I'm sure we've all had this experience with Wii games as gifts: a family member or other relative, who knows that you're into gaming on the Wii, wants to pick something up for your birthday or other holiday, and walks up to an aisle of Wii games with nothing more to guide them than the covers and price tags. You open up the gift to find something that you'd never purchase, and that makes you feel a bit of sadness for the well-meaning family member, along with the usual annoyance at the shovelware white noise that keeps the average consumer from knowing the good games from the bad.
I found myself in this situation a few days ago. Two of my sisters decided to buy something for my birthday together; one half of the gift was the ever-useful iTunes card, and the other half was a Wii game. I opened up the Wii game to see staring back at me -- to my carefully concealed skepticism and disappointment -- the generic-looking cover of MySims: Agents, complete with the EA logo in the corner. I thought: "Honestly? I'm 28, and while I do tend to enjoy games with a childlike quality (they know that I'm still a huge Mario fan), this one looks like I'll end up banging my head against the wall if I actually try to muddle through it and pretend that I'm having fun."
So, back at my place, I eventually popped in the disc, expecting to at least enjoy mocking the bad quality of the game. Having seen a handful of these titles on the shelves before (MySims Mini-Game Party-Fest, MySims Mario Kart-Clone, etc) -- and having a moderate dislike of EA as a whole -- I naturally expected this one to be tremendously dull and formulaic, yet here's where I was proven wrong. Much to my surprise, the game had a charming (if still quite simple) atmosphere and design right from the start. The characters were very well animated, the dialog was often amusing and fairly well-written for the genre, and the town had a clean yet stylistically appealing design. None of it was groundbreaking, yet there was clearly a sense that the designers actually put some care into the game and enjoyed laying out the characters and details.
A few hours further into the game, I'm sold. After the initial cases in the smaller town area, you gain control over an agency, within which you may organize teams of agents (drawing from the different colorful characters you meet along the way), combining these teams based on different strengths and weaknesses, and then deploying them to take on various missions. These missions will, in turn, give you various items that you can place in your agency, customizing the floor that is each team's home-base by adding items and furnishings to enhance this or that skill set. This management aspect quickly adds a fair amount of strategy and customization to the gameplay; you can spend quite a bit of time rearranging your teams and customizing them to tackle increasingly demanding missions.
The agency / team-management part of the game runs in parallel to the more traditional crime-solving adventures, using the cell-phone as your link between the two. This means that you can be actively engaged with a particular case -- meeting amusing characters, finding evidence, running through the little mini-games for lock-picking or forensics when needed, expanding the story -- while constantly monitoring your 4 deployed teams via the amusing text-messages they send to your phone on a regular basis. These messages are always customized based on the characters you deployed, which gives a sense of real consequences for your management choices. You might even send characters on missions contrary to their personalities just in order to see their reactions.
I'm running a bit long here, so I'll just get to the point: I was fully expecting the game to be a complete waste of time, and while it is by no means groundbreaking -- and while the actual cases don't require a lot of thought to complete, more or less playing themselves out mechanically if you just go through the obvious steps -- I can't deny the charm that fills the game and its characters, as well as the little gameplay additions (like the team management) which effectively add variety and customization to keep you entertained throughout. The bottom line is that I was too skeptical, and that even a game from EA in a series that looks formulaic can turn out to be well worth playing.
TLDR Summary - While I received it as a gift and would never have picked it up myself, MySims: Agents surprised me by turning out to be a very entertaining game made by developers and designers who clearly put effort into the details and gameplay throughout. I suppose I'm too skeptical sometimes, and should keep an open mind even when a game originates from a company that I generally dislike.
Interesting. Might have to check it out after reading your GINORMOUS wall of text.
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That's what the TLDR part is there for . I believe it was Adam who once (a year or so ago, when I was much more active here) suggested that I put up summaries on long "Wario's Wall of Text" posts.
Twitter is a good place to throw your nonsense. Wii FC: 8378 9716 1696 8633 || "How can mushrooms give you extra life? Get the green ones." -
This looked like it could be a lot of fun, but I was put off more by the EA logo than I was by the "kiddie" appearances of the characters. Glad to hear it was actually good...but I've got so much on my to-buy list (and so much I have bought that I have yet to finish!) that I probably won't be getting to this.
Yeah, though, excellent moral. As you know, I had a similar awakening with Wii Music...which is still one of my most played games on the console. I need to pick it back up and try out some new compositions.
This looked like it could be a lot of fun, but I was put off more by the EA logo than I was by the "kiddie" appearances of the characters.
Oh, same here; I was really referring in that part to my great surprise at receiving a game with that type of cover art from my older sisters. I actually tend to prefer kiddy-looking games for the most part, but somehow I was put off by the fact that they bought what appeared to be a generic game of this type. It's one thing to have a shelf full of these sorts of games made by a company with the history that Nintendo has, but I felt a bit sheepish holding up what looked to be a merely formulaic game made for children or families. I questioned what my sisters think of my gaming habits. Of course, as noted, I turned out to be wrong about the game.
It has been my guilty pleasure and secret shame since my niece asked me to help her with a puzzle a couple years back. It is insanely addictive and fun as hell to boot. She has let me borrow MySims, MySims:Kingdom, and MySims: Agents. I greatly enjoyed them all. Kingdom is by far the best in case you were wondering.
I feel so much better now that I have that off my chest.
I've had a lot of fun with MySims, Kingdom and Agents too. They're big games, well worthy of comparison with the likes of Animal Crossing and the fully fledged Sims games on the PC. My only serious gripe would be that the construction controls are rather fiddly to use and that could prove frustrating to the younger and more casual gamers that they're generally aimed at.
The DS versions of the MySims games are, sadly, very poor in comparison. They're every bit the generic turds that Machu alluded to earlier.
I've got MySims Kingdom and think it's pretty good. Even though it's targeting a younger audience, the game is still well made can be enjoyed by older games (like me). I'd certainly give Agents a shot based on the better than expected experience with that game.
... It's one thing to have a shelf full of these sorts of games made by a company with the history that Nintendo has, but I felt a bit sheepish holding up what looked to be a merely formulaic game made for children or families. I questioned what my sisters think of my gaming habits. Of course, as noted, I turned out to be wrong about the game.
...but not wrong about their opinions of your gaming habits.
... It's one thing to have a shelf full of these sorts of games made by a company with the history that Nintendo has, but I felt a bit sheepish holding up what looked to be a merely formulaic game made for children or families. I questioned what my sisters think of my gaming habits. Of course, as noted, I turned out to be wrong about the game.
...but not wrong about their opinions of your gaming habits.
Good point. :-/
In order to make that case, I'd need to show that they bought this game knowing that it contained a bit more polish and complexity than meets the eye, which in fact is likely not true.
Twitter is a good place to throw your nonsense. Wii FC: 8378 9716 1696 8633 || "How can mushrooms give you extra life? Get the green ones." -
In order to make that case, I'd need to show that they bought this game knowing that it contained a bit more polish and complexity than meets the eye, which in fact is likely not true.
Yeah, you got lucky. Next time, make sure that you give them a short list.
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Topic: MySims: Agents, or How I Learned to Keep an Open Mind
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