Though you might think you're familiar with "the people simulator" known as The Sims on PC, it's hardly the same thing as MySims on Wii. Gone, for example, is the social interaction and character building of traditional Sims games. In its place is a material gathering mini-game compilation and the mandate to collect more furniture than an obsessive-compulsive IKEA clerk with an employee discount.

Arriving in a rundown SimCity (which you name as you see fit), you notice plenty of empty lots scattered about -- apparently the local "builder" has skipped town -- along with the former residents, like rats to a piper with a pie.

Luckily, someone else has the builder's gift of harnessing a town's "essence" to make it a desirable place to live. That someone is you, of course. And so it falls on your shoulders to rebuild the town to its former glory, a five-star destination to lure back all those fickle Sims, piper lovin' rats that they are.

First thing you do is... wait for the game to load. Seriously, MySims load times are brutal. Just starting the game is an exercise in the suffering of several lengthy loading screens. And that's not the end of it: nearly every step along the restoration way there's break in the action for a load, though it makes sense after a while as the game sets in place many different gameplay elements that are introduced later, slowly, as you progress, making for an amiable learning curve with lots of load breaks (whether you need a break or not).

You start by building yourself a new house, done in a separate sandbox of menus using the Wii-mote. While manipulating the 3-dimensional objects in there can be frustrating, the system works well for the most part with many mostly-accessible build, tweak, customization options. Ultimately the aesthetics of that which you build will determine how eager the people will be to repatriate.

Speaking of which, whenever someone new (re)joins the town, they'll have a laundry list of demands before they're satisfied and committed to staying. People simply aren't happy moving into their new houses unfurnished, for example. And to that end, in addition to building houses, you can also build a workshop to toil away in on all types of custom made furniture, appliances and electronics. What's more important to those, moreover, is the "essence" of the thing, and essences are gathered in different ways, usually involving some simple mini-game -- fishing, gardening or digging or whathaveyou --, none of them particularly difficult, all of them mildly time-consuming and mostly modestly entertaining.

So, though MySims suffers from frequent interruptions of frustratingly-long loads, and though it offers very little in the way of kinship with its much deeper, more entertaining and more rewarding PC counterpart, it does have its own addictive qualities, mostly of the IKEA catalogue shopping variety for the sake of repatriating MyRats via mini-games, for better or worse.