Hands on with MySims Kingdom on DS

Electronic Arts has built The Sims franchise into video game royalty, a fascinating series whose kingdom spans every imaginable platform from N-Gage to PC. Prepare for another audience with the king of simulation games this autumn when DS entertains MySims Kingdom.

Much like the original MySims adventure where rebuilding a ruined town was your objective, your goal lies in beautifying King Roland's nation piece-by-piece. With a royal mandate to draw in citizens, it's left to you to engage the people and slowly reconstruct the dilapidated kingdom into a fully functional domain.

In many ways, MySims Kingdom bears more in common with SimCity than The Sims. Everything we saw involved drafting unique objects to rebuild the town with, personalising our character with custom clothing, or interacting with villagers in mini-game form. It's the same formula used for the first game, just tweaked for a better balance among activities to heighten the fun.

It worked too because we found MySims Kingdom more entertaining in the first five minutes than an hour spent with the original. Much of that has to do with the new mini-games that range from kayaking to tennis to ski jumping. They're a lot easier to unlock and there's simply more of them. The 'Constellations' mini-game, for instance, requires tracing out the requested constellation using the stylus. Simple, straightforward, and yet still fun.

You're rewarded for mini-game performance with Simoleons that can be spent on prefabricated items with which to customise the town. These may include stone walkways to beautify the central plaza to a new building or even a piece of furniture. Since customization reigns supreme, however, you're encouraged to make your own items instead of purchasing them with cash. Collecting essences littered about the town allow you to craft special objects. Essences act like resources with each type opening up a new range of possible objects to construct.

The 'Synth-O-Tron' enables you to combine essences to form objects. All you need to do is plop a few essences in the machine and shake it using a scribbling motion with the stylus. Results are random, which is somewhat of a sticking point. It seems to us that randomising the yield will lead to a lot of frustration. If putting in the same two essences into the machine five times yields five different results, it could be more of an annoyance than anything.

Fortunately, you're able to create unique clothes for your Sim with absolute certainty. Visiting the town's dress shop opens the option to design your own T-shirts. While the feature returns from the original game, you'll find an expanded set of options including new stamps and colours. What's even better is that you can share these designs with friends via local wireless.

MySims Kingdom will also support wireless multiplayer for certain mini-games. Hopefully the game will enable single-card play, as that is certain to get more people into the game than forcing multi-card play. Either way, we'll know when the game ships in time for Christmas.