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You can place every knick-knack and home appliance like you are actually renovating and moving in. Hometopia is everything it is advertised to be: You are given an empty plot of land, you can construct your mansion made of gold, your happy cottage life, or recreate Bill & Deana Riker’s house they share with their daughter in Picard. Ok, that’s enough Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy references for one article!
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The sandbox mode on the other hand, does very much interest me as it allows me to create my dream “little” home that I can lay outside of when the bulldozers come to knock it down. I tried to avoid that this week during the Steam Next Fest because those restrictions don’t interest me at all. You focus on fixing things up on a budget and selling it on. In career mode, it is a little more akin to House Flipper.
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Hometopia does take that consumerist section of the home design aspect from The Sims and makes that the entire game. For the life of me, I can’t remember where it was said (I think a Channel 4 doc by Charlie Brooker), but Will Wright, who created The Sims, said that it was always designed around a satirical look at US consumerism. Ok, Lisa and I disagree on this one a little, but I always found The Sims games to be about home design. Hometopia is a game I wrote about coming to this week’s Steam Next Fest because, when I saw the press release that said it is about designing homes with as much detail as possible, I almost jumped for joy. Ok, I’ll stop now, but only because the Earth is about to be obliterated in two minutes and nineteen seconds.Īnyway, Hometopia is The Sims 4 if it was created by a human that understood what we all wanted: More home design gubbins. I think I’d need to be looking in a dark and dank basement bathroom with no staircase or light to get down there, and I just cannot be bothered. It may also be a crime that I make such a lengthy and on-the-nose reference to Douglas Adams, but I haven’t checked.
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I think I speak for the entire Earth delegation in that, to put up a notice over in Alpha Centauri that a hyperspace bypass will be constructed right through the happy little homes we’ve just spent many hours creating, that is a crime.
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