Ever wonder what your life would be like if you had decided to be a
paramedic? Or if you had the skills to be a professional athlete?
Well now you can see what life would have been like had you followed a different
path by playing The Sims.
To begin play, you must select your in-game persona - your Sim. You can
either select a pre-existing Sim or create your own. Creating your own Sim
allows you to tweak his/her personality to your liking - neat, outgoing, and fun
are a few of the traits from which you'll have to choose. You'll then be
given an initial budget and with which to purchase and furnish a home.
Once this is done, your Sim is placed into the gameworld and the fun begins.
In order to keep your Sim happy (and alive) you'll have to monitor his/her
needs. These range from the basic food and bathroom variety, to social
interaction and self-fulfillment. Managing all of these needs might prove
overwhelming were it not for the availability of maids, gardeners, and repairmen
for hire. You can even have pizza delivered to avoid having to cook for
yourself (it costs a bit more than home cooking, but saves time and luckily your
Sim does not have to worry about fat content).
One of the first things to do when starting out is to select a job.
This can be done by reading the classifieds in the paper or searching the
internet from your sim-computer. Once a job is selected, your Sim will
spend eight hours a day at his/her new job. You don't have to direct your
Sim at work (this is a game after all, and you probably spend enough time at
work without having to do so in a game too); a car pool whisks him/her off to
work, leaving you to enjoy some piece and quiet while you rearrange the
furniture or redesign the home.
While at home, you can help your Sim work on becoming a better person.
To do this, you tell him/her to interact with various objects you can place in
his/her home. These interactions usually will help to increase your Sim's
proficiency in one of the skill areas tracked by the game. For example,
sit your Sim down to a chess board to increase his logic skill or tell her to
work on a painting to increase her creativity. The more skilled your Sim
becomes, the more successful he/she will be at work, the more money he/she will
earn, and the more stuff you can buy for his/her home.
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