TIME Top 10 Video Games 2003: Space Colony

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The Sims may be the most popular PC game of all time, but there are plenty of players who don't find it escapist enough. So what if you're supposed to manage willful little people through their eating, sleeping and bathroom habits? Isn't that their parents' job?

Space Colony (PC, $40, Gathering) takes the Sims concept and runs with it for about a billion miles. You're still managing an unruly bunch of little people, but now they're trying to build industries—ranging from tourism to chicken farming—on alien worlds, and are beset all the while by bothersome creepy crawlies of every variety. Unfortunately, you don't get to tweak the personalities of these little people as you do in the Sims. But the built-in cast of characters is plenty entertaining. Venus Jones is the coolheaded heroine who must keep together a string of interplanetary colonies; her cohorts become happier and more productive if you raise their allowances, make them fall in love or send them to the disco. Real parents might find all this a little too real.


	NEXT: Temple of Elemental Evil

BY CHRIS TAYLOR

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