The Sims - Bustin' Out

Most people who played The Sims on a PC spent their time building houses and torturing their tenants. The console version assumes you might want something to aim at. Its Story Mode hands you a series of goals, tied to different locations around a small neighborhood, and the game steers you from one to the next. It was a smart bet for a console audience that had no mouse and no habit of inventing its own fun.

The structure is where the game parts ways with its parent. You begin with a bare-bones character and a modest place to live, then work toward objectives that unlock new areas and new people. The old needs bars are still there: hunger, hygiene, bladder, energy, and social contact all drain, and ignoring them still ends badly. But the daily grind now feeds into something. A job, a skill, a friendship, a purchase: each one moves you toward the next goal, so the routine feels like progress instead of upkeep.

That is also its limit. The missions lean on a fair amount of repetition, and the leash is shorter than on the PC, where you could ignore objectives altogether. Controlling a house with a gamepad takes some patience, and menus that were quick with a mouse feel slower here. Load times between locations break the flow more than they should.

Still, the translation was handled with more care than many PC-to-console ports of the period. The humor survives, and so does the odd pleasure of watching a tiny person fail to make it to the toilet in time. Going out to explore the neighborhood and meet its residents gives the game a shape that the original deliberately lacked.

It is not the definitive Sims, and it was never trying to be. What it offers is a version of the formula that tells you where to go next, and for a player who found the open-ended original a little shapeless, that guidance is the whole appeal.