For most people, the main goal was to establish your sim family and progress up to the mansion at the top of the map. The first game featured a pre-defined hood, with more available through expansion packs. The first thing you’ll notice is the neighbourhood. Higher resolution, higher detail, higher fidelity. Other than that, everything else graphic related is just a refining process. My K6 wouldn’t have even loaded a full 3D explorable environment, let alone been playable. given the technical restrictions of hardware back then, you can understand why. The sims themselves are still 3D rendered, but the environment is a pseudo 3D world. Back in 2000, that felt pretty incredible and was perfect for providing a god like perspective, but now it just feels stiff, inflexible and uncooperative. You can zoom in and out and even choose between 4 perspectives, but your view point is fixed to this 45 degree angle. The first game however is completely isometric. All the games which follow are fully 3D rendered environments. kinda, but the biggest change is a technical one. I mean, the resolution is lower, the detail is a lot lower, but you can still make out what’s what, we still have wall paper, shadows, carpets, expressions…. It doesn’t look drastically different from what we have now. So let’s take a comparative look, and let’s begin with the biggest difference of them all, the graphics. It really takes a side by side comparison to see exactly how far we’ve come and thankfully, I find that kind of thing fascinating. Disconcertingly the year the Running Man is set.
With that sort of spacing you can probably expect 5 in around 2019. Here’s the subsequent timeline Sims 2 was released in September 2004, 3 in June 2009 and 4 in September 2014. It’s the same when you remember back to a Spectrum game you played in the 80s… back then it felt graphically amazing, and it’s that feeling which stays with us more than any technical aspect. The Sims is a game which I’ve dipped in and out of over that time in it’s various releases and with various expansion packs, but remembering exactly what’s changed, what’s advanced is tricky. Of course, since then, things have advanced even further, and the specification requirements have moved with the times, so clearly a lot has evolved. We’d had city simulations, sports simulations and even ant simulations but never really a people simulator.
We were talking a pretty advanced simulation, especially for that era. Aish!īack then I had an AMD K6 Processor with some kind of Diamond Edge video card, which wasn’t a bad combination at the time, but the original game still took an age to load and wasn’t the smoothest experience in the world. Come to think of it, that’s still 16 years ago now. The Sims feels like it’s been with us for a lifetime, back well into the 90s, but the original game didn’t actually arrive until February 4th 2000….
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