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Original post by C-Junkie I love how this thread has made me a girl. Oh well, at least I apparently have social skills as well. I will admit that this game would be more fun if you could start gang wars. WEST SIDE!@!!!!!!!

LOL! Yeah, for some bizarre reason I wanted my house to be bombed out ruins where I walked around with an AK hunting rats when my hunger meter got low. I think I'm on the level with those who drowned their Sims by putting them in the pool then selling the ladder.

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Original post by Madster The way i see it its mostly about the lack of goal, and the lack of a clear-cut progress indicator. There is no way of knowing how long it takes to "win"... mainly because you can't "win". For twitch,strategy and some puzzle gamers this is annoying.

Funny enough, I think on the Playstation Sims does have a series of goals (although that may just be the tutorial, where you're trying to get out of your mom's house).

But I wonder: How much of the frustration with not being able to win is reflected by cabin fever? What I mean is that when you get big you can't really affect the world around you, except through your house. Would this frustration go away if you were told win X dollars in Y time?

This hatred (or more lightly, dislike) of the sims may also be because it is hard to do it 'perfect'.

What I mean is that even if the sims had some type of score board, one for each 'goal' (wealth, job, social, house etc.) I think I would still not enjoy it because it is so hard to do it well. It's not worth the effort.

This comes from a 'quick load' half-life freak. Every time I would get damaged in half-life (original) I would reload and try to do it again without loosing any health. This isn't terribly hard, (although in some places you have to die a bit). I will often use self imposed restrictions, and suprisingly it makes my game experience more enjoyable.

With the sims I have found it hard to find this 'winning strategy'. The continued balancing of needs makes it difficult.

The same situation arose when I used to play Sim City 2000. How do you win that game? All my cities seemed to get to a certain point and then dwindle.

Anyway, I'm a perfectionist and others probably don't feel the same way but that's my major gripe over the sims.

For me, a game must meet a few criteria to be enjoyable long-term:
1) It must cooperative - I want to play WITH actual people
2) It must be competitive - I want to play AGAINST actual people
3) It must be difficult and challenging to solve the game {by which I mean the entire 'optimal' sequence of actions should not be obvious (as it is in The Sims, MMO*s, etc) at any time really}

There are some more, I'm sure, but those 3 are the main ones. The first 2 mean it pretty much has to be a team-based multiplayer game. Single player games have no replay value for me (excluding a few exceptions like SNES games I play once a year).
The last one means I should have to be dynamic and adapt as gameplay continues, contrary to how MMORPGs are where there is a single/few optimal skill sets that you're working toward the whole game. I've seen people argue that MMOs fit this criterion since the cleric had to heal just enough not to anger the dragon while the fighter killed the dragon, but it sounds like there was a simple formula behind it and any intelligent dragon would have noticed the cleric was the only reason the warrior was still alive after a second or two even if some magic formula didn't say the cleric's healing was more important than the warrior's damage.

I am curious as to why every game "has" to appeal to every gamer? Face it, there are always going to be people that don't like one genre or another for a variety of reasons. To say that "hardcore" gamers hate the Sims kind of misses the point. There are, by sales numbers alone, thousands of "hardcore" gamers who just happen to love the Sims. Just because they don't play a game or genre that you associate with "hardcore" gamers does not make them any less of a gamer, it just means your ideology of what you "believe" a hardcore gamer should be is falacious. In developement I would discourage pigeon holing your options for a target market. You never know when one or more aspects of one genre may be the very thing to get your project a mass appeal. .02