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Genre: Life Sim

Format: DVD

Developer: Maxis

Publisher: Electronic Arts

Mac Publisher: Aspyr

Minimum System Requirements: Mac OS X v10.3.9, 1.0GHz PowerPC or Intel chipset, 256MB RAM, 3GB free hard disk space, 32MB ATI Radeon 9000 or NVidia GeForce FX 5200 video card or Intel GMA 950 chipset, DVD drive.

Review Computer: 2GHz 20" Intel Core Duo iMac, 1GB RAM, 256MB ATI Radeon X1600

Network Feature: No

Processor Compatibility Universal

Price: $29.95

ESRB Rating: T (crude humor, sexual themes, violence)

Availability: Now

Demo: No

Official Website: www.thesimsstories.com

By all accounts, this should have been the version of The Sims that finally won me over to the franchise. Although I understand the appeal of the games, simply moving little people around, buying them lamps and making them hate each other never appealed to me. I want my games to have a point. A story. A beginning, a middle and an ending. So now, Aspyr brings us The Sims Life Stories, which actually gives preset characters, a plot and a climax to reach. The problem? They forgot to make any of them the least bit interesting.

Certainly, by now, you understand how The Sims is played and what it's about. You've got these little people, and you get them jobs and you decorate their homes and you make them fall in love with each other or hate each other and take showers. It's reality TV for the gaming world, with you as the puppet master. And, like reality TV, it seems impervious to our defenses. Through something like twelve dozen expansion packs and plenty more looming, The Sims has become the largest selling franchise in gaming history.

And so, you can look at The Sims Life Stories in one of two ways: either EA is trying to breathe some new life into the series with a new style of game play, or they're just milking it dry. Regardless of their motivation, I wanted The Sims Life Stories to be good. I think a Sims game in this style can be, but Life Stories really isn't.

Okay, here's what happens. There are two stories built into The Sims Life Stories. In the first, you play Riley Harlowe. She's young, she's pretty, and she's starting life in a new town at her aunt's house. She meets some new people, and "generic One Tree Hill plot #14 takes place (only, the boys mostly leave their shirts on). She decides she likes dude #1, which angers chick #3, so she becomes friends with chick #2, but then dude #2 shows up, and then everyone wins the basketball tournament and the evil mayor gets his come-uppance.

Okay, there's no basketball and there's no evil mayor, but I sure wish there was. Anything to make this story worth playing through. The characters are generally annoying, which is fine, because the fun thing about any Sims game is the ability to be annoying and mess with people's lives. That works in the wide-open gameplay of The Sims 2. But in Life Stories, when you're stuck within a linear plot that you really can't control and with sims that you didn't create, the comic value of annoying people is lost.

In the second story, you play Vincent Moore. Whereas Riley was looking for success in both her love life and in her career (hey, like nearly everyone else in the modern world!), Vince is already successful in his career, being a billionaire and all, but not so much when it comes to the ladies. Or maybe he is. Plot element #1, after dating Samantha for three weeks, she proposes to Vince. Seems pretty successful to me. But Vince turns her down and turns to e-dating, and wackiness ensues.

Neither of these stories are awful, I suppose. They never insulted my intelligence like, say, an episode of One Tree Hill. But they're terribly uneventful. In the Sims and the Sims 2, hitting milestones in life is enough because it's you hitting the milestone. When players create two characters and lead them through careers and friendships and kitchen fires to the point where they get married, it's fun because the player is the one getting married. Here, it's Riley Harlowe getting married, and do we care about Riley Harlowe? That's up to the gamer.

Along with the aspirations you're given in The Sims 2, characters in Life Stories have daily goals they want to achieve. For instance, early on in Riley's game, she had the goal of getting to the point where she could flirt with this guy she liked, or tickle him, or whatever. She also wanted to make enough money to buy a book case and to gain the confidence to kick a girl out of her home. To reach the point where you can do this, you have to run your Sims through their traditional routines, keeping things like their hygiene, energy and bladder and acceptable levels. I found it difficult to get a day's goals done while allowing for enough time to rest before work, but many will carry over to the next day. And if you miss your smaller goals, no worries; you can still get married.

You're not stuck within these rigid story lines, however. Traditional Sims 2 gameplay is available, so the Life Stories does have life after the stories are told. However, the life isn't as vast. There are fewer places you can go than in The Sims 2, fewer house construction and decorating items are available to you, and you can't get as many sims on screen. Owners of The Sims 2 therefore have no reason to pick up this game, yet there are two large audiences out there for Life Stories.

First, there are those who, for one reason or another, have never played a Sims game. Because Life Stories controls the game for you and provides you with fewer options, it's a good way to learn the system without ever inundating you with fences and chairs and job options. Houses and lives are just easier to manage, here.

Also, and I salute EA and Aspyr for this, the game is much less taxing on your system than is The Sims 2. It can actually be played on the Mac mini and the MacBook, making it accessible to many gamers who couldn't handle The Sims 2. In fact, the controls have been given new shortcuts specifically to accommodate laptops, you can play in window mode, and the game pauses itself automatically when you close your MacBook or MacBook Pro.

One other thing Aspyr got right, here, is the price. At only $29.95, it's priced about the same as the expansion packs for The Sims 2. It's certainly worth picking up over another pointless expansion such as Glamour Life Stuff. The game is well developed and well ported, and I really do like the idea of adding stories to The Sims. It's just that Maxis needs to make something interesting happen. Otherwise, we get an adventure game with no adventure; a role-playing game in which no roles are played, a sim in which little is simulated.

I'll give the game the benefit of the doubt, though, as maybe this is a logical starting point. There are, after all, two expansions already in the works: The Sims Pet Stories, which looks simply horrid, and The Sims Castaway Stories, which could be really entertaining if it's more about the fight to survive on an uncharted island and less about decorating your lean-to with palm fronds and monkey skulls and giving your girlfriend a necklace of seashells.

And I hope Riley and Vince don't end up on that island. If they do, I'll win the game by just leaving them there.

Buy The Sims Life Stories