Electronic Arts have done it again!
After The Sims 2 which was highly addictive, I now am finding that I am hooked on The Sims 3 because of the realism and the fact that you can follow multiple story lines and suchlikes. My sim, Skye McIntosh was originally married to her husband, Innes McIntosh who split up with her when she started making moves on their maid, Grady, but not before she had a baby called Callum. After a short marriage to Grady, he and Skye split up, and then Skye met and fell in love with an uptight workaholic called Tori. Those two got married and adopted two girls who they called Norrine and Kerrine. Callum and the girls grew up, and Callum married twice, the first time to an evil-minded girl called Joann, and the second time to the maid, Tenshi. Meanwhile during her teenage years, Kerrine had a steady relationship with a girl called Brandee who she married as soon as she became a young adult. Norrine, Kerrine, Brandy, Callum and Tenshi moved into their own house where Tenshi became pregnant with Elliot, and Kerrine and Brandee adopted a girl. While all this was happenning, people they knew, friends, family members and co-workers were able to progress with their lives. It was quite a shock to me when I made Callum drive to his Dad’s house to find that without my intervention, Innes had two children, one of which was a toddler. It was even more of a shock when I took one of the sims to go and visit Grady in his mansion down by the bach that I had originally built for Skye and Innes to be told by a tooltip when I placed my mouse pointer over the house that nobody lived there. It would seem therefore that Grady had died. It is quite an extraudinary game and you just want to keep playing. I do believe it is a lot easier to help sims to progress in The Sims 3, and with the community having it’s own free will and being allowed to progress, it makes that game that much more realistic.
I could liken it to Mango Lassi. You take your first sip, and think ugh what is this foul concoction, but then you give it another sip and think mmmm, actually this is not bad, and by the time you’ve finished the glass, you absolutely love the stuff and want more. The Sims 3 is a lot like that. You play it and see the lack of objects that are available, and you find that if you have a sim go to certain community lots, i.e. shops and restaurants, you cannot follow them inside. Also you realise that your sim can no longer go to University or open a business, and the weather doesn’t change and you think oh no! What have they done? You keep on playing however ad you start to love all the things it can do. You love how you can go into a library and while you’re there things will continue to play out at home, or that you can stay at home while a sim is out at a library or any other community. You can still go into some community lots, such as the library, the gym and the simming pools as well as the beach.
I’ll be honest I didn’t know just what I was expecting from The Sims 3, and I was apprehensive about what would be omitted and released in expansion packs. My biggest worry was that cars wouldn’t be an option for the RTM game, but that was extinguished. Car driving is so much better. In The Sims 2 the cars could only be parked at the front of the lot but now they can be parked anywhere. I have Callum’s police car parked in the back garden for example. Because Sims can now roam freely having a car makes more sense because you can drive quickly to places as opposed to having to cycle or take a taxi. You can also decorate cars using any of the available textures. Elliot’s car is a black 4×4 style vehicle which looks like it’s a cross between a Land Rover and a BMW X5 and it is black with green and yellow wavey lines on it, with dark blue bumpers, pillars and roof-rack brackets.
I could go on about Ths Sims 3 all day with an enthusiasm which is comparable to Clarkson when he drove the Bugatti Veyron for the first time back in 2005 on Top Gear, but I feel that would be very selfish of me, so I’ll stop now.