Posted on: Tuesday, December 18, 2001

The Left Lane
Hook up with 'Sims'

Can't get a date for the weekend? The next most entertaining thing to do might be hooking up virtual couples with "The Sims Hot Date Expansion Pack" (EA Games, $29.95), the latest situational add-on to the best-selling puppet-master software title "The Sims."

Where "The Sims" allowed players to create simulated people using the most basic of personality traits and then set them off to goofily interact with their virtual neighbors, "Hot

Date" allows you to send your Sims via taxi, pictured below, to an all-new Downtown area of restaurants, parks, nightclubs and unattached Sims.

All with the intent of playing matchmaker.

More than 40 new social interactions (including varying hugs, kisses and pick-up lines) and 125 mood-setting objects (from a love tub to a dozen roses) keep the sparks flying or cut the evening mercifully short. The result is a clever (and, for the most part, chaste) expansion pack for Sims addicts weary of watching their pixilated creations either sleep or set the house on fire. EA Games has rated "Hot Date" T for teenagers, due to "comic misbehavior, mature sexual themes and minor animated violence."

— Derek Paiva, Advertiser staff writer