Singles: Flirt Up Your Life!

Singles is a title that is heavily influenced by The Sims. It could almost be described as The Sims with an end game. The overall goal, as the famous Greg Kasavin once put it, is "to knock boots". This is not to say that the game replaces all of the standard facets of The Sims with the goal of getting laid. You still have to ensure your characters do not die of starvation or urinate all over themselves (fetishist or not). You do have all the standard tools for laying out your home and adding furniture. Essentially, the game puts you in control of two people, and the objective is to get them to spend enough time together to fall for each other, and eventually sleep together.

Unlike The Sims, in which you manufacture your characters from scratch, every game in Singles begins by selecting two pre-existing characters from a list filled with a variety of personalities and traits, including a single stereotypical gay man and a single stereotypical lesbian, which of course lead to the Internet joke that the game's "hard mode" comes from trying to make those particular characters fall in love. The game markets itself as putting you in control of two "sexy swingers in their twenties" but it must be pointed out that Singles features possibly the worst swingers in history as they never drink or even leave the house except to work. The game does not even have the obligatory swinger's "weapon of choice": The bowl of car keys.

One point that can be made about Singles is that it possibly offers a interesting commentary on modern social interactions, in that once you have achieved the final goal (coitus) all interest in that couple is lost.