Nostalgia Moment: The Urbz, Sims in the City

I’m at my parents’ house at the moment and I uncovered my old GameCube while I was digging around some of my old stuff. I loved that GameCube so much, in fact, to get us going let’s just have a listen to that start up bit…

Aaaaaaaah… That, dear readers, is the sound of my childhood.

Anyway so we uncovered a game which, when we were young, impressionable, and tasteless, my sister and I thought was brilliant. My other half, who is with me while I’m at my parents’, took one look at the cover and was unsure what to think so we decided to give it a go… I don’t know how many of you are familiar with The Urbz: Sims in the City but it’s… Interesting. To explain to you the concept of this game please enjoy the intro video for the game. Do watch it, it’s amazing.

Confused? Yeah. So was Dan, I believe his words were “The right drugs have not been invented yet to make this make sense”. You may also have recognised the song in the background was ‘Let’s Get It Started’ by The Black Eyed Peas… In simlish. Yup. In case that didn’t blow your mind enough let me tell you the best thing about this game: The soundtrack is mostly music by The Black Eyed Peas but sung in simlish. It’s hilarious. As you heard in that video the words ‘Let’s Get it Started’ sound more like ‘Let’s go rattata’ and I just can’t get enough. The band are also characters in the game with Will. I. Am. as your bestie who gets you set up in the city.

So what’s the aim of the game? Basically you need to build up enough reputation in the city to get into loads of clubs and get a penthouse, don’t stop that party though because if you do your rep goes down and you start to become a nobody again. You start off in a shitty flat with a small amount of money and super convenient subway access, you also choose a zone to start building your rep up in and each zone has a different style, so for example Central Station is full of punks, Kicktail Park is skaters, Neon East is sort of Asian themed with eye assaulting colours… That sort of thing. You have to learn social gestures and moves (I don’t really know how to describe it) that are specific to each zone and you also have to dress like everyone in there to get in to the local club and have the time of your life. When you get into the club in each zone the current city big shot will teach you a Power Social move (the weird break dance thing they did in the video is one of these) and you can use them to become super popular, complete missions for other sims or awe bullies so much that they can’t compete with how sociable you are and leave the district forever (seriously). We tried out the Power Social ‘Blastikiss’ on a punk that our sim barely knew where our sim confidently swaggered up to him, grabbed him and kissed him. They soared into the air, fireworks went off,  Rather than report our sim for sexual assault the punk seemed to enjoy it and boom boom pow, we got put on the guest list for the local club.

Something that I never really noticed when I was younger was how deformed the sims are, the girl has a waist so small you could just hold it in your hand and the male sim has shoulders so big they look like 80’s shoulder pads on steroids. It’s hard to rock that body when you look like a Barbie doll/deformed rugby player. All ladies of course have rather generous humps (what does that even mean? I guess no one knows what it means but it’s provocative) and no matter what body shape you make a man, from your limited choice as it is, they will always have abs and weird arm muscles.

I did always find it a bit weird that once you have loads of rep you can’t dress the way you want to by mixing clothes from different districts and everything, I would have thought being individual was a good thing but no you must conform, where is the love guys?

If you were hoping I would shut up with my Black Eyed Peas puns throughout this post (if you spotted them, and I hope you did otherwise you may have just thought I have a weird writing style) then sorry not sorry, I love bad puns. Imma be playing through some more GameCube games while I’m here so I gotta feeling I’ll put some nostalgia moment posts up. Stay Tuned!

Are there any games from your childhood that you would find weird to play now? Have you played this game before?