Caro's Sim Kagen

Vima - I have no idea what the name of this place means. The site is in two languages, one being English and the other being Japanese. So you have to look past all the funky symbols if you are an English speaker. ;) The site translates well, but I think in either language, you have the same problem. Poor navigation.

Some new exterior walls grace the front page I really like these matching sets as you rarely see things like this on exterior walls. The bathroom sets are cute, but a bit to um...one colored for my taste.

The faces are really great here, but please use more of Fionn's Real Heads and less of those Maxis hairdos.

I really hate the navigation here. I don't like when a new page opens for the same site. I have my browser back button, and I can use it. The organization is poor it needs a better structure by far.

Skins are good. Nice designs, patterns, but need a little more shadowing.

I really like this site, but am not in a shopping mood right now. The navigation needs a lot of work as I'm sort of irritated by it. If you need faces and can withstand the pain of navigating, do drop by and grab these fabulous sims.

Three martinis and a bookmark.

Storel - Caro's Sim Kagen is a little unusual in that the main reason its creator, Caro, asked us to review it was because she wanted to know how usable this Japanese site is to non-Japanese users and was particularly interested in hearing how it could be made more usable. So while I will comment briefly on the actual downloads, most of this review will discuss the site's organization and usability.

My first recommendation is that the notice that the site is best viewed with Internet Explorer should be on the home page, not buried in the fine print on the Disclaimer/Read Me/Profile page. I spent over an hour and a half assuming that all the weirdness I was seeing was because of the Japanese, not my browser, and it was very annoying to discover that much of it was simply Netscape incompatibility. The visual improvement with Explorer is great enough that you probably won't want to use Netscape, and this should be announced up front as on other web sites.

The English text is grammatical and correctly spelled, which is more than I can say for many American websites, but the site seems rather disorganized. Presentation is inconsistent from page to page. Even the site's name is unclear; the title on the home page says "Caro's Sim Kagen", but on several other pages the site seems to refer to itself as "Sim Miyage". Does this reflect a name change that hasn't been updated on all the pages, or do "Kagen" and "Miyage" refer to different parts of the site or something? Would it be clearer if those words were translated into English?

The Downloads page is the main starting point for navigating the site's content. There are actually at least three different ways to go through the downloads, but the page's confusing layout makes it hard to figure this out without a lot of trial and error. The three methods are:

1) Linear: Click on "Browse Sim Miyage from Miyage Download Page #1" to start at the first page, or "Go to the most recent Sim Miyage Download Page" to start at the last page, and use the "Next" and "Previous" buttons to go through the pages in numeric order.While this ensures you will definitely see all the pages, they're numbered in chronological order from the oldest updates (on page 1) to the most recent updates, so you'll jump around from skins to heads to walls in a fairly random way, depending on when they were added to the site.

2) Visual: Under "View Catalogue", click on one of the links to see, for instance, all the women's skins or all the men's heads on a single page. Clicking on a particular graphic will take you to the particular numbered page that skin or head is located on. Walls and floors are not listed in this format, though, which is a shame because you may not even realize the site has any walls or floors if you don't happen to scroll all the way down to the bottom of this rather long page.

3) Descriptive: The rest of the Downloads page after the "View Catalogue" section is in this format, which divides the pages into functional groups -- recent arrivals, women's heads, kids' skins, etc. -- and lists each page with a one-line description of what's on it.

Unfortunately, the visual catalogue pages have no text on them at all, which makes it hard to figure out how the skins or heads are organized, and the text description sections have no visuals, which makes it hard to decide if you want to see a particular page. One big improvement would be to combine them by using the one-line page descriptions to label each group of items on the visual catalogue pages, which would also have the advantage of shortening the main Downloads page considerably.

Another improvement would be to lay out the groups of heads or skins more consistently. For example, on the Female Heads page, for instance, with the browser set at 800x600, the first line has six heads, the next line has eight, the next line has only one (which seems to be an overlap from the previous line), the next line has six again... Yet visually, one would expect the heads should usually be grouped by threes, because each group of three is almost always just the same head in three different skin tones and the number of items on each individual page is usually some multiple of three.

I do like the large pictures that are used to display the heads, so you can really see the heads in detail when deciding which ones to download. I also like that many of the earlier heads have been redone in the C001 format so they can easily be adapted to use with Fionn's "Real Heads" meshes from SimFreaks. Macintosh users will appreciate that nearly all the downloads here are available in Mac-friendly formats. And the quality of the downloads seems pretty good in all the areas this site covers: heads and skins primarily, with a few nice walls and floors as well.

Really, the fact that the site is in Japanese is not in itself a problem. The only page I could find that didn't have any English was the Tips and Knacks (cheats?) page, and that's not a big deal since there are so many sites that do have tips and cheats in English. I think improving the site's organization, though, would help speakers of both English and Japanese. The site has a lot of promise, but finding your way around is currently a lot harder than it needs to be. Two martinis plus an extra lime.

Squeegee - This is a first for me. To evaluate a site that was established on the other side of the Pacific. "Caro's Sim Kagen" is a Japanese Sims (Sim People) site and the webmaster there wanted a candid review of how this site is able to adjust to non-Japanese speaking (or reading) Sims fans. This was truly a kind gesture and it shows a lot of concern for a person to want to know how "friendly" the website is to other nationalities.

I have to say that at the first impression. The site is not friendly to Netscape users. The mouth watering background hamburgers are on the right side in IE but on the left side in Netscape. Also, the brown "borders" (I assume that would be the correct name) go all the way to the other side of the page in IE. But in Netscape they only go as far as where the text ends. So, just to continue the review. I will cease using Netscape for the time being. I am very loyal to Netscape but I know that it will just not be competent to use it in this review.

I really like the look. It has that 1950's Diner type of influence to it. I can easily navigate here because of the use of English text next to each Japanese (I assume that they are as I do not have the downloaded Japanese text files to read it) phrase.

And I noticed that all downloads are made for both Mac users as well as Windows. Very nice touch.

The Downloads section offers a hefty amount of skins. There are female skins all over the place. There is a large assortment of Japanese garments that would go well in any color combination that a user might visualize. All the skins show up in a new browser window. The graphics load up decent for me. But I can see where there might be a problem. You see, I am on a cable connection and I can see that they load up sort of slow. But I would assume that others on slower connections MIGHT not have this problem. The arrangement is there so that the loading process is faster. And I can see that the Webmaster for the site has taken great pains to make loading speeds decent enough for all fans.

I think users will enjoy the "All Heads" option. There has got to be over one hundred heads or more all in the same pose but each one different!! Users will enjoy the time spent in the skins area. There is much offered.

The Walls and Floors area is not as easy to get to as the other areas of the website. I think that maybe if they were advertised better and not at the very bottom of the downloads page. I noticed that each group of heads have their own link. But maybe the floors and walls can also have a link?? I did notice a few broken links (link to male heads?). But I can not recall exactly where I came upon them to give more information.

The links section features detailed commentary on each link that is listed. I like this approach as to it also shows the sophistication of the Webmaster. The problem is that it's in Japanese and for a guy like me who doesn't have the added files to view them I get the "AfSf"fN,É,A,¢,Ä,â,ç" instead.

A side note, I do understand some Japanese but I can not read it. That's what 12 months overseas on Okinawa does to you. But I do more now then what I knew before!! :)

I liked the point of the site and the review. And that was for Caro to make the effort so all nationalities could enjoy the site. And I think Caro was able to do this.

I submit a review of two martini glasses and a half chewed cherry.

Simantha - The Sims is truly an international game. Played around the world, with websites to match.

Too bad I'm illiterate in everything save English...

Now that's an interesting background, the virtual hamburgers...Okay, let's see if I can figure out where to find things. Oh, that's lovely, the latest updates are thumbnailed right there for ya! The latest update was a bunch of really nicely put together walls. The heads page is sort of confusing, since I don't know which name belongs to which head so I couldn't download them separately if I wanted to. The skins are sort of nice, but there are a lot of pages of them so I can't hit them all.

Navigation was a bit hard until I found the page that lists *everything*. Now if that page was a menu on the left or something I'd be very happy...

Okay, so three and a half martinis for Caro's, quality very nice, navigation (if I hadn't found the catalog page) on a par with KillerSims. Have a nice evening everybody!