Part 5: Interlude: Let's Try On Clothes

For better or worse, playing dress-up is a big part of this game. (Dressing up and interior decoration both, actually, but furniture comes into play later.) We'll get new clothes and hairstyles constantly as we go through the game, and I'm going to document them as we go, because they are often entertaining.

So, starting clothes! Let's say we decide to make a male agent. When we first start up the game and enter Create-A-Sim, our new dude has seven outfits available to him, as modeled by this handsome gentleman here:



And this handsome fellow (plus Sam) will model the male starting hair/hat choices:



(Yes, we have a trenchcoat/fedora combination available to us. Sadly, no neckbeard.)

This, uh, fellow shows off the slim selection of starting eyewear, which is available to both genders:



And what if we'd wanted to play a female agent? A fancy female agent? Eight outfits, one of which is unisex and two of which are recolors:



Plenty of hair and hats, too, some of which are unisex:



Sadly there is no combining of hairstyles and hats. If we wanted a hat, we'd be stuck with the hair that comes with it. I too want to perch a fedora on top of a giant afro, but it is not to be.

Anyway! We'd also have skintone choices of light/medium/dark, hair color choices of blond/red/brown/black (to start), and lots and lots of different eyes/mouths/assorted facial details, which I'm not going to document because we'll see most of them on other MySims as we play the game.

But wait! There's more!

In 2009, when the game was first released, EA promoted it with a big shiny interactive website. On the website there were five Flash-based Agents 'cases' to solve. Solving the first four would have netted us a secret code; solving the fifth would have netted us a second code. Those codes, when entered into Create-A-Sim with the d-pad, unlock secret outfits! Oooooooh.

The big fancy website is long gone, unsurprisingly, and so are the Flash games, but the codes remain valid and documented.

Entering left, right, left, right, up, down, up, down makes us super cool:



And entering right, up, right, up, down, left, down, left makes us pretty cool as well:



These outfits are also unisex! In fact, the person in the black ninja suit is a lady, not that you can tell. This is not the only way to unlock these outfits--we'd have gotten both of them during the course of normal gameplay--but this is the only way to have them at the beginning of the game.

But wait again! Entering up, down, up, down, left, right, left, right makes us OUTER SPACE cool:



This particular code was never officially released by EA, however. It was discovered later, most likely by someone bored enough to type random codes into the game until something popped out.

From here on out I'll only be showing the male outfits and hairstyles, since our intrepid special agent is a guy. If I'm feeling motivated once I wrap up the first playthrough, I'll zip back through with a lady agent and show off some of the differences.