‘Play with your life’ – Not literally !

It has been more than a month since EA launched the ‘online’ version of their popular god sim game, ‘The Sims’ for facebook as ‘The Sims: Social’. One of the most liked apps for facebook pre release; the game has more than 53,178,785 fans worldwide. If you don't know anything about The Sims, it is a game were you get to play God. You can create a virtual human of sort and decide what happens in his life. The Sims Social brings this experience to facebook. You can play along with your friends (and the only place where you can get away after peeing in your friends shower), be friends or enemies (being an enemy is lot of fun), fall in love and more.

Like in the real world your sim has his needs. He will become hungry, would complain if didn’t have any fun, get lonely, would stink if didn’t take a shower for too long, feel sleepy and get bored if did the same activity over and over again. For the sim to be happy his needs should be taken care of; If not he would refuse to do what you tell him to do as well. You start off with a basic lot, with necessary furnishing to take of your Sims needs. As the game progresses, you earn money and can upgrade it to a large mansion (but unlike the original game, you need to build this room by room and needs help of your friends to complete it). In the beginning you earn very little money and like in other Facebook games, there is an option to convert your (or your dads) hard earned money to simcash (or lifetime points). You can buy new cloths, get new hair cut, buy paintings, and other stuff to give your sim all sort of pleasures. As you level up you unlock more and more things for your home and can buy them with your simcash. There are some things which requires social points (usually requires you to build it with help of some friends) and life time points (very hard to get, and insane amounts are required to buy so there is no way other than spending some of your money to get these).

The number of activities you can do is limited by an energy system (and you can’t get a nice nap and get your energy back..it doesn’t roll that way) which has a cap of 15. Irrelevant stuff like making food, using the toilet etc doesn’t take up energy but flirting with your girlfriend certainly does. You can earn sim cash by composing music in your guitar, writing articles or hacking in your computer, painting, photographing interesting things that pop up in your lot like a set of birds, or growing up fruits or cleaning up the lot. The wild plants in the lot grow like on some tonic and you’ll have a home in the middle of a jungle if not cleaned up frequently (Cleaning the mess gives you a very small amount of money and takes away 3 energy slots, which is one of things I hate about this game). You can ask your friends for energy or make energy drinks (which requires lot of hard to get ingredients, so make sure your friends are playing it too…like Farmville and other games). As you play the game, each activity gives you some sort of ingredient for making something like instant good mood, instant fun etc. And achieving some goals can get your sim ‘inspired’ which gives bonus simcash for every activity for a short time.

To interact with other players you need to visit their lot after the player approves you as a neighbor. You can do lot of activities like talking, sharing a joke, watching TV together, flirting, dancing, playing music for the other sim etc. The activities can either boost your relationship with the sim or ruin it (peeing certainly does that). Bella is your first neighbor (Sims players will recognize this sim from the actual game. One of the most popular sim in the whole series) and you can visit her to fulfill your sims social needs. ;)

EA keeps on adding more and more contents each day and the game is certainly a lot of fun to play with your friends. EA has fixed most of the bugs that it had and the game doesn’t crash often as it did in the first few weeks of its launch. So try this game, if you are a facebook junkie and play with ‘your’ life.

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