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By Brad Cook

Riley and Vince: A study in contrasts. Riley’s life was on an upward trajectory in Sim City, until she lost her job and had to move to Four Corners and live with her aunt Sharon. Vince is a successful high-tech entrepreneur in Bitville with a beautiful house and great friends, but he’s been unlucky in love. They may live in different towns, but each has what the other wants, and only through their interactions with other Sims can they finally achieve happiness.

The Sims Life Stories

The Sims Life Stories takes the tried-and-true formula found in The Sims 2 and distills it into Riley’s and Vince’s stories, allowing you to chart their lives as you apply your own twists to their tales. While the interface is the same one you’re used to, the emphasis is now on following the 24 chapters in their sagas, making the important decisions that form crucial relationships with other Sims and fulfill their goals, such as finding a job or getting a hug from another Sim. Each character has a journal where they record their achievements, and a between-chapter text piece explains where the story is headed next.

In addition to streamlining the gameplay mechanics by introducing keyboard shortcuts for important commands and making relationship development easier, Life Stories was designed for quick sessions. The game runs in a window, allowing you to check email and surf the web while playing, and its graphics were optimized to run on laptops, so you can take Riley’s and Vince’s drama anywhere. Life Stories even features a laptop battery indicator.

Plenty to See and Do

Life Stories doesn’t mesh with The Sims 2 and its expansion packs, but it offers plenty of its own content, with more available for download. Bitville and Four Corners both include community lots where Riley and Vince can go shopping, work out at the gym, enjoy a nice meal, and, of course, meet other Sims. Riley and Vince can also get to know their neighbors while hanging around their homes, building amorous and platonic relationships in the process.

Sims in Life Stories earn special rewards as they achieve their goals. You’ll find those objects in their inventory panels; you can drag them to the appropriate spot in their homes, or leave them there for easy retrieval later. Riley and Vince start their stories with cell phones that make communication with other Sims easier when they’re visiting community lots.

As in The Sims 2, you can enter Buy mode and purchase new objects for your Sims with the currency known as Simoleons, as well as construct and furnish new homes from the neighborhood view. When you’re done with Riley’s and Vince’s stories, enter Free Play to take control of other characters in the game, all of whom have their own unique relationship dynamics but whose lives don’t unfold along a specific narrative path. You can also create new Sim families and move them into an empty house to start your own stories.

Nothing Simple is Ever Easy

“My first day in Four Corners was both exciting and unsettling,” Riley says in her diary as the first chapter of her story comes to a close. “First my crazy aunt decides to get up and go not five minutes after I arrive. After freshening up a bit, I met a few of the locals.”

While she didn’t know what to make of Fiona, who gave her a coffee machine straight out of an infomercial, she hit it off right away with Mickey, who starts dropping by to visit nearly every day after that. You won’t find it hard to develop a relationship with him, but the trick is keeping their interest in each other alive while crazy aunt Sharon does her best to keep both of them on their toes.

Riley’s story won’t be easy to bring to a conclusion, nor will Vince’s, but is anything ever simple with The Sims? Of course not, and that’s what Life Stories is all about.

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Man singing to a woman.

That’s Amore. One Sim professes his devotion to another.

Choosing clothes menu.

The Life of Riley. Life Stories features an easy way to spice up your Sim’s appearance.

Man calms scared woman.

Simlish-to-English Dictionary, Please. Sims spend some quality time on a nice community lot.

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System Requirements:

 

Cheat If You Must

Life Stories uses many of the same cheat codes found in The Sims 2. As in that game, hold down the Control, Shift, and C keys at the same time to open the cheat code box. Type a code and press Return to activate it. To quickly return to a previously-entered code, press the up arrow. To stop entering cheat codes, type “exit.”

Note that you shouldn’t use a comma in any codes that ask for a number.

The Codes

motherlode — get 50,000 Simoleons

kaching — get 1,000 Simoleons

unlockcareerrewards — unlock all of the selected Sim’s career rewards

aspirationpoints(#) — replace “#” with a number (but keep the parentheses) to give the selected Sim that many aspiration points

aging off — keep all Sims on the lot from aging; type “aging on” to restore it

maxmotives — max out the motives for all of the Sims on the lot

aspirationlevel(#) — replace “#” with a number between 0 and 5, with 0 dropping the selected Sim’s aspiration meter into negative territory and 5 maxing it out

slowmotion # — replace “#” with a number between 0 and 8 (keep the space after “slowmotion,” but don’t worry about any parentheses), with 0 being the slowest game speed possible and 8 being normal game speed

 
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