I’ve tried the Sims, and it was fun to play for a little while, but to be honest I found it gave both too much and too little choice to be much use at generating ideas — it’s the randomness of Tiny Tower’s characters and settings that makes it so great, with the relationships open to imagination, whereas I found the Sims to be more about making coins so you could choose stuff to buy, and then the relationship responses were unpredictable and hard to control (almost the complete opposite). I also get irritated by games that demand too much interaction (play all the time or your character gets depressed, etc.).

But that’s just me. Anyone who finds that Tiny Tower doesn’t give the player enough design control and/or wants more emo input from the game would probably appreciate the Sims.