My Sims 3 Mini-Review

Ok, I would like to do a brief review of the Sims 3. I didn’t have much experience with it because it kept crashing (grumble) but I did notice some differences… that people who loved Sims 2 will hate and love and people who didn’t like Sims 2 will love.

I am a BIG Sims fan. I purchased the game when it first came out when nobody knew what it was. Before I knew it, the game had blown up and I felt like I was ahead of the curve. It is amazing how far the game as come. From tiny small almost indecipherable pre-made faces, to giving us the power to control everything on the face including the height and shape of CHEEKBONES!!!!

Anyway… My first impression of the game is that it loaded REALLY QUICKLY. Like, less than half the time it takes to load Sims 2. I realize I have thousands of custom content files in my Sims 2, so that slows it down a lot, but this is faster than I was expecting for a game that was more powerful. It looks pretty shiny and glimmery and it made me excited.

It comes with only 1 neighborhood and no ability to create your own. I read somewhere that this is something they will add later, but isn’t that just BASIC to sims? I personally like to start with a blank slate when I first play because the pre-made families sorta bug me.

Anyway, I loaded the neighborhood (easily the longest loading period of the game, but not unbearable) and went directly to create my sim.

DETAIL DETAIL DETAIL.

For those who foudn the Sims 2 overwhelming, I can only imagine what this version would do.

Personally I found it amazing. We can finally make sims that aren’t just "skinny" and "plump"… they can be virtually any size! You get to pick muscle size as well. You can pick the skin tone (it comes with strange skins too, like blue and green) and EVERYTHING can be customized on a color wheel. So you’re not stuck with preset colors! YOu can get some nice variances! You can’t select height, which was sad. I’d love to make some short and some tall, but maybe that’ll come along with an expansion…

After that you go into hair, facial features, clothing, and personality.

I’d say they’ve expanded the options on these about A MILLION TIMES OVER. You could get lost in how awesome it is. Just for the fun of it, I’ll go through a brief "making of a sim":

1. Hair: Pick a style from about 25 different types… you can choose a basic color, or go into the color wheel and choose root color, main color, highlights and TIPS!!! You can pick ANY COLOR COMBO YOU CAN THINK OF!!! It’s amazing, and there are some long styles that weren’t in previous games. But no curly hair yet!

2. Face: OMG… how to describe. Pick the brows and go down. Brow shape, thickness, orientation to eyes. Eyes, shape (from adjusting the inner and outer corners to placement) and color, once again with a wheel to make gorgeous light lavendar eyes to evil red! Nose… mouth… cheeks… even the lines AROUND the mouth can be adjusted. Cheek bones, ears, jawline… all way more complex than the Sims 2… which did allow for good customization, but NOTHING like this. You can add age lines, freckles, and beauty marks (and facial hair for men, some really cool options here!)!!

3. Clothing: I’m probably forgetting something on the face, but lets move on… you can pick clothes for everyday, formal, sleeping, exercising, and swimming. No more underwear, which is something I’ll miss from Sims 2. I loved having my sims stay in their undies all the time. Maybe they’ll add it later. Anyway, something SUPER COOL about Sims 3 is that you can take an article of clothing and CUSTOMIZE IT RIGHT THERE! change fabrics, patterns, colors on EVERYTHING. There are SHOES AND SOCKS and SANDALS for each outfit to choose. along with jewelry and watches… ALL COLOR CUSTOMIZABLE. Seriously, no need to wait for someone to create a color you like and then download it, you can make it RIGHT THERE IN GAME.  It’s absolutely mind bogglingly endless how much you can do just to create the perfect evening gown. You can also pick hair styles for each outfit. So up for evening, down for daily, and pony tail to swim if you want!

4. Personality is probably the most daunting. In previous games, you’d choose how much of each thing a sim would be. A lot of points to clean and friendly and outgoing and that’s what your sim would be like. In Sims 3 you choose the traits themselves… like neurotic, family oriented, insane, clumsy, technophobe, flirty, greedy, evil, good, absentminded, athletic and on and on…. yeah, you can make a crazy combination, and there at least 50 different traits. You get to put 5 into each sim, and I have no idea what each of them does. I did get a chance to make a clumsy sim and she was falling all over looking goofy. She was also a loner, neurotic, and insane and a workaholic. it is just out of this world what you can do with this option and I didn’t really get to explore it.

You also get to choose their favorite food, music, and color and their lifetime goal (you get a selection that is based on the traits you’ve chosen)… pretty awesome! Oh! And their voices! Three different voices and a slide bar to make the voice decibels higher or lower! This was pretty cool so they all don’t sound the same!

Once you spend nine years doing that (and oddly, the game never crashed while i was doing this portion, even though I spent an hour making a sim couple… but in game, i can only get it to play 20 minutes max. stupid game!) you move them into the neighborhood…

This is very familiar. Building, buying things, all that, pretty much the same. they have some new looks to these screens, but overall, it’s not that different from Sims 2. (Except the fact that you can change colors and things like the clothing!!!)

What IS different is that the world is seamless. No saying "go to the store" and waiting for a load screen. Nope, you go to the store, and you either go to your car (in the base game this time!) or get a taxi or ride a bike!.

They cut a corner and there are no animations for getting into the car, you just appear. This bugged me. I liked that animation! I’m not sure if it saves space and time or if they just didn’t have the time to put it in and they’ll do it later. i dunno.

Anyway, you appear inside of the car like magic and then you get to watch it actually DRIVE to where you want to go.

My first sim went to the theater… but here is the boo part… they just disappear inside. You can’t see them sitting down and watching a show. Same for restaurants and grocery shopping. they disappear inside. I loved goingto a restuarant in Sims 2 and ordering the food and watching the bustle go on around my sim and in the kitchen and such. I’m really hoping they expand later and allow us inside of these now "secret" interiors. When you shop you get to select what to buy and there are recipes you can only make if you get certain ingredients. You can check your fridge for what you have as well.

I never got to order pizza  or see how babies are born because it kept crashing… BUT… woohoo is the same. I was a little disappointed. There isn’t even a little cut scene movie… they just bounce around under the blankets.

That made me sad. I was hoping for some different woohoo animations!

Anyway, some other things I noticed… Sims follow directions REALLY WELL. I woudl get really frustrated in Sims 2 if I told my sim to do something and they wouldn’t do it because another sim was in the way or they were in the middle of a cancelled action. This was a much quicker response and a much smarter sim. Like, if you were cooking and told a sim to do something, the sim would stop cooking and the food would burn. Not this time, they finish cooking and then do it!

When talking with other sims, there is now a little box in the upper left corner that shows what the sim you’re talking to thinks of you. They think you’re amusing, they think your being rude, they think you’re being flirty, they like you! they hate you! That’s fun to read because it gives character to sims you’re not controlling, when before you sorta had to read their reactions and hope for pluses or minuses.

What else… what else… I didn’t get to send a sim to work or see them do too much because of the crashing. Oh! And you can put more than one thing on a counter. At one point my sim had a book, a bowl, and a plate all on the same counter! It was super cute. Yay clutter! hahahaha.

But some missing things are: No more environmental need. No more memories. I liked the memories cuz it helped me keep track of what was happening… none of that now.

Instead they have these moodlets that have effects on the mood of the Sim. Like, if a sim walks into a room with smelly garbage, their mood is effected for the next 10 minutes (or until the mess is cleaned up). If a sim is having fun, then they get a positive boost for the time period and so on.

Miscl things:

Bookshelves:A lot more books, titles, different things to read.

When at community lots, if a sim goes into a restaurant, they can meet other sims thee and get to know them even though you can’t see what’s going on. Seems a lot easier to meet and make friends and do the social things… and it’s less overwhelming because there are no loading screens, you don’t have to see EVERYTHING and it is a smoother experience overall.

This is sorta annoying if you were into Sims 2 because there was just SO MUCH DETAIL there in what you could see them doing. It is frustrating to have that ability to "peep" taken away. However, I do think they’ll change it with expansions. It is a more friendly game though because of this though, and will ease more people into being a fan.

A few other random things… the water in this game is super cool. I don’t think the game would be any fun on lower settings. Almost all of my sttings default to high (my sims are at high, when there is one step above, I didn’t turn it on though, i’m sure it would make stuff crash then!) so I got to see a lot of the visual improvements. Shadows are better, trees sway in the breeze, water is clear and not opaque and reflects light… it’s a really pretty game if turned up enough. The sims animations seemed jerkier than in 2, but i noticed thre is a "smoother animation" setting I didn’t have turned on. Probably more crash worthiness.

so anyway, quick recap… for those that liked Sims 2… it’s a different experience. It’s LESS than Sims 2… but only in that we can’t see everything we used to be able to see, but in a way we see MORE because we don’t have to wait for loading screens to get into town and hang out at a park and meet people. I am pretty confident they’ll upgrade these things in the future (and thus make more money) but if you like sims 2 you will like 3 if you are willing to take away some of the intricacies that 2 provided.

For those that didn’t like 2 (and I’m not sure how you COULDN’T LIKE IT!!!!), it is a more new user friendly game. The tutorials are a lot better and it’s more sensitive to commands and not overwhelming too much. It will definitely make you fall in love if you have any inclination towards a life sim game. Just watching them cook (which is my favorite part! ha ha) and seeing them go through their little lives (I got a sim pregnant, but it crashed before she could start to show, … oh the puke is green and chunky now! whee!) and the customization is really worth it.

and for hardcore Sims fans, you’ll love it. It’s different and good… and it may not take away your desire to play 2! I still want to play 2, but I want to see all there is in 3, so that’s why it’s in my head and I want to throw responsibility to the wind and go buy it right now!!! However, I’ll just wait and think about my little bit of experience with the game… it was all very good and left me wanting more!

And now… back to work and reading favs! whee!