As it turns out, The Sims Life Stories was specifically designed with users of laptop PCs in mind, a place where The Sims and The Sims 2 titles and expansion packs tend to falter due to the comparative lack of muscle on all but the mightiest of notebook computers.

Life Stories gameplay is still classic Sims where you're controlling those quirky, self-created characters living out virtual lives in a virtual world, acquiring possessions and status along the way, going to the bathroom whether they need to or not and dealing with any basic calamity you care to throw at them (cue the Talking Head's house-burner song).

With laptop friendliness, however, comes a shrinkage in scale of most every parameter; you only get up to four family members to play with, the simulated neighborhood -- dubbed "Four Corners," aptly enough -- is likewise hamlet-ish with little to quench the miles-wide wanderlust so naturally permeating the larger Sims games and their innumerable add-on scenarios.

Still, it's still Sims gaming, and Life Stories is certainly more conducive to short spurts of gameplay whenever you and your laptop (or you desktop PC, for the matter, low-end ones specifically) have a spare moment, be that in the game's story mode, where you loosely guide your Sim through a soap opera-type plot, or the open-ended mode where you can live the vicarious life of Riley in whatever way you fancy, albeit within a clearly smallish space with less optional furniture. It's all good.

• TIP: In Free Play mode of The Sims Life Stories (not Story mode), you can bring up the cheat menu by pressing Ctrl + Shift + C. Enter "aging off(or on)" to stop everyone from aging, "motherlode" to give your family 50,000 Simoleans, "unlockCareerRewards" to unlock all career rewards for your selected character, and "exit" to exit the cheat menu.