"While discussing Playboy: The Mansion last week, we lamented the state of the modern Sim Clones. Despite Hugh Hefner's digital love child being far from a brilliant game, it was still one of the finest things that have sprouted in Maxis' long shadow, because the rest of the lineage are incredibly rubbish rather than merely midly rubbish. The Sims has, perversely enough, proved to be the only huge-selling, genre-creating game in history which hasn't lead to an army of imitators. Doom begat endless Doom clones. Dune II/C&C begat a tank-rush of pretenders. Hostile Waters... well, we can't win them all.

Sims begat virtual nothing."

Sims University review over at Eurogamer. Not hugely pleased with it. The problem with writing the infinite-form review at EG is that you find yourself gravitating towards actually going back to root-logic every time and showing all your working. While this transparent honesty is why I tend to prefer long form reviews (compared to the short form review, where if you're trying to say something too clever you use assumed knowledge to justify criticism. To choose a regular example, saying that Quick-load is a bad thing without ever justifying it. I don't like the arrogance inherent in making such a blanket statement without saying why. It's bullying to the reader, because you're implying if they don't understand why they're just stupid - when in fact, it could be *you* that's stupid if you don't show /why/ it's so. And what a long bracketed statement), it can end with you just hitting an old argument and looking for a fresh spin. It's what I find myself trying to do here, and not really succeeding.