Sim Fever

Vima - "Oh your giving me the fever tonight, I don't want to give in, I am playing with fire..."-Pat Benetar. Having its URL makes a site easy to remember. Sim Fever has sort of a disco name, and I like that. The layout is nice and clean. I really like the interface they've used.

Walls section really has too many walls per page and it would be nice to have some categories. Like Outdoors, indoors, brick, tiles, and wood. Some of the walls are good some are bad. Take what you like (if you can) and leave the rest. They don't use either zips or exe files. I would bet that some people won't be able to download these things.

Floors are a mixture of good and bad. Some of the lines are a bit too dark and hard creating too much depth. The image WIDTH and HEIGHT should defined in the image tag so the images will load faster. When they aren't defined, time is wasted while the browser determines the width and height. The Sets section has some wall ensembles to create various themed room settings.

The houses are all huge, but well layed out and roomy. Several views are offered to see the interior as well as the exterior. A nice little description is included and enjoyable reading if you like that sort of thing.

I find the roofs attrocious. I really don't think I'd use one of them.

They offer a quick link to some Maxis programs so you don't have to search through there site. At first I wondered about whether this was okay, but I checked their policy and linking to Maxis programs is fine, just don't link to their objects and skins!

All and all, it's not a bad experience. Looks like they could use an object creator though!

Two martinis... I hated the roofs and they need an object creator...they're looking!

Sister Cecilia C. Robertsim
Pastor of the Church of Simmintology - SimFever, whoa it is hot in here, I must be coming down with something...oh goodness what a punster I am. Well this place has a clean set up but I really do not like orange and gray together so the colors do not make me very happy. This place is all about build mode...I could not find any objects nor skins, and I was fine with that. It is not important to have everything in the world as long as what you do have is quality work. Praise Be!!

That TommyZee has some nice floors here, I think I will take a couple of samples home for Pat, he might like the gray tile, or the white, oh or the terra cotta colored. Well, maybe one of each...

The walls section is fine nothing that really fit my tastes, although if you like ivy growing up the side of your exterior walls you might want to come and have a look.

Stephanie has created some LARGE houses, which we all know the Good Lord would want us to shun, there are children starving so we should live frugally and give all of our extra saved pennies to feed the poor. That is what I do!!! Piety has its price as I always say.

The walls and floor sets section has what you need if you are a pioneer of the stars sort. I got the holo deck and programmed in a tropical honeymoon, Lovely just lovely...Pat has the cutest knees in those pink Hibiscus patterned shorts. Hallelujah sister!!

Well Skyler I cannot even imagine where you have been, you will probably show up tonight looking like something the cat dragged in and with some story about traveling salesmen!!! I just do not know what I am to do with you girl....

Oh yes! I am giving two and an half communion cups to SimFever, I would love to see you change your colors to something a bit more subdued, and maybe instead of having twenty or so walls load at a time, break it up a bit, it took me forever to load each page. Other than that it was a nice visit.

I have been remiss in not saying hello to Simantha, why don't you come on over to the piety corner tonight perhaps we could study the good book together for a few minutes?

Storel - Wow, I have not had this much trouble with a site in quite some time. Basically, this site is completely unusable in Netscape 4.7. Two graphics on the home page don't show at all, even though they show fine in Internet Explorer, and the page goes way off the right side of the screen in 800x600 resolution, even though it fits the screen fine in IE. Then on the floors page, the large majority of graphics don't display in Netscape. (What's odd is that all the graphics are JPGs; I know Netscape won't display BMPs, but it's never had a problem with JPGs before. And why would some JPGs display correctly, but not others on the same page?) And then, if you click on one of the rare wall graphics that does display, either nothing happens or you get the binary data from the .WLL file displayed as text. Bleah.

After rebooting and switching to IE, things went a bit more smoothly. This site has no objects or skins, so those of you who only care about those can skip the rest of this review. In Walls, TommyZee's are decent, especially the wooden ones, and Stephanie has some nice walls on the second page. WallSets has three of Stephanie's Star Trek sets (also seen at TSR), which are well done. The link to the Sim Lodge Resort set doesn't work, though. In the Floors section, TommyZee's floors are a bit garish, but Stephanie's are pretty tasteful. Eight of the floor graphics on page 2 were broken, though. And the Roofs section didn't impress me at all.

The Houses section is pretty good. Outside, first floor interior, and second floor interior view of each house; I wish more sites were this thorough. The houses looked pretty good, too; kudos to Stephanie again. Unfortunately, the most recent news item says the house downloads aren't working right -- apparently the zip files are getting corrupted when uploaded. Wouldn't you know it? The best part of the site and you can't use it.

Navigation is pretty simple and straightforward, too. I can't fault the site's design, just the technical implementation of it. Given that the webmaster is 15, I suppose the intricacies of Netscape compatibility are a bit too much to expect, but having broken links, corrupted zips, and graphics that don't show up even in IE is hard to excuse.

So: if you like walls and floors and use Internet Explorer, this site is worth a quick look. Otherwise, you needn't bother. One martini glass plus a lime.

Squeegee - Here is a site that looks great if you're using the proper browser. But if you're a person who uses Netscape, then you will see the main page is something less then advantageous.

The design landscape looks charming. But I noticed that there are a few images that failed to load up. They were different images depending on what browser you use. The last update was April 15th, and updates seem to be posted once a week in the past.

After reading some of the past weeks updates I noticed that SimFever has posted "you can now preorder an Xbox & GameCube from our store!". Now, I don't mind ads or banners as long as they are not annoying. I have came to the point in time that I don't pay attention to banners anymore. And I really don't like getting solicited to buy something in a area where your looking for news of what is new with a Sims website. I just feel that there is lack of respect to the user when something like that is done. It should be in the ads area of a website, that's my opinion.

Read more into that March 30th update. And you will find the person tells you that you have to pay a higher price for the product and then you will be send a check for the difference as soon as it's known how much the product will be sold for. That's a major red flag to me. In fact, who the hell does this person think he is?? This gets me mad and I won't even bother talking about it in this review. But I do have a few words about it!! I would just urge people who read this review to take a look at the March 30th update and make your own judgment.

Clicked on the "floors" page and the page loaded up with fifty (50) images of various floors. Some of the floors had my interest but I also noticed that if I use Netscape, 23 of those images would fail to load up. If I used IE, then there were no problems. I don't like it when a site doesn't take steps to make itself viewable to all viewers and not just the one type of browser that it used by more people. Why don't I like that?? Because I consider EVERY user special and I would take immense pains so that all can enjoy what I offer. It's called respect for others. But that is just my outlook.

Browsing the walls section using Netscape brings up 48 walls but of those, 37 show up as broken images. Using IE I noticed that maybe Netscape has a working mind and actually took steps to not show some walls that are butt ugly. Can it be that Netscape looks out for it's owner?? :)

Now, to sum up the review. The update that featured a solicitation to buy a product turned me off to taking the added effort to fully look at what the website offered. I just have the opinion that it's not a wise choice to attempt to solicit people in the manner used.

There are not many positives to the website. I do like the design and the colors used. But that's about it. I am sorry.

I toss in a review of one martini glass.

Simantha - Ooh, I'm feeling a little woozy. Must be that Sim Fever coming on. Okay, first off I'm thinking this really isn't going to have a whole lot of stuff since it appears that there are other games that this site is covering. So let's see. Houses first. Apparently there's something wrong with the zips, so I won't download them, not that I ever download houses anyways but some people like that. I see they're using the Maxis walls and floors, but couldn't the builder have used less...tacky ones? Especially for something called the Marble Manor? Hmm, no main house index to return to very quickly, have to go back to the top to get to the houses link or use the back button. Meh. In several of these houses I really have to question the usage of certain Maxis floors...would a castle really have bright pink courtyard walks? I think not.

On to walls, walls&floors and floors...The walls look promising, but I think some of the walls might not go smoothly placed next to each other. Also, it might be better to split the walls pages into sections by type, since there are quite a few to load on each page...The walls/floors sets appear to be Star Trek-themed, which puts me a little too much in mind of my recent experiences but once again I digress. The mural-type walls look fairly seamless, but I wish there was a different "blank" wall than just a simple black one. Floors are pretty tacky. And some of them don't appear at all. Okay, not all are tacky, but they are very few. (Look on page three for the semi-decent ones.) Eww, the roofs look like lego blocks, with no roof-like texturing at all. Not a shingle in sight. The cheats page is outdated.

Downloads. Maybe I'll get some objects out of this place. Oh, I guess not. Just some programs you can get off the official site. Meh.

I'm so disappointed I can only muster enough energy to throw one and a half martinis in your face.