This year, and for most of my life, I have been mostly looking forward to:
Hopefully this will be as good as everyone hopes it will be. I found that when using The Sims and other such Maxis games, that it's fun for a few hours (admittedly, we're talking 20-40 hours here) and then you get bored. It's not that they're bad games, quite the opposite, but there's no drive there. I mean, with The Sims, I created the perfect house, built to my specifications, and spent ages building up my little family until they could afford the fugging thing, got them in and then... that's it... nothing. There they are, in the wee house, and that's it. Nothing else.
The Sims 2 was good in that you had a variety of different upgrades and goals for your Sims to attempt to get, what with fulfilling objectives (make them LOOOOOOVE!) and straying away from their fears (COMMITMENT?!) earned you points for buying money trees and suchlike, but even that got kind of boring after a while.
Although I have no doubt that Spore will feature much the same kind of gameplay after a certain point, as all sandbox games eventually do, I'm really looking forward to building my little society up and interacting with other peoples creations. The Civilisation games had got that gameplay down to a T, but it was wrecked by the restrictive time limit; Black and White was good too, except that you kept having to abandon your little society to move to the next area. Hopefully Will Wright will create a game with drive and freedom that these games lacked.
Playing: Final Fantasy III (DS)
