I have a confession to make...

I remember seeing the ads on TV and thinking, 'Ooh, that looks good. When I get a PC, I'm going to get that!' since I've always been a fan of the God Game genre.

And so, when I got my PC, although I was on the internet through 56k dial-up and couldn't believe the difference in speed compared to the Dreamcast online, I was yet to venture into online shopping. This meant I was still buying in 'the old fashion way' of high street stores ... well ... mainly one store which at the time was Electronics Boutique, it was after GAME had taken over that I saw it .. and it was a Collector's Edition too!

If you haven't already guessed by looking at the image first, it was The Sims, yes, the game so many love, but a whole lot more hate. It also came with Livin' It Up (or Livin' Large as it was known as in the US) and over the next 18 months or so, I managed to get all the expansions too...

• "House Party"
• "Hot Date"
  
• "On Holiday" ("Vacation" in US)
  
• "Unleashed"
  
• "Superstar"
  
• "Makin' Magic"

Regardless of what people say, I like The Sims and although I only have onboard graphics at the moment, I have enough RAM to run up to the House Party expansion without any problems. Hot Date and onwards use 64MB of RAM which might not be a problem, but I also have a couple of other programs running as well as standard other stuff (anti-virus, firewall, etc) and don't want to leave myself running out of RAM.

So there you go, I confess to liking The Sims and if anyone wants to hurl abuse at that fact, just think, is your life that sad? I may be 'sad' for liking something that, "people that don't have their own lives" play, but at least I'm not sad enough to waste my life on the internet abusing people. ;)

I've also installed Railroad Tycoon II which was a favourite from back in the Dreamcast days (I think it was the first game to utilise the DC mouse) and due to needing around the same spec as The Sims to run, I've started playing it again!