Now, you may be asking yourself at this very moment why I would compare a purely nonoffensive game like My Sims Party (now available on, not surprisingly, the Wii) to a high school drinking party? Well, I actually just told you why, but let me elaborate. See, a freshman kegger, a high school drinking party, has about as much chance of getting actual alcohol as, say, Dick Cheney has of being elected president. It would require an incredible intersection of events–extremely permissive parents, an understanding elder relative who didn’t fear anything less than extremely permissive parents, outright bribery–to actually happen, so the result you’re left with is a party that promises to be a lot more than it actually is.
This is, of course, exactly the case with My Sims Party, a game that promises to be a whole lot more than it actually is but seems unable to deliver.
The plot is pretty simple, as is generally the case for Sims games of any stripe–you’ve moved to a new town, which you get to name (I called mine Steveland, because it’s so very plausible and sounds almost exactly like Cleveland, only with two letters changed). The tourism board of this little town is desperate for a way to keep residents in the town, working and contributing to the tax base–and of course is always looking to bring in more people–thus they’ve hit on the idea of the Festival. The town regularly (at least once a month from the look of it) declares a holiday and puts on a tournament of various minigames, including running luggage from one side of a hotel lobby to another, dancing at a night club, scooping up to-order ice cream cones and making pizzas. This all will, of course, be accomplished by doing various things with your Wiimote.
All of this sounds fun enough on the surface–we’ve played a literal slew of games like this already–but the big problem with this one isn’t the cutesy-poo characters or the repetition or the fact that most of the “games” at this Festival look like a way for the townspeople to get free labor out of us, but rather that the controls are seriously malfunctioning. When I went to rock out at the dance club, they assured me that all I’d have to do is “shake my Wiimote”, which sounds a lot dirtier than it actually is, but when the time came to do the shaking, it refused to accept my commands no matter which direction or how hard i shook the Wiimote. Worse yet, it wouldn’t even accept simple button press commands. Scooping the ice cream cones was also not an easy thing as my scoop would frequently overshoot the particular flavor of ice cream I was after.
So that’s why the comparison, and that’s why I can’t recommend this game at all. Sure, it looks like it’d be a lot of fun. it even sounds like a party. But when you get there and discover that the promised keg is nowhere to be had and the game barely recognizes that you even have a Wiimote, there’s just not that much point in sticking around.
