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Macworld's Game Room recently reviewed The Sims Life Stories, a new story driven addition to the Sims franchise. Created by Aspyr Media, Life Stories offers both traditional and story focused play as well as a laptop computer friendly interface. The Game Room gave Life Stories a score of out of 5 mice.

From the review:

The Sims Life Stories—the first game in the franchise to be originally developed by Aspyr, rather than just ported to the Mac—is billed as being friendly to laptops and low-end machines that might not be able to run the full version of The Sims 2. Believe it or not, The Sims 2, despite its reputation as a “casual” game, has some of the most demanding system requirements of any title out there, and can easily bring even a high-end Mac to its knees, thanks to really advanced AI and sophisticated graphics features.

Aspyr’s position as this game’s original developer is also the reason why the Mac version of The Sims Life Stories only trailed its PC counterpart by a few weeks, rather than the months that Sims 2 fans have come to expect. Hopefully Aspyr will be able to close the gap even further in future installments and release new games simultaneously with their PC counterparts.

So The Sims Life Stories tailors the game engine and some functionality a bit to run better on lower-end hardware. Still, the game offers an authentic Sims 2-style interface and really impressive graphics, even if you can’t have quite as many Sims on screen as before, or quite as huge a house, or, for that matter, as big a neighborhood. You’ll hear the same styles of music and the same nonsense “Simlish” language that you’ve heard in other games.

Macworld Game Room: The Sims Life Stories Review

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