[dragon_kazoooie]

I've been playing through The Urbz: Sims in the City again recently. It was a game I got used at a game store because I always loved the idea of sims but never had a chance to play it. Immediately this one is different by starting you off playing a mini-game, getting kicked out of your house, and thrown in jail. From there you have to talk to the denizens of the town to gain their trust and attain more 'rep' which functions like a meter for the various factions. Every faction has a leader, for instance the leader of the Artsies is Roxie a carefree, top-hat wearing, carny.

The main drive of the game is to deal with the negative effects left by an uncaring billionaire, known as Daddy Bigbux, and hopefully overthrow him via protests, secret meetings, and keeping him from buying up every lot in town. His goal is, in typical super-villain fashion, to buy the entire town and keep it exactly the same but charge admission fees to enter each place for its' authenticity. Think gentrification but more cartoonish. This is accomplished via the mission you receive such as 'Talk to Polly Nomial about attending classes' or 'Reach 100 relationship with Darius'. Of course this is The Sims so while all of this is going on, you'll have meters to take care of as well. Your sim gets hungry, tired, bored, etc. and it's up to you to make sure you're ready to go and you need to plan out each trip out into the world because if you have you're bored, for instance, you can no longer talk to people, play the mini-games for cash, or learn a new skill.

There are ways to make the mood-lets sustain for longer, and skills you can acquire that makes it much easier to talk to people and gain their trust. The mini-games serve as your way to gain funds and there's a few of them that range from shooting hoops (A simple timing game), being a comedian (Tell jokes in the center to generate laugh meter and avoid the tomatoes by walking left or right), or racing dirtbikes (Excitebike basically) so you'll also have to plan to do that because you've got rent, buying better a better bed, eating, and all the other expenses required when you live in the city. These are also only available at certain times Hoops from 5am-5pm for example, so it's another consideration when planning your 'day'. None of these things detract from the gameplay much and it doesn't take long to make the money for rent, in fact I never found myself worrying about money at all since you can gain skills to get 'Promoted' and once you reach the top level you're rolling in it.

My favorite part about this game is how absurd it gets though. Like it starts out slightly cartoonish but relatively normal like The Sims do, but it gets pretty out there eventually. Idk maybe this sounds like something you're interested in, I bet you could find a way to play it on the computer somehow, though I honestly just can't for the life of me figure out how you'd go about doing that. For those that just want to hear about where the story goes let me spoil it for ya'.
~In my blog because I don't want to take up a bunch more space in here!~