Sims 3

So… Sims 3. Been playing it for quite some time now… maybe like 15-20 hours.

In short, it’s a good game. EA may be the Nazis of video games, but they have managed to, once again, make a solid Sims release. One that is sure to have dozens of “extras” like all the others.

Anyways… so, how to begin?

I’d say that the first thing about the Sims is that each one had a specific outlook, goal or whatever you want to call it. The first Sims was just the basics. You have a family, they get jobs, go to work, meet people, fall in love, etc. The 2nd Sims had all sorts of family tree stuff plus extra relationships, new graphics, and the community lot feature added on from the beginning. The Sims 3 improves upon all these features and adds more. Jobs have been tweaked, as have relationships and the various services (fyi maids are now overpriced. In the others they were far too cheap).

But the biggest change is how the neighborhood works now. In all the old Sims when your sim(s) went to a community lot time on your house lot froze until you came back. This had some advantages, of course. You could go out and play video games at the arcade and get home three hours later all prepped for work, for instance. However, it also had the annoying effect of spending two hours shopping only to come home tired and come to work. In general, it was annoying and I didn’t really like the system.

Not so in the new Sims game. Now, the entire community can streamlessly be visited. Sims can drive (yes, you get your own cars without any expacks) to the park while their children stay home and do homework with the babysitter. Or they can visit friends at their houses, or they can see a movie, or they can search for bugs, or go fishing. You get the point.

On the downside, you can no longer play multiple families in the same neighborhood. At least, after 20ish hours of playing the game I haven’t figured out how to… IMO this is a (sole) step backwards. Part of the fun of the Sims was creating your own neighborhood (you can’t do this either; you’re stuck with one neighborhood, two if you download the extra one) and then filling it with your own sims and giving the neighborhood its own story. Now, you can do that to a degree, and the seamless neighborhood makes visiting and meeting people easier, but its not the same in my opinion.

There are a lot of other little features that I could mention about the sims, but honestly, those are the two things that struck me the most. All I can say is that I think the Sims 3 is better than the previous two releases. That being said, unless you’re a die-hard fan of the game I would encourage you to wait until EA releases some tasty expacks and the original game’s price goes down form $50 to like…. Well $30 or something.

Oh, and on another note, if you buy a pirated version the game will tell you that its pirated. It won’t stop you from playing, but it will ask you to buy a real version.