![]() ![]() For each need, there are very few actions available, and no one else to meet them beyond your character's single roommate.Singles: Flirt Up your Life, lets you control the lives of two very different people, apartment sharing in a busy European city. You'll need to constantly butt in to meet your character's social needs, however, which are divided between fun, sensuality, romance, and friendship. That's when you'll do most of your watching, witnessing dramatic events like cooking dinner, the morning shower, and repeated hand washing. Your characters have conventional needs - hunger, cleanliness, sleep - that the A.I. Your job is mainly to watch, like the Slaughterhouse-Five aliens, but occasionally you'll have to perform a few rote routines to prime the pump of carnal interaction. In Singles, you essentially play these voyeur aliens playing audience to their couple in a bubble, but your subjects are a lot more timid and require your input. ![]() Although the situation is really weird, it only takes them about a week. Party time! In Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, aliens put Billy Pilgrim and Montana Wildhack in a glass display representing a house in order to observe them having sex. And long before you reach the actual sex, you'll have to sit through a lot of creepy fondling, Sims-ish moaning, and bad collision detection in which one character's hand passes clean through his partner's arm or someone's neck disappears under a pillow. There are indeed nipples, pubic hair, and penises when people take a bath or change clothes (a toilet paper icon covers people when they go to the bathroom), but the sex takes place under the sort of strategically placed blankets you find in R-rated movies. But in practice, Singles is hardly more explicit than The Sims. Equal opportunity for all bodily functions, puritanical dignity be damned. If you're going to have a game in which characters go to the bathroom, fart, and have babies, you might as well have a game in which they have sex. Singles is supposedly so explicit that retailers won't carry it and (publisher) Eidos Interactive seems to have resigned itself to offering it online. In fact, if you go to the game's website, you'll be virtually carded before you can enter. That means no kids allowed - 18 and over only. Whereas sex in The Sims was implied in the Hot Date expansion, Singles fairly crackles with the promise of explicit sex that's so hot that it earned an "AO" rating from the ESRB. But the purported difference between the games is that Singles promises to explore the forbidden carnal corners that The Sims only hinted at. For this most part, this means it'll be familiar to everyone who boots it up (it's hard to imagine someone who didn't play The Sims would bother with Singles). Singles is an unabashed imitation, right down to the interface, of The Sims. The most obvious fact about Singles is that it's so blatant a The Sims clone that you have to wonder what it takes to kick up a lawsuit against clones these days. First, let's admit that there's nothing wrong with the basic premise. What we talk about when we talk about weather. Because the privilege of clicking on "Do the Wild Thing" is the equivalent of the boss monster in Singles. And by "oddly regressive," I mean "juvenile," "foolish," "embarrassing," and any other adjectives that spring to mind when your girlfriend walks in on you while you're clicking on a computer character and selecting "Do the Wild Thing" from a menu of choices. So it feels oddly regressive to play a game built around the concept of seeing what a plastic doll has on under its clothes and how it looks when it's posed in compromising positions with another plastic doll. And then you turned thirteen or so, which is well in advance of the minimum age recommended for the purchase of Singles: Flirt Up Your Life, and you realized how completely stupid that was. And you probably even posed them in, ahem, compromising positions (just for the record, I'm not saying I ever did this). And if you had a sister, you know you swiped her Barbie and took off its clothes. When you were a kid, you took off your G.I. ![]()
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