There are a few basic minigames included to help pass the time. You can tend to your garden by spraying pests and keeping your flowers watered. You can cook a variety of dishes with some mouse clicks and side-to-side stirring motions. And you can play Texas Hold 'Em either in a fake online setting or against the other housewives. All of these minigames come up as part of the storyline, and none are particularly engaging.
The rest of the game boils down to going from point A to point B, completing a mostly linear series of goals usually just by talking to the right people. The game leads you by the nose the whole way through, and some of the goals are quite tedious, involving jaunts back and forth from the shopping mall or treks all around the neighborhood. Thankfully, you can double the game speed and instantly "teleport" between the different homes on Wisteria Lane, which helps keep the pace going. The entire game is structured like a season of the show, as a series of brief episodes all bookended by some oblique narrative from Brenda Strong, the show's narrator. It'll take you maybe 10 hours to play through, so there's more to the story than you'd probably expect from a TV show-licensed computer game.
Poker and a few other minigames are there to give you something to do in between all the chatting and gossiping.
One aspect of Desperate Housewives that was borrowed a little too faithfully from The Sims is the overall sluggish feel of the gameplay. Simply talking to another character forces clunky little animations as the two characters arrange themselves so that they're perfectly face to face. The different housewives look recognizably similar to their TV counterparts, but other than that, the game really isn't much to look at. Flat lighting effects and saturated colors make this look much more like a generic computer game than the TV show. Apart from your character, all the other characters are fully voiced, and the voice acting is passable. There's not a lot to say about the rest of the audio, though the musical score sounds straight out of the show, with lots of playful plucking of violin strings and the like. The only other aspect of Desperate Housewives' presentation that will likely catch your eye is how the game is laced with some real-world products and advertisements for those products. You'll see real banner ads while using a fake in-game Web browser, for instance. In fairness, there's some clear product placement on the show itself, and most of the in-game ads here are appropriate in context.
A lot of games based on movie or television licenses are flat-out bad, either because they're not any fun to play or they don't have any new or interesting material in them. Desperate Housewives is a different story. You can tell that the developers at Liquid Entertainment, known for some solid and inventive real-time strategy games, really dumbed this thing down so that, presumably, a nongamer might like it more. That's a bit of a shame, but on the flip side, Desperate Housewives is fully competent fan service, basically a computer-game version of an unaired season of the show.
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