Valley24.com has part Two of their “It’s a Simulated World” writeup. In this article they discuss the worst of the Sims series, as well as the copycats that tried to imitate the sucess of Maxis. I strongly have to disagree with most of the games on the list, especially SimCity 3000 and Animal Crossing…But I do agree with The Sims Online (failure from a business standpoint) and Singles (which just looks plain awful).
The Sims Online (2002) – The Sims has no real final goal, and the same can be said of most MMORPGs. But, in order to get people to pay a certain amount of money a month to play what they’d already playing for years, The Sims Online had to have some kind of hook: hence, the free enterprise system that could’ve only come out of Ayn Rand’s naughtiest dreams. And if extremely limited capitalistic competition with online strangers didn’t float your boat, all of the God power that makes the Sims games famous disappears as The Sims Online reduces the amount of controllable characters to one—and in real-time, too. At best, The Sims Online was an expensive chat room that let you watch tiny meters grow.
