The Sims with a touch of Lego, and twice the cuteness. Wait, I need HOW MANY gingerbread to make you a refrigerator?!
So for me, MySims is the Sims without all that pain-in-the-behind work of keeping your Sims happy and healthy. For the first...ten or twelve hours, it was awesome. Funny characters, the level of customization in building (once I figured it all out) is fantastic, the world itself is interesting and catchy.
The furniture customization is brilliant, but the control of it is awkward. This is one time where I think i might have preferred a more traditional D-pad placement process rather than having to point-and-click, because it is sometimes really hard to place a piece where you want it. That being said, however, you feel like a kid with a set of endless Legos. Ok, you need a bed. Well, I COULD just use those five pieces, but it will look so much cooler if i use twenty of THESE! The tasks you are asked to do by each shop owner and resident are interesting and appropriate, and allow you to stylize each location to your own fashion. The arcade goes totally retro, with tubes and stripes, while the boutique across the street gets everything rounded and soft, and that creepy museum owner wants everything made out of deadwood and stone. In the original building phase, your selection is limited severely compared to past Sims titles, but however you design the outside doesn't seem to affect the setup of the inside.
I do wish that some of the Essence paint patterns had a little more variety, and a more subtle variety. Yes, I know I have to paint that sofa using Action Figures, but that doesn't mean a sofa covered in giant Lightning Bolts looks good. However, all that is coming from someone who would spend hours creating the most ridiculously furnished/decorated Sim houses ever imagined, so my frustrations at the lack of non-cartoony wall paint may not be shared by the masses. I also wish that after you have created a piece of furniture, it would be possible to simply recreate it without going through the whole building process. Or that some other stock furnishings would be available so that you con't have to start from scratch every time. Collecting essences was fairly easy at first, and then it got more difficult, and then it just got kinda monotonous. Once you reach two and three star levels, you're customizing furniture like mad, using up entire stores of essences. The ones that have to be prospected are the most annoying, the planted ones you can just chop down (for wood essence!) then plant again. ated, the essence collection process gets old after you reach three stars. Prospecting gets really old after about five minutes, but when you're trying to get thirty Gingerbread, it takes at least that. Overall, MySims is one of those games where you start playing, and four hours later you have no idea how you managed to lose track of time, but you have two stars and you just built the world's coolest Disco Club. A great game for all ages, and both genders. I think it is a great foundation for EA to build on, and that we'll see more titles to come.