The Sims Online
 

I recently tried TSO's 14 day trial from FilePlanet and uninstalled it 24 hours later. The act of creating your living space for your sim is interesting and fun -- you have to balance having necessities, and things that it would be fun to watch your sim play with (like a model rocket set).

However, after your initial construction is complete and you're out of money -- boredom sets in. You essentially have to work at raising job "skills" and the process of doing so is so incredibly boring that I can't imagine anyone would bother. If, for instance, you want to gain charisma, you can practice speeches in front of the mirror. This involves clicking the mirror, clicking "Practice Speech", and then alt-tabbing while your sim's charisma very very very slowly raises. Alt-tab back in 20 minutes and you have .13 of a skill point, just like magic.

All-in-all, a horrible game built on the idea that people enjoy watching paint dry. It had the potential to be a really fun game but they ruined it with the mindless skill-raising which, again, requires NO effort at all on the part of the player.

its a game of patience, might not be for you (or me either), but they're seem to be alot of people playing it. (someone must be buying all those f'n addons)

Think you're talking about The Sims single player game, there, junglistic. The Sims Online is an entirely different game. It's based (loosely) on the same idea and uses the same basic mechanics of The Sims - but's a MMO, not a single player game with add-ons.

Yeah, I owned the single player game several years ago (never purchased any add-ons) and it was far more entertaining than TSO.

I'm looking forward to The Sims 2, though...