The Sims Superstar

Review - Sam returns to his arch-nemesis The Sims in search of stardom.

Aha, another installment in the computer-game equivalent of Police Academy. Now I am duty bound to write more than fifty words on this new expansion pack for the bafflingly popular Sims but you are in no way required to read the whole review, so you can skip on down to the last paragraph if you so choose.

Okay, for those of you still here I am going to be brief and shall try to make this as enjoyable as possible. I'm in Florida at the moment and so obviously have better things to do than write about EA's latest ruse to separate people from their money, and I'm sure y'all can think of something else you'd rather spend the 2-6 minutes it would take to read a normal sized review, (think away, I can't be arsed for there's a steak on the barbie).

Sims Superstar is what, the fifth, sixth udder to be attached to the cash-cow that is the Sims. In this stellar new adventure you can take your Sims to new heights, scaling the slippery cliff of celebrity till your eyes bleed or sanity makes a return. There are three new career paths to choose from; you can propel your Sim into the worlds of either the movie star, pop-artist or fashion. Wow, get to turn a bunch of pixels into a better looking bunch of pixels. Anyway, there is a new experience bar to fill up, the 'fame' bar, represented by a rising grade of half-stars, up to the full five-star treatment. Which leads me to a digression, where's the bands? I want to be Five-Star, not One-Star; get the mansions, the cars, the bad accountants and then degenerate into a pathetically sad has-been, eyes rolling in the head like the empty champagne bottles used to do beside the Jacuzzi, back when we 'wiz famous. Unfortunately, like all of the Sims games, this is living of the most sterile kind, so there's no dealer option on the telephone and your model alter-ego doesn't vomit all over the place. If you could snort virtual Charlie and shag virtual groupies then I might give this a chance. But seeing as none of the things that real celebrities do, hell, the very things that people want to become celebrities for, are available to the player, my interest is, understandably, low.

Instead the player is wooed with the prospect of actually being able to follow their Sims to work for the first time - there's more than twelve new social interactions, three new locations corresponding to each career path and oodles of new doo-daas to plaster all over your fake home and office. You can drive around in limos! Hire butlers! Win Awards! Yes this is a big expansion, I'll give it that. The thing even comes on two discs, has an annoying install glitch on XP and even gives you the joyous option of installing AOL 8 on your computer. One full package I tell you, probably the best value expansion to the Sims so far. Probably not the last though, unless there's only three months until Sims the second is released.