Which will come out on top? And which bizarre “Sim” games have you long since forgotten? The only requirement is that “Sim” must be somewhere in the title-sorry Spore. Each series will only be included once, for brevity- The Sims entry, for instance, will include every Sims game. Let’s escape into a friendlier past, then, to count down our way through the entire Sim series from Maxis, ranked from worst to best. Hell, the 2013 SimCity was unplayably broken when it launched, and EA’s The Sims 4 has been called inferior to The Sims 3 in nearly every way that matters. The only living brands are The Sims and SimCity, both of which suffered through critically derided releases with the last game in each series. Today, the heyday of the “Sim” has long since passed. Each had its own naive brand of charm and a little bit of the trademark Maxis humor-llama references in particular were never far away.
Every year brought further PC “Sim” titles from Maxis, the makers of the genre-defining SimCity, with increasingly esoteric names and premises: SimFarm. As a child of the ‘90s, I recall a distinct moment in time when “Sim” games abounded.