User Rating: 4.5 | Singles: Flirt Up Your Life PC
Singles is a simplistic knock off of the Sims with a juvenile twist. I totally agree with the Gamespot review. You perform mind-numbing tasks over and over again, all in an effort to get your two roommates together and comfortably naked in order to perform "the wild thing". Yes, it's written in the game as exactly that. It's like the developers used a "Lingo of Hip Terms from the 80s" for this game's dialouge and interaction options. You pretty much go to the bathroom, shower, cook, wash your hands, and then chat with the other roommate constantly, until you have enough relationship points to head to the bedroom and screw around. That's it. Being a Sims player with a tad of skill, I was able to obtain the entire weird sexual "goal" in under 45 minutes of game play. The whole game is about as hard as the first original tutorial in The Sims. There's little need to buy furniture or rearrange your shared apartment, and many of the options make little difference on your relationship (such as selecting what TV show to watch, or buying a bigger couch or more tables). It's a bit frustrating when you start out, as you cannot build new rooms in your loft so more than anything, you'll find your initally prudish characters fighting over bathroom usage. Gamespot hid it right on the head when they described the weird social interactions and how they don't necessairly coincide with each other. You can be a tiny fraction away from having enough "points" to actually have sex with the other character and still run away when you see them in their underwear. It's bizarre to repeatedly tongue kiss and flirt and fondle the other roommate for an entire week, but still be unable to walk around in your underwear or brush your teeth while they shower. It's far more difficult to try to make your roommates hate each other than to have them screw their brains out. Once you get them in the sack there's little else to do, except play it again with another vague set of characters who have no differences other than their hairstyles and descriptions. The nudity is a bold statement in video games but ultimately unnecessary. You can zoom right in on the privates of each of your characters but strangely, the shower and bathroom still gets a Sims-like censor over it. Other than the hair and face, all the character models are the same when they're naked anyway.. and they all look like sculpted models anyway, so there's never a question of one roommate not being attracted to the other's body.
