Molly's Blog

Which is the Best Sims game ever?

My first Sims game was The Sims 1 when we went over to my cousin’s house to create ourselves in the sims and built a little house for all of us. These rankings are based on how fun the games are for me to play and not necessarily the features they provide. I realize that The Sims expansion packs are expensive and not accessible for everyone and I stream The Sims on Youtube if you wanted to check out sims gameplay to see if it would be a good game to get into. Enjoy my rankings!

4. The Sims 4

This comes as no surprise to anyone in the sims community who has read other rankings of the games. The Sims 4 when it was first released was an unfinished, buggy mess of a game with many missing features like pools, toddlers, and aliens. These are staples for sims games ever since The Sims 2. The game itself has been out for almost 10 years now with no new game on the horizon. Other features from previous games are also heavily paywalled and contain less features.

The building mechanic in The Sims 4 is the best it has been in previous games, however once you move in sims and try to play it falls flat. The new feature of The Sims 4 is emotions but it doesn’t work well and things like partners cheating on each other or prank calls don’t have a lasting impact on the sims’ mood.

I have played The Sims 4 extensively and have over 1500 hours on the EA App on my PC. I want to like it and give EA the benefit of the doubt, but I think they should listen to their community more and give developers the freedom to create new and exciting things

3. The Sims

This game holds a special place in my heart because it was the first sims game I played. The character creation is simple and the sims themselves are not that smart, but it allowed a young kid to create a story and control a virtual dollhouse. The base game didn’t have aging or active careers or even a lot of furniture and playing it in 2023 is difficult. My favorite expansion pack was Makin’ Magic because it brought magic and potion-making to the game.

Overall, it was a great time waster and it was fun creating characters that looked like my friends and family members. My brother still talks about how we set off fireworks inside his sims’ house and burned it to the ground. Great memories, all around!

2. The Sims 3

This game revolutionized the dollhouse model to create its own world full of different personalities and possibilities. When this was first released, there was a lot of controversy because you could only play it if you had a really good computer that could run it. That was too expensive for me so I had to make it work with my family’s old dell desktop. The game froze and stuttered and took forever to load because my PC was just ok so it was hard to make this fun. Later, we bought a new computer that ran this game like a dream and I spent hours creating families and exploring the open world.

The sims themselves got a new look and not for the better. They were less cartoonish and more uncanny valley which turned me off from the game a bit in general. Creating a sim was fun and there were many character traits and lifetime wishes to choose from. However, I loaded up the game and it looked really ugly so that part was hard to reconcile.

The features in The Sims 3 were massive and gave you more freedom than ever to expore the open map, get into relationships, hear the latest gossip in town, and see the other sims age and grow along with your own family.

This game was great for storytelling and came out with expansion packs that greatly added to this amazing installment.

1. The Sims 2

This sims game will always be the gold standard for me. When this game was released, it was such a huge improvement from the original Sims that I could not get enough. The personalities of the sims were varied, more control over character creation, much improved graphics, and added to the lore of the sims in general.

My favorite part of The Sims 2 was memories: a collection of notable and important events that happen in a sims’ life. A first kiss, moving out of a parent’s house, a fire in their home, getting married, having kids, etc. This game added many features that were missing from The Sims like aging, pregnancy, babies, toddlers, different meals, memories, etc.

This game will always hold a special place in my heart for its innovation and addictive gameplay.

keeps me coming back over 10 years later.

Ever since I had the capacity to form memories, I have played video games. My parents didn’t understand my passion for these fantasy worlds, but my brother did and we played them for hours a day. I also loved to play outside and climb trees because my mother’s house was next to the woods that held so many secrets and possibilities for a young child. The combination of those interests culminated into an adult who was the perfect audience for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.

When I went to college at 18, I didn’t bring my any of my gaming consoles and used a Mac for schoolwork that had one game on it at most because macbooks aren’t the best for video games. Once I came home for the summer, however, all bets were off and I would spent days in my mom’s basement getting lost in the magical land that Bathesda created. My first Bathesday game was Oblivion when my brother suggested the game and let me use his Xbox 360 to experience one of his favorite games at the time. I spent the first 7 hours just wandering around and looking at the amazing scenery so lovingly crafted for gamers like me. Once Skyrim was announced, I waited with baited breath for that same magic to appear once again.

Skyrim is an RPG adventure game with nordic and medieval tones that has dragons, assassins, magic, kings, queens, etc. The best part about Skyrim for me is the open world full of side quests and interesting details strewn about the towns, caverns, forests, tundras, and homes. It could be as simple as reading a letter out on a table of a local tavern threatening a debtor or an adventurer’s body right outside a cave with a book detailing what they were hoping to plunder in this very cave. As much as I love this game, there is some things that need to be said about the company that owns the franchise currently: Bathesda.

Bathesda is known for creating and releasing games in a buggy state. Bugs and glitches are features in video games that do not work quite right or something looks a little off. Some examples would be a character that looks like they are swimming that are on dry land or a wolly mammoth shooting into the sky unexpectedly. Both of those examples I have seen in Skyrim many times.

Another game Bathesday released a few years ago was Fallout 76 that was full of bugs and not optimized for online play with friends. My husband and I had several instances where we could not see each other’s characters and that made it hard to play together.

It’s difficult to pinpoint exactly why Skyrim is so special and why people are still playing it over 10 years later. It is a combination, I think, of environment, excellent music, characters, dialog, and tiny details that set Skyrim apart from all the rest.