The world is electric with remasters of The Sims 1 and The Sims 2, as it should be. Both games, while old and for sure showing their age in some places, are absolute classics that a gaming powerhouse was built upon. Who doesn’t love The Sims? But, what I’m asking is for a little bit more. While EA is in a remaster-doing mood, why not bring back a true gem from the series’ history? It’s time, at last, to bring back The Urbz.
The Urbz, for those unaware, was a peculiar yet impactful entry into The Sims series that hoped to make the whole ordeal a bit more cool. A bit more modern. Rather than place you in a lovely detached house with a pool and a job, it placed you in the city. Urbzville was the place to be, and your main priority was to gain popularity with various cool groups in this city in order to become a VIP. 2004 was the best of times, so I hear, and as such EA was able to pull off some real magic. There’s a reason it placed well in our very own Sims ranking list.
It was also one of the strangest Sims games ever made, in my opinion. It was wacky, even by Sims standards. You can dumpster dive in The Urbz, way before The Sims 3 and The Sims 4 brought it back. People were dressed up in all manner of out-there outfits, seemingly down with your life of buffing glass and digging through trash to save up for a T-shirt you really like. The Sims is a journey in earning money to improve your life. The Urbz is a journey in doing odd jobs to improve your standing with strangers at clubs. Truly, a more grounded depiction of city life than we had seen back then, and dare I say, have seen since.
As you progress, you unlock new parts of town to explore, new Urbz to talk to and tickle on occasion, and new clothes to buy. The throughline in The Urbz is fun – this game is unashamedly fun. Nothing hits like mashing buttons to improve your mental faculties while your character is playing future Snake on a cyber chair getting brain blasted. That’s a sentance you’d never write for another game, that’s the power of The Urbz! The power of The Urbz is to take the foundational mechanics of The Sims and just go bananas with it.
As a side note, what’s WILL.I.AM doing right now? What’s the entirety of the Black Eyes Peas doing? Making music, one assumes, or at least thinking about making music. You think they would be down with coming back for a Simlish remix of a song or two? The truth is for many folks, Black Eyed Peas are kind of linked by the hip to The Urbz, and cement the game in this early 2000’s era that people have a real love for.
Yes this is an opinion rooted firmly in nostalgia. I have gone back and looked at the models, and yeah it’s super dated. The fact you can tickle people out of nowhere and people are seemingly cool with that is perhaps a sign of the times. But damn it, there’s gold in those hills. It will cost money to dig it up, yes. That gold may be niche at the end of the day, sure. But c’mon, people love The Sims, and I feel in this retro-fanatical world we live in, a good portion of that love must trickle down to The Urbz.