Everyone at some point wishes they could escape their own life and become someone new. The Sims lets you do just that. I have been playing The Sims games for as long as I could remember — I remember being slumped over the family computer working endlessly on my families and running their lives just as I wanted my future to be. Being able to perfectly manicure my characters was relaxing and let me back away from my own life for a while.
Creating my own little world was always so exciting, and it never got old. I could create endless people with endless houses, and when I got bored with one story, I could start another. But once you finally created a family and a house you really enjoyed, you got to stick with them and watch their entire life. You could interact as much as you wanted or just sit back and watch.
But that doesn't mean I always played the game fair and square. I still knew all the cheats by heart and made sure I always had over $100,000 in the bank. Let's be real — who actually played the game with no help at all? Motherlode and Rosebud were my best friends.
I remember when the first pets pack was released, and all of a sudden a whole new world was introduced. Then there was the university pack where you could move your young adults into a dorm and experience college life with them. I know it might sound crazy, but The Sims helped prepare me for these kinds of moments in my life.
Now of course The Sims also helped me relieve some anger. Everyone who has ever played The Sims knows how therapeutic it is to create someone you are mad at, and then to go and place them in a pool and remove the ladder. It's not insane, it's part of the healing process.
I'd been holding off on buying The Sims 4 since it came out. I always knew I wanted it, but I could never justify spending the money on it. I downloaded the free demo Create-A-Sim game and tried to crave my appetite with just that. And it worked for a while, but I finally caved. I bought The Sims 4, and I can already see myself falling back down the rabbit hole. As I'm typing up this article, the game is downloading and once it's open, who knows when I will stop?
The Sims has always been my video game, a game that I could just pick up whenever and just instantly remember how to play. Everyone has their game they're good at, and for me, it is The Sims. The Sims has never let me down, and I doubt it ever will. Well, my download is finished. So it's now time for me to spend the next three hours of my life making myself perfectly represented in The Sims world.
