Chris Barton: Does God have to upgrade too?

The home PC was found wanting over the holiday break. Not up to snuff, lacking the goods. The cause of its impotence was The Sims 2, a gift for the 13-year-old - a long-time Sims fan - from the Canadian arm of the family. I immediately feared trouble.

For those who have just crawled out from under a rock, the Sims is a "people simulator" - simulating, of all things, suburban living.

It's known as a god game. Many would say the god game. In it players control from on high, create virtual people - the Sims - drop them into a suburban setting, and poke, prod and push them to family sitcom happiness, or disaster and ruin.

While the computer software follows a set of complex rules that generates all sorts of outcomes, "gamers" can influence the behaviour and fortunes of their characters in a variety of ways.

For example, if you don't pay attention to the social needs of the father in a family that's just had twins, the social bunny will fall from the sky and enquire why the poor chap is such a loner.

Throughout all, the Sims jabber in gibberish that is strangely understandable.

Improbable as it may sound, the game is hugely addictive and has become something of a global sensation - selling 6.3 million copies in its first version, The Sims. But it's not to everyone's taste and is banned in China - possibly to protect the country's youth from suburbanite corruption.

The latest version also has The Sims 2 Exchange, an online swap shop where players can trade items, characters, even whole buildings. But the swapping has had some unintended side-effects thanks to hackers embedding virus-like weirdness in their creations (www.securityfocus.com/news/10232).

Entire neighbourhoods of Sims no longer aged and some characters found all the happiness they could want for in a shot of magic espresso.

Other Sims were abducted by aliens every time they looked through their telescope - instead of just occasionally, which is normal.

But none of that caused us grief. It was the size of the game, which requires 3.5 gigabytes of hard drive space. That was the first problem as the home PC's disk had only about a gigabyte free.

After about a day of clearing out years of detritus from the hard drive, doing some long overdue backups of email and documents, and burning acres of digital photos to CD, there was enough room for the install.

It didn't go well, taking an age to copy from DVD and when finally in place, the game ran like treacle. The 13-year-old tried for all of five minutes and promptly declared the game unplayable at that speed.

When you're playing god, things need to happen in an instant and turning off some of the amazing simulation effects like texture and shadow to get the game to run faster rather defeats its purpose and appeal.

Sims 2 requires at the very least an 800MHz processor, at least 32MB of video memory with an ATI Radeon 7200 or NVidia GE Force2 chipset, plus a minimum of 256MB of RAM and an 8X DVD drive.

I had all of the above except my processor was just off the pace - a 730MHz Pentium III. The machine was bought in 2000 and still does a fine job of everything else we use it for, but with a Sims addict in the house I'm now facing the prospect of having to fork out for a new machine.

These days processors start at 2.8GHz and 16X DVD drives are the norm, providing grunt to burn. But to make The Sims 2 run really well and to give a bit of headroom for Sims 3 which I'm sure is just around the corner, I'll be looking at video memory of at least 128MB and ordinary memory of about 1GB. But I'm also shaking my head at the insanity of it all. Here am I in a suburban family upgrading a perfectly good PC in order to run a suburban simulation. I think I need a shot of magic espresso.