A few days back (last August 10, 2011 to be exact), Playfish, subsidiary of Electronic Arts that develops Facebook social game apps, launched the beta or their most recent Facebook game, The Sims Social. The Sims Social is a Facebook app game version of their multi-million dollar worth PC game series, The Sims.
Being a guilty The Sims addict myself, I told myself that I gotta try this the first time it comes out in beta!
I made a male character named Ken Hidaka, after my eternal crush a young handsome ex-pro soccer goalie of J-league turned assassin under the code name Siberan from an old anime called Weiß Kreuz.
My first impressions of it is that it’s really cool. Imagine that you can actually play The Sims in your browser. Though not in full detail like the PC ones, it’s still The Sims.
I took a few screenshots to let you compare them with the actual PC game.
Like in The Sims, in Sims Social, you can play with your character, ask him to eat, take a bath or wash hands, dump and sleep depending on the moods it has. You need to raise their mood when they get red, or yellow.
You can also learn new skills, like in this case, a guitar skills. There’s also a writing skill that you can learn when you click the computer.
You can also buy different furniture and decorate your house, via the Shop.
There’s also a Build tab under the Shop, where you can purchase stuff for your house’s architecture, like doors, windows and such.
Then of course, you can also buy clothes for your sim by the Clothes icon.
There’s also the Craft icon. While you play the sims, do actions for your sims like eating, washing hands, taking a crap, taking pictures of the birds outside your house, watering plants, weeding out plants, etc., it sometimes drops objects. These objects you acquire go inside your backpack. You collect these objects in exchange for greater reward objects later on. This is something typical in Facebook games.
Then you can also visit neighbors. You visit neighbors and interact with them to raise your social mood up, when it gets low. You can also raise your social up by using the telephone at your house, though visiting neighbors is still cooler since you get more interaction options. You can also become someone’s boyfriend/girlfriend there too, when romance picks up. And when it gets even hotter, you can woohoo in the shower! Haha!
The most frustrating part of this game though, like the PC version of it, is that it loads extremely slow at the beginning. And often, when I play it, it just stops loading. And you can’t really go and rage all about it for obvious reasons. Well, hello? It’s still in close beta.