It sounds the same, I know, but in reality it feels quite different. Having done away with The Sims' basic list of "motives" - bladder control, etc - Rotobee has incorporated other concerns - Fun, Romance, Sensuality, etc - which go up or down depending on the sorts of things you get up to.
Obviously though there are lots of ways you can help build up the relationship too. You're also rather hamstrung if you go for an "exotic" combination of characters - the increasingly different lifestyle of each potential flatmate is meant to provide for a sort of organic difficulty level, which is a nice touch. It's really easy to throw a spanner in the works by just, well, being a guy. Take Enrique for example, who will happily stand around gawping while his female flatmate showers or bathes, suspiciously running into the bathroom to discuss "hobbies" while she's in her bath towel, but shirks away at the merest hint of cleaning up - quickly wandering off on his own to watch TV, unless you can hook him back in time and get him to lend a hand. Sit them down to watch TV, for example, and you could just chuck on a gangster flick or the latest headlines, but you're far more likely to get them in the right mood to chat if you stick on a chick flick.Īnd of course as we all know, making a relationship work is a difficult thing, not helped, it has to be said, by the natural attitude of the average guy. You can instruct your singles to talk to one another about their hobbies, or you can have them sit down and watch TV, or any of a hundred other things - and their reaction and how it affects their mutual friendship varies massively depending on what you do. However obviously the aim of the game (loose though it is) is to encourage relations. Each character is a fully rounded person with a back-story and strongly held beliefs, all of which is borne out very cleverly by a script that reacts to their conversations and activities, and they're no more interested in coitus when they first land atop the Prague-ish cityscape than they are in giving you power over their balls (or whatever).
You don't create these people, although you can encourage them to update their wardrobe, and even though you control both of them within the game's penthouse apartment setting, you can't just drag-select the pair and hit Ctrl-SEX. At the start of the game you pick a pair of flatmates out of 13 male and female characters (mostly straight, although there's the possibility of single sex couples), who range from anarchists and cheesy Latin dancer types to catwalk models and salon stylists.
Gone are more or less all of the tedious daily rituals, leaving us free to worry about more pressing matters - like the continued existence of the human race.
Your little singles are quite capable of going to the toilet, thanks, or brushing their teeth, tying their shoelaces - even deciding they want to go and watch TV. No? Well that's fine by me, because the main thing that separates The Sims from Singles is German developer Rotobee's decision to focus on the more enjoyable applications for private parts, rather than their participation in human waste disposal. For the love of God, Maxis, if your game is going to focus on strategic manipulation of human genitalia, at least make it interesting! All I really want to do is get on and build up an empire of useless crap in this quirky little world, and instead I seem to spend every waking hour desperately trying to master someone's wang. Endless worrying about comfort levels is a theme that runs throughout every Sims game Maxis has developed so far, and it saps my will to live (and makes me want to go to the toilet). It's because I get bored worrying about someone else's bladder. It's not just down to the endless lazy expansion packs, and it's not because it's a "casual" game either or anything blinkered and pathetic like that.
Now, I don't really like The Sims any more. It's also more or less exactly the same to control - selecting and moving your little simulated people with the left mouse button, queuing up tasks plucked from any given object's context-sensitive menu, rearranging the house with an Ikea catalogue knock-off and a wad of fifties, and of course pausing and/or fast-forwarding the action to compensate for tedious tasks, the hours your little people spend at work, or your increasingly unhinged attempts at feng shui. The interface is very similar, everybody's jabbering away incomprehensibly, and most of your time is spent manoeuvring a camera through translucent walls in a spacious penthouse apartment, watching a pair of flatmates squabble over their silly little lives while you worry about whether they have enough televisions. In fact, at a glance it's actually quite difficult to tell the two apart. Let's get something out of the way: Singles is very similar to The Sims.