MySims: Way Too Cute Company: EA Games Oh, my God! It's just too cute. That is my professional opinion. The Sims has been a long-standing, towering force to be reckoned with; often imitated, yet never quite duplicated. However, it must have not been reaching the younger crowd. Enter MySims - a sim game that plays like a cross between The Sims and Animal Crossing, with overly cute characters and lots of cute animal "essences" and various objects that can be found, harvested and used to create a house for your sim that is very "you." These essences are objects, such as anything from foods to pets to hand-held toys, which can either be dropped into your house as-is or utilized in other ways, such as by using them as "essence paints," which will give you the ability to paint objects or even walls with things such as a kitty print or a cube-puzzle (a la Rubik) print that looks like cubism-inspired wallpaper. MySims looks like it is going to be very accessible, with an interactive tutorial that explains the various things you need to know. I will say that I found the construction interface to be a bit hard to get used to; something that didn't put me off, personally, but might frustrate younger players or players with shorter attention spans. Specifically, there are times that pieces appear to be lined up correctly from one angle, but actually are misaligned. The ability to rotate the view makes this easy to see with the push of a button, but doesn't make it much easier to prevent from happening. However, while this construction aspect can be confusing at times, it is also one of the stronger features of MySims. Not only can you put house pieces together to create your house, you can also get plans for building items, such as furniture, and then build them in your workshop. The plans have certain parts that are required, and placing the correct parts in certain places will trigger those parts being replaced with detail pieces (such as computer monitors and a control panel, in the case of the supercomputer), but you can choose the materials (including translucent materials) and even add additional parts to customize the items to your taste. For example, when I constructed the "spy chair" (which matches the "spy desk," of course), I added arm rests that the plan didn't call for. One mini-game that I got a chance to try out is the "mining" for essences feature; in certain areas, you can pick up a metal-detector-looking device and search around for essences. Once you find the location of one, an option to "dig" will get you some essences to collect and use later. The area I tried this in kept yielding food essences, mainly bacon and cake, which is something I wouldn't expect to dig out of the ground and, if I did, probably wouldn't eat it, but, then again, this is a sim game, aimed at kids, so I guess the younger set might either overlook this issue entirely or find it uproariously amusing. MySims seems to have the same addictive gameplay as The Sims, except without the level of stress that you get in The Sims. Check back for a full review when we can get a full version in-house for some more exhaustive gameplay. -Geck0, GameVortex Communications AKA Robert Perkins