Sims 3: My favorite part so far....

[sigma7]

I've been toying with doing something of a real demo/review of Sims 3, but given the game's complexity and lineage, it eludes a simple summation. So until I get to that point, here's my favorite bit so far.

At this point I'm playing with a brother-sister household, Troo and Skye Bloo. (I enjoy the red and blue skin colors. Pity those are as exotic as it gets.) Troo aspired to become an athletic superstar, Skye wanted to ascend to the top of the medical track, and both succeeded. Every once in a while, though, while at work, certain events happen and result in a little dialog box on the right side of the screen. Skye got this one while at the hospital.



And in alt-tabbing out to run Fraps and get the screencap, the game crashed immediately after getting the cap, and I hadn't saved in a while, and just the idea of getting them back to where they were is...demoralizing, so I think I'll just start over. I guess that's why they call them the Bloos.

Comments

[kateshort.livejournal.com]

...you've been waiting ALL DAY to use that pun.

[sigma7.livejournal.com]

That's not the worst part. When a Sim's gardening, one of the pie chart options is "Tend Garden" and every time I see it I keep hearing "Empty Garden." The Sims-Elton axis has suddenly become clear.

[aardy.livejournal.com]

It's never lupus. (Or vasculitis.)

[maggiebloome.livejournal.com]

Is there a custom-skin-import thing like in Sims 2? I remember making interesting ones for my Four Horsemen, and I was going to do the blotchy alien freckles thing before my C crashed but never got to it...

[sigma7.livejournal.com]

Import, not really -- someone's already figured out how to replace the default skins (nipples a go-go), but I can't see any way around the hard-coded limit of six tone-gradients, with pale at one end and dark/saturated at the other. There might be more/different face-paint textures, but having a few dozen to choose from doesn't seem in the works.

The most vexing thing about the game is that it purports to give you more customization, and that's true only to a point. You've got patterns to drag onto clothes/items/whatever, each with four different color swatches, and each swatch having up to four different, fully customizable color channels. It's really easy to, say, take an item of prebuilt clothing, create a color scheme, then drag-drop it onto another item and it carries over perfectly. And it's even possible to create your own patterns. But meshes/hair/skins are a long way off, if not impossible, and I can't help to think that's because they're pushing the online micro-payment content. Mods are possible only in very limited scope -- there are a few large-scale mods, but you can't pick and choose between which you want, it's one large-scale mod only.

There are some distinct improvements, but there are simply broken implementations and glaring oversights in object/functionality inclusion, especially if you've been spoiled by the Sims 2 mod community. The most telling thing I can think of is that Will Wright's not the showrunner this time around, and it shows.

[beagle1971.livejournal.com]

At least is wasn't based on Grey's Anatomy.

[spankingfemme.livejournal.com]

Wha? Now that is intricate LOL!

[samson-of-5.livejournal.com]

So the Goddamn Batman gonna stay in Sims 2?

[sigma7.livejournal.com]

Yeah, importing meshes seems to be a way off -- EA's gone out of their way to make sure customization to the extent it was possible in TS2 is at best extremely challenging and at worst impossible, for no other reason than to milk money out of the fanbase via its online store. Even the extant mods operate under the Highlander rule -- there can be only one, picking and choosing don't work no more. Which is a shame.

Worse, dancing isn't an available occupation anymore, so GDBM as we know him just can't make the transition without an expansion or a massive breakthrough by custom content designers....