LaughAtlantis

I used to have a bit of a... um... problem with computer games. The real problem came in when The Sims stretched into a cornucopia of different computer obsessions - Civilization II, Rollercoaster Tycoon, Sim City, Caesar III, Zoo Tycoon, Majesty... the list goes on -but the cornerpiece of it all was The SIms. Then The Sims started getting expansion packs like Livin' Large and Hot Date, and I started spending more and more time in front of my computer. I named my Sims after people I knew and then realized I was spending more time with my Sim friends than my real friends. (In my defense, by and large those friends lived an hour away, so my contact with them was limited to once a week whereas my Sim involvement could happen on a nightly basis.) But it was out of hand.

So I stopped. I had my friend Terry take Sims off my computer entirely. I uninstalled things left and right. And I didn't play for a while. Then once I moved to Boston I reinstalled a few things. Cultures and Age of Empires consumed my days and nights. And again, I realized that I had a life and I stopped - just occasionally going back and reinstalling Caesar III.

Well, now there's The Sims Online - which seems like an okay game. It allows you to play Sims while chatting with people, which is nice. And there're all sorts of ways to make money - also nice. But I sorta feel like there's something lacking in the game. Half the fun of The Sims was being able to control whole families and neighborhoods of people, each of which had their individual goals and whatnot - and with the online version, you can only have three Sims. And they can't live in the same city. You're forced to rely on other people to be online at the same time you are in order to keep your friendship quotas up. That sorta sucks. Because if you lose friends, you lose the ability to have certain types of interactions. And once you get 10 total skill points, the points start wasting away - so you have to pick one trait to have and really work at it constantly. And if you work at it by yourself, it's slow going, because it's only by group studying that you can actually build skills at full speed. So I don't know how long I'm going to keep up with it, but we'll see.

The thing is, though, that by playing Sims Online, I've gotten back into the original Sims. And they've come out with a new expansion set recently that allows for more neighborhoods and five new career paths. Can you say yay? ANd even MORE exciting is the fact that the people who made Age of Empires have now come out with Age of Mythology, in which you don't just play a world leader, you play a GOD. That sounds like pretty much the coolest thing ever. You can be Zeus and throw thunderbolts at your enemies. You can have giant cyclops people as an army unit. YAY YAY YAY!!

So yeah, I'm a big geek. So sue me.