Tomorrow will see the release of Sims2 Apartment Life. Usually by now my pre-order would have been long placed and I’d be bouncing up and down awaiting the latest expansion. But I’m not. No pre-order, no poring over screenshots, nothing, and I have to take a moment to wonder why. After careful thought I believe that I’m all Sim-ed out. Not the game - I still love it and am still determined to turn Brandi Broke’s life around for her, determined to have the time of my (Sims) life at a cool college dorm and rise to the top of my chosen career…so it isn’t that. Just that this is the eighth expansion (I’m not even counting the myriad of stuff packs). That’s a lot to deal with. Before long, Sims 3 will be out so is it even worth it when I will have to start all over again next spring?

I lapped up the first few - I adored the Uni pack, loved Nightlife and Open for Business….wasn’t fussed about the pets until they picked up and jiggled a tiny puppy about and my heart melted. (It promptly hardened again when a stray dog destroyed a bed that cost thousands of hard earned simoleans). However, as each play with each new pack progressed, I found myself with more and more to juggle…teen years, homework, skills, then on to uni – classes, term papers, and pranks, not to mention your Sims’ needs and then their wants and then the lifetime aspiration and influence…then business…trying to juggle managing your lot, dealing with slacker staff and indecisive customers before coming home to newborns screaming, toddlers toddling, an agro nanny who made my adult Sims cry, and your sleep-deprived Sim ends up slumping in the dinner with exhaustion.

Then there were pets needs too…then holidays, and then, and this is what finally broke me…hobbies. Now I have to fulfil their hobby wants too and keep up their interests in case they wane and I realised that I was so busy managing all this and more that I was forgetting to enjoy the game. I found myself getting more and more stressed and frustrated. I became especially irate after a stupid gaming hobby woman phoned my house at 3am after a Sim’s dream had pushed them into the next hobby level. It seemed she thought it was an okay time to phone and wake up newborn twins to invite me to join her club. Well piss off love, can’t you see I’m at breaking point?! I nearly mangled my mouse and ate it.

What was happening to me? This is supposed to be the easy way - managing a life better than I can cope with my own. Gentle, sedate, making people’s aspirations come true - it made me feel good and I enjoyed every moment, advancing careers and my Sims whoo-hooing and hob-nobbing with everyone in town. Now, to add to it all, the final nail in my coffin, we have ‘Apartment Life’. I haven’t even touched the holidays yet and now I’m supposed to build some airy loft space and feed my Sims cheeky Friends-esque cups of coffee and sip Cosmos and dream of Manolo Blahniks? When will I find the time? How will I fit all this in? What are the developers trying to do to me?

And then it sinks in. In a subtle, insidious way it has transformed to this point where it beautifully shadows real life. Trying to juggle family and work and hobbies and needs with your wants and desires and your secret wishes, holidays and destructive pets. I can’t cope in the game anymore, there is not enough time. The game’s perverse juggling is simply a mirror held up to our own lives; mine at least and that is rather sobering and quite apt. So like the real world, all I can do is vaguely prioritise and hope to muddle through and somewhere in the middle, I’ll find a kind of happiness.

Or so the saying goes. Simple fact is, though, that you will. Two books on a shelf, same price, both authors you’re not familiar with - you’ll go for the one with the nicest looking cover.

Same goes for games. Obviously, all of us big game fans have games that we are chomping at the bit for (LittleBigPlanet, anyone?) - and frankly it wouldn’t matter if they published it with the front cover being the title written in crayon above a picture of a steaming great dog turd - we’d still buy it.

Those are just a small proportion of the games that we all buy though. A lot of them are those games which could be good, but you just aren’t sure. To buy, or not to buy, that is the question? And these games could really benefit from some snappy cover art to turn “just looking” into a purchase.

And that is exactly where some publishers seriously drop the ball. Actually, though, I’m not just talking drop the ball, but drop the ball and then it rolls into the road and gets hit by a truck.

What started me thinking about this is that recently, despite it having been out for ages, I bought and started playing “Haze” on the PS3. I am pleasantly surprised by how good this game is turning out, and looking back on it I think that maybe the reason I expected it to be poor was down to this “stunner” of a game cover:

I can sort of see what they were going for, but they’ve missed the point. This is an all guns blazing, shoot-first ask-questions-later kind of game, where you can play co-operatively with four players, and they’ve given us… a bloke with a hole in his mask.

Of course, this isn’t the first time a decent game has struggled with a poor cover. Take this classic Playstation 2 example, The Suffering. I heard it was actually quite good, but (like everyone else) I never dared to pick it up and buy it after seeing this front cover art:

They might as well have printed “All gamers are w*nkers!” instead of “The Suffering” based on the reaction that cover got.

The bloke on the front of the box looks like he’s screaming out “DON’T PLAY THIS! I DID, AND LOOK WHAT HAPPENED TO ME!”.

Not the worst example of the genre, but a slightly poor one is this, for Crackdown:

The cartoon styling screams out “We ripped off GTA!” which, they sort of did, but the fact is Crackdown is very different to GTA. Also, the endorsement from a magazine is from an “Official” magazine, where no-one takes the scores seriously for one second. But by far the worst thing is the massive “Includes invite to Halo 3 beta” sticker, which as far as I’m concerned might as well say “This is sh*t, but all you Halo fanboys will buy it anyway”.

Thing is, Crackdown wasn’t sh*t, in fact I very much enjoyed it (particularly playing with a friend), but the fact that it might be sh*t was the impression I was left with when I saw the cover.

Still, this might not be a problem for too much longer, with more and more games becoming available over download services, and broadband finally becoming available at a semi-decent speed. It didn’t take me too long to download Ratchet and Clank: Quest for Booty - a three gig download - the other day, and that’s over old-fashioned copper wires, not even fibre. It has to be said, Pixeljunk Eden, which I love, wouldn’t exactly have leapt into my shopping basket if I was in a shop and the front cover was a representation of what the game is about.

So who knows, maybe with download services thriving as home internet connections speed up, games developers may be spared the mercy of having their game appear in the shops with some god-awful picture (dis)gracing the front of the box - and we’ll all be a lot happier.

I was rather fascinated to stumble across a BBC news article last week, documenting a report by Manchester University into virtual “gold-farming.”  According to their research, a whopping 400,000 people earn on average £77 per month generating and selling in-game currencies.  80% are based in China. 

I must admit, my first thought was complete mystification.  Surely games are purchased to be played, no?  And yet here is a scenario - well, 400,000 of them to be exact - of consumers spending their cash on a title, and then spending MORE cash to get someone ELSE to play the game for them.

No Spandau Ballet lyrics, please…

But then as I began to ponder, it occurred to me that it is not really any different than, say, dog walking.  You buy a dog.  You then pay someone to walk that dog whilst you’re out at work or otherwise occupied.  You get home, and voila!  You are received by a chilled out, contented canine.  No being dragged through a park whilst it’s bucketing down with rain.  No scooping up after Princess FiFi.  Except, in this case, walking is smashing a gazillion trolls over the head with a sledgehammer.  And Princess FiFi is a level 81 Paladin with 30,000 gold.

It must also be said that gold-farming is usually a violation of a game’s terms and agreements.  Players caught doing it can be banned and have their account shut down.  So then why do so many people do it?

It’s the classic phrase of time equals money.  But by splashing our cash to have people acquire us high-powered avatars and the latest virtual gear, are we exploiting them?  Or are they exploiting us?  Has the online virtual world gone mad?  Or perhaps just a little closer to our own reality?