I’m always uncomfortable around game clones. In one respect they seem to represent the one of the things I like most about gaming culture - that it attracts crowds of iterative magpies, who love the games they play and love the idea that they could make them better. And, in others, it’s gaming at its worst: disrespectful, lazy, shabbily commercialised.

Can’t think what put that issue in my head, especially since I was playing MySims - the DS one - over the weekend. But whether or not you think it’s clone-ware, and whether or not you think clone-ware is evil, you can’t deny that it’s a game that had at its disposal not just a very close role model, but a role model of unusual excellence. So how is that that at every single stage of the first five minutes of MySims, it alienates and annoys me?

The first thing you hit is the language: ” Please choose the gender of your player character,” it asks frostily. Wow, I feel welcomed and connected to your cute, vibrant world. Has EA considered making a driving licence application process simulator, do you think? I reckon that’s a niche it could own.

But I choose, and so, a few hair-cuts and skin colours later, I’m dumped into the world. Town is due east, I’m told by the charisma-free ship’s captain. Great, I think, and prepare to set off, only to have my gender-assigned-player-character whisked out of my control. It trots into town, starts chasing a boy in a dog-helmet, runs out of puff (why couldn’t I chose the fitness of my player-character, hmm?) and decides to walk into a building. Brilliant. So much for me forging any early, precious sense of identity with that player-character. Why tell me I need to go east if you’re not going to let me go where I want? Why assume I’d want to chase the boy?

Never mind. Here I am in a house, with a woman. I can, the game chirps, ‘touch the Sim directly to initiate conversation’. I tell you, there’s not a weekend goes by here without our neighbours calling the police cos we’re all initiating conversations like crazy. Plus, if it’s suddenly OK to call her a Sim, why couldn’t we have been calling my player-character that from the beginning? Wouldn’t that have made it seem a bit more like an engaging, consistent world?

But here I am carping away, when this Sim, who I have touched, is experiencing a crisis. Her grandson is missing, and she’s too busy to talk to me. Also too busy, it seems, to do anything except stand still. Certainly too busy to go and look for her grandson. I wait for further instructions, but sadly the game doesn’t say if I can ‘touch the Sim to instill a sense of responsibility and constructive effort’. So, I haul myself off to where on the map the grandson is, play a mini-game (mini-task, really) to get him to come to his senses and Whoop! He hadn’t realised how worried she was. He’s going to head straight back. Except, in what I’m beginning to understand is a family trait, he’s going to accomplish that by standing rooted to the spot. I check his status screen. He’s ‘heading quietly back to the mayor’s home’, the game assures me. More imperceptibly than quietly, it would seem.

Not to worry. Back to the lady mayor’s house to explain that she can relax, I’ve found the lost boy, but he’s lost the use of his legs. However, in the course of his adventure he’s clearly gained miraculous replacement powers of locomotion because as I enter the house - pling! I see on the map that he’s teleported straight home at the last minute. Quick work - almost as impressive as how effectively the game entirely de-valued the point of me going to get him. Is there a quicker way for a game to strip away all that boring, colourful, appealing game-world stuff and reveal its core mechanics in all their ugly, empty, manipulative glory?

And then there’s a flower-planting task - how could there not be? But instead of giving me any creative input, or any sense of customisation or ownership of the world, the game gives me a pocketful of identical red tulips and demands I place them in pre-ordained flower beds. Fine. I do eight, get bored, return to the quest giver. No dice. I’ve got to put them in ALL the spaces in ALL the flower beds. Fine. Back to the flower beds. Not fine. There are 14 spaces and only 10 slots in my inventory, so I’ve run out. Now I understand why the flower-lady said I could come back for more ‘if I ran out.’ Although I don’t quite understand why she didn’t say ‘when I ran out’, since the game had made that an inevitability. But fine. Back to her, and back to the flower beds. At least, I think, I’ll end up with 6 bonus tulips. I return for my pat on the head, and she takes the spare tulips off me. Not fine.

And on it goes. Three screens of repeated dialogue to get into each shop. Shops that dump you out of the whole process if you decide you’ve picked the wrong category. Mini-games that don’t have a retry option. Characters who you trek across the world to find, and who then teleport when you’re six feet away, because the clock trips from day to night and they’re supposed to be home. The game itself, when you get to it, might be brilliant. But why make it so hard to get to it? Why have an otherwise functioning, appealing game riddled with so many tiny, cheap, fixable hiccups?

Five minutes in, and I take it all back. MySims is radically, daringly unique. I’m not sure I’ve ever played a game where every single interaction I’ve encountered from game start to first save is so needlessly flawed. Maybe instead of Animal Crossing, EA should have cribbed a bit harder from The 400.