So we return again to  San Francisco, courtesy of Tom - this time to look at MySims Kingdom. Continued from this post. 

Next up was MySims Kingdom. Leaving the corporate pizzazz of the conference room SimCity Creator was demoed in, we were led to the belly of the beast: the MySims designer offices on the second floor. It was something of a transformation from the clean, cool curves of reception and the majority of the ‘on-show’ campus. In fact it’s exactly what you’d imagine a videogame developer’s office to look like. Posters of MySims character art were pinned to the partitions, flow charts and Post-It notes were scattered all around, while toy animals inhabited any empty space (more on which in my next entry). Bean bags and comfy chairs surrounded the TV in the Kingdom demo room; all sense of formality dropped. It was like a completely different building.
 
Kingdom’s Executive Producer, Tim LeTourneau, was suitably relaxed as he showed off Kingdom. The first thing that strikes you is how more refined the visuals are compared to the original MySims, which was hardly a bad looking game in the first place. The colours are more vibrant, while the cutesy characters are detailed and well-defined. The second thing you’ll notice is that the game is not a simple sequel to MySims. It has the same characters and aesthetic, but a completely different direction. “It’s an adventure game” says LeTourneau,  a statement which caused a few raised eyebrows across the room. Surprisingly, as the demo went on, we found it to be a description that fits Kingdom, even though it remains a MySims game at heart.

 
Your customised Sim starts out as a worker on a pig farm, but it turns out that the King is having a contest to find the next great Wandolier, “a made up word we created that means someone who can build and construct”  LeTourneau informs us. You win the competition , of course, and then embark on a journey around the Kingdom using your building skills to help others. Altruism at its cutest.
 
Most of your building will go on outside – constructing houses for people, building steps to reach inaccessible cliffs and fixing bridges. As in MySims, you’ll need to collect essences around the world by playing a few different minigames like mining or fishing using the remote. These essences then add up to unlock scrolls which give you new objects to build with.  As you progress through the game, you’ll need to unlock these scrolls to solve the various ‘building puzzles’. The puzzles were probably the most intriguing part of Kingdom - some of the tasks we were shown (and later played) included piecing together a machine’s cogs to open a door and building a framework of pipes to efficiently water a field of tomato plants. This particular task is for Gino the chef (remember him?) who needs the crop for his pizza sauce.
 
The characters, LeTourneau says, are like the Muppets in that they return from MySims in a different guise , but with the same personality - Ginny the pirate, for instance, is now a cowgirl. All these characters are effortlessly charming and the dialogue has that delightfully simple sense of humour that you find yourself laughing in spite of yourself. Your idiotic pal Buddy, who accompanies you on your quest, offers constant comic relief, while there is a caveman character who is, as LeTourneau puts it, “a little simple” and offers some classic caveman prose. Having a blocky moron dressed in a leopard slip saying “Bobaboo! Why you in cage?” to his grad-student girlfriend shouldn’t be funny to a 24-year old, but it is. And frankly, if caveman-speak stops being funny as you get older, I never want to grow up.
 
For all intents and purposes Kingdom is a kids’ game  (or ‘family’, if you prefer), but like the best cartoons it holds enough beneath the saccharine exterior and simple humour to keep players of all ages interested. Kingdom’s toolset is sophisticated enough  and the genre mix of building sim and adventure game actually makes the game something of a fresh prospect. Last year, MySims was one of my surprise hits - Kingdom looks to be heading the same way.

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This entry was posted on Monday, September 29th, 2008 at 2:05 pm by Tom Hoggins
Columns & Opinion, Early impressions, Forthcoming titles, Wii.