadn’t expected.

The main part of the keynote revolved around the Project Natal technology, which allows real-time motion capture and voice recognition, allowing players to interact with games without needing a controller. It was made very clear at the outset of the presentation that this was primarily intended to be a means by which non-gamers could be attracted to interactive entertainment – but of course, this hasn’t stopped hardcore gamers bitching and moaning as they always do.

We saw a number of demos, including some questionable real-time avatar motion capture and animation and a fun-looking tech demo called Ricochet (essentially body-controlled Breakout). We also saw how Natal will allow users to interact with the Dashboard in a distinctly Minority Report manner by swishing their hands around and, much to the disgust of Atheistium over at viera.nu, allow their avatars to try on girly clothes while having a video chat. (To be fair, this was pretty cringeworthy, but I don’t see it being a huge part of most gamers’ lives.)

It was Peter Molyneux’s work with Natal that provoked the most interest and curiosity, however. Presenting a virtual human called Milo, he demonstrated the capabilities of Natal along with software by showing someone interacting with Milo by speaking naturally and using realistic gestures to interact with the virtual world. At one point, Milo invites the player to look into the water and a real reflection of the player appears on-screen, with the ripples in the water responding to their “touch”. It was a pretty incredible sight, and a glimpse of what the future might hold, especially for games like Oblivion. (Thanks to Ajguy for suggesting this.) Imagine being able to hold a naturalistic conversation with an NPC rather than tediously clicking through a list of topics.

As I mentioned earlier, reception has been mixed. Natal is undoubtedly amazing technology (assuming it works) but the self-professes “hardcore gamers” of the world are already up in arms about “dumbing down”. But the fact is, just like the Wii is not a system for these people, Natal and its features are not designed for this audience. What Natal will allow Microsoft to do is broaden their audience from the core of gamers to families and other non-gamers. With the introduction of other services on the Dashboard such as last.fm, instant-on 1080p movies (I remain cynical about this, given the general crapness of my connection) and live TV from Sky, the aim is very much to turn the Xbox from a simple games system to an all-purpose multimedia box that sits under the television as the centrepiece of your digital life.

I don’t think that’s such a bad thing. No-one suggested once that hardcore gamers would be left out in the cold – quite the contrary, in fact, with the announcement of big titles like Modern Warfare 2, Crackdown 2, Left 4 Dead 2 (yayz!) and numerous others. What Natal will do is simply open up the field of interactive entertainment to more people. If all they want to do is prance around like a pillock in front of their TV, then let them. But there’s always the possibility that they’ll get interested enough in the hobby to join the growing number of gamers out there and enjoy this rapidly-changing medium.

I think that’s quite a pleasant image of the future, in fact. Let’s see what happens.