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So, Sims 3. It's enticing and vexing, encouraging and demoralizing, two steps forward, one step back. I don't think you're going to see a more insightful and accurate review than Yahtzee's Zero Punctuation review, as he does hit the high points. I've a bit of divergence in that I don't think it's quite as grindy or mundane as real life, but it's certainly less escapist than Sims 2, and that's not good.
Let me just breeze over the high notes right quick, in pictoral form, below the cut.
So let's start with a simple premise: let's render four cockatiels as people. Easy enough. Let's take the default human the game spits out at us....
...and give him a yellow and gray mohawk, like Tiny Moo. Kinda.
First thing you'll notice, if you're just coming in off the streets from Sims 2, no more three-or-four hair colors baked into each style. You can set individual, 16-bit colors for the roots, the tips, the body and the highlights, so cockatiel hair is finally feasible. Whee.
Let's give him some nose, just to hammer home the whole "bird" thing. You can play with facial deformity sliders to vaguely-human extremes, and there's already a few mods out to take the sliders to strange and disturbing birth-defect places.
So. Here's his default clothing. And here's what might be the best idea to come from Sims 3 and the most difficult to articulate: create-a-style. The clothing meshes don't have textures baked onto them -- you can apply any number of different patterns to that piece of clothing or furniture or appliance or almost anything. And in each pattern can be up to four different colors you can set to any 16-bit color you like. For example, let's take this checkered shirt....
...and change the colors around. Note to the right that there's a big circle and four smaller ones to its right. You can tweak the value of the big circle (which would make color changes across the object) or each of the individual circles, which would just change one particular color on the shirt.
Like this. Same shirt, same pattern, even, just different colors selected. That's a fantastic level of customization (but it's superficial, and that's a recurring theme, I'm afraid).
If you want to wear corduroy, you can. You shouldn't, but you can. You can have a corduroy bookcase, refrigerator, couch, bathtub, Toyota Prius.
If you want to wear a brushed aluminum shirt with corrugated steel pants, go right ahead.
The game ships with a metric buttload of patterns, and the community's already spit out a bunch more -- not even limits of good fashion sense need apply.
But Tiny's a gray and white bird, so we'll stick with those colors.
For formalwear, let's start with the basic tux. Note the rounded-squares to the right -- two for the top and bottom of the tux, one for the shirt, one for the tie.
Just drag the color picker around or type in RGB or hex codes to get the specific color you want.
Here's half of a good idea: traits. Your Sim can have up to five traits, and they will affect what the Sim can do, how the Sim reacts to outside stimuli, or what stimuli come looking for him. The traits can be good, bad or balanced, and there's no benefit for taking a negative trait. If you come from the RPG world, you'll understand the idea that the good things must be paid for -- that a good trait should be counterbalanced by a restriction elsewhere. Not so much.
In the traits as well as in a few other aspects of the released version of Sims 3, I'm finding good ideas not followed through to satisfying conclusions. Take collecting -- you can amble about town picking up bugs, precious metals, gems and meteorites, but there's little you can do with them, apart from turning them into more money. It's a basic part of the game concept that just doesn't resolve in a satisfactory way.
So once you've chosen (or randomly rolled) your Sim's traits, you can pick their lifetime aspiration. Do you want to ascend to the top of a specific career track, maximize skills, have a big family or break hearts? Tiny wants a big garden, presumably so he can tromp around in it like a pint-sized Godzilla.
I threw in Moosie (changed to a female just for variety's sake) and custom-entered hex codes for her shades of gray. Thankfully entering grays in hex is dead simple -- found #777777 to be a nice medium and #555555 to be a suitable darker gray. Finally something even my stupid color-blind self can't screw up.
This was Moosie's default swimsuit. Note the tab to the left of the color squares. I just set the color for the top to the typical grays, then dragged the tab and dropped all of the colors onto the bottom and....
...Voila.
So here's Muffin. I really like how just straight from the box he looks kinda like a blonde Danny "Jonathan from Buffy" Strong. And he's got that wary "what are you about to do to me" look....
So I gave him slippers. They're not bunnies. Gophers, maybe? Just awful bunnies?
For Biscuit I went to town on her makeup. It's not something I like doing or even feel vaguely confident (that whole chromatically-impaired thing) in, but I just threw on some basic generic options and she looks appropriately teenage-rebellious.
Younger ages get fewer traits -- Biscuit and Muffin only have four, but Biscuit's definitely excitable.
Plan A was to have the lot be siblings -- but that's a no-no. So Tiny and Moosie are siblings, Muffin's Tiny's kid and Biscuit is Moosie's offspring. *shrug* Don't ask me.
Then the game gives you $20K and lets you pick where you start.
Given that your options are extremely restricted with $20K and there's maybe one house in town that's both cheaper than $20K furnished and has two bedrooms, it's not so much of a choice as it is an ethical question if you want to use the "freerealeastate" cheat or not. I did, but only to populate some other pre-built Sims into the city; for the birds, let's keep this by-the-book as much as possible.
This is what $20K gets you in Sunset Valley. Not much.
Of special note is that items can now be placed at angles, and the grid is now subdivided, allowing for greater flexibility for item placement. They're incremental improvements, not game-changing features, but they're still welcome.
Here's the new control bar. There's eight tabs on it now, and that's actually easier to navigate than you'll think at first. There's only six motive bars now, and you'd think that'd make upkeep easier, but I've actually found it worse -- I'm finding the motive decay to be profound enough that I spend more time spinning those plates than I ever did in Sims 2.
As ever, the mood thermometer-bar in the middle-left starts as the summation of your motives -- max the motives and you max the bar. But now added to the mix are moodlets -- temporary conditions that might add or subtract from the mood. Negative moodlets -- being in the dark, losing a game, being embarrassed, being on fire (yes, seriously) will take the bar down, but positive moodlets (won game, got kissed, got promotion) pump it up. And keeping the mood high is critical, as mood affects your work performance, your hobby output, your ability to learn, pretty much everything in the game.
The game speeds are significantly slower than in previous iterations, mainly because of story progression. Here's the idea behind story progression: while your Sims are doing their things, the computer's also letting the other Sims in the city lead out their lives, to one degree or another -- they'll come walking by, go to work, meet each other, and occasionally move out of town or die. (Theoretically you can turn it off, but apparently that doesn't entirely work out of the box.) So while you control your Sims, the computer's trying to approximate all of the other Sims in the background. Whatever algorithm is running that story progression scheme is far from optimized; even your fastest speed is still soggy tedium (there's been a patch which purports to improve performance, but I'm not rushing out to install it). Story progression is, again, half of a good idea, the second half being apparently successful implementation.
So yes, the first thing to do with the new family is to get them reading. I don't want someone with skill level 0 in cooking to burn down the house again.
Of all of the progress that the game's made -- every Sim has a cellphone, for example -- newspapers are delivered every morning at your doorstep, whether you want them or not. They can't be canceled. After a week you get seven decaying newspapers on your front stoop inflicting a negative moodlet on anyone who wanders near. It gets to the point that no matter how spotless you keep the rest of the house, you end up needing to hire a maid just to take care of the newspapers. For a game with such clever and interesting tweaks, it's a baffling oversight.
There are now four "wish" boxes, no fears. Every once in a while a new wish or two will pop up in the top window, and you can "promise" it to one of the four boxes below. (Note that fulfilling a wish in the top box gives you no credit. I keep making that mistake.)
Tiny wishes to take a gardening class, so he just hops in a taxi and jets out to the science center to study gardening. It's expensive but worth it. To get to the map view, you just scroll out with the mouse wheel until the magnifying glass pops up and click on it. They've made the transition from map view to breathing-down-your-neck view as seamless as possible -- not that it's entirely successful without moments of invisible or gray-textured objects, but it's a reasonable approximation.
Here's Tiny getting out of his class. This is the max zoomed-out level before going to the map view, I think.
And a spin of the scroll wheel takes you to this view.
Work environments and special locations like the science plant are rabbit holes -- your Sims disappear into them, and you can't see inside those environments until they emerge. It's the same idea as when they'd disappear in the carpool to work in Sims 2, only now there are actual buildings involved. It's a pretty solid compromise, I think.
Also of note is that while at work you can select "tones" -- you can work hard, you can take it easy, you can suck up to the boss or hang around with your co-workers, and each tone affects your work performance, your motives and your relationships. It's a significant improvement to the game.
So Tiny's going to build a garden armed with his new gardening skill. We buy a water sprinkler (under "appliances," not "plumbing") and note that it sprays water across a five-by-five (and I immediately think of Eliza Dushku) area, so we wall that area off with a tiiiiny wall, just so we have an easily-bypassed visual reference.
When someone in the house gets a significant skill in handiness, they'll be able to upgrade the sprinkler to turn on automatically. Yes, handiness can upgrade all sorts of items, from stereos to computers to stoves to teleporters.
Muffin and Biscuit are in high school, but they can take part-time jobs, and Biscuit signs on to work at the bookstore.
Biscuit also wants to take guitar lessons, so we click on the theater in downtown and send her on her way.
Tiny starts planting seeds. Seeds can also be fertilized with foods or fish caught from nearby bodies of water.
Biscuit just emerged from the theater, and I'll send her over to buy some skill-learning books from the bookstore next door.
There is a crapload of book-learnin' in this here game. You can learn skills, read recipes, learn new songs for the guitar (there is only one goddamned musical instrument in this game and it's the guitar, but more on that later), brush up on catching certain fish, get parenting tips or just books for bookworm Sims to devour at leisure.
Zooming out a bit from the bookstore here, and this is the city's central park. It has chess tables, picnic areas, grills, even mini-ponds for fishing.
In addition to the aforementioned ores, gems and bugs, you can also find seeds around town -- both for mundane flora and the more exotic and incredibly useful plant life as well.
Biscuit's taking some time out to fish -- fishing's about a billion times more useful in the game than it ever is in real life. Believe me when I say it's part of the necessary skill set to eternal life.
There's a few dozen recipes in the game, and this time, from fridge to face they all look exactly like they should. This, unsurprisingly, is macaroni and cheese. (And if you grow your own ingredients, the meal quality, as you'd expect, can take a big bounce.)
Aaaaand Moosie starts running around in the water sprinker like a mad woman. This struck me as odd until I realized the game's significant shortcomings.
One musical instrument: the guitar. No hot tubs. A foosball table, but that's about it for group entertainment. A ton of extant content from Sims 2 has gone missing in this version, and judging from the motions of the Sims when interacting with various props, most of the content on here has been recycled from Sims 2 to one degree or another. For all of the game's improvements, if you came from enjoying Sims 2, you're going to have at least one moment where you look for your old favorite content only to realize it's not there anymore and for no discernible good reason. And like Yahtzee, I can only conclude that it's to drive sales of downloadable online content via micropayment (which is really just taking the expansion-pack phenomenon and reducing it even further into absurdity). Which might be a fantastically shrewd idea from a business standpoint -- from a gameplay standpoint, it's infuriating.
So, yeah, Moosie's playing in the sprinker 'cause it's probably the best she can do.
How many times did you see this in previous Sims iterations? DAMMIT GIRL AH'M TAKIN MAH BAFF.
And Tiny's mood gets docked thanks to an "embarrassed" moodlet.
Let's play with create-a-style now that Muffin and Biscuit are tucked away in their identical beds -- I dunno, just throw a few insane textures and patterns on there, for the fun of it.
Much better.
Aaaaand we can't get through one night in Sunset Valley without the game slowing down and the ominous music playing. No, of course they don't have a burglar alarm, as they cost $900+, and I completely forgot about the burglar....
I do like her stealthy gait.
Neighborhood watch: YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG.
Mind you, I woke Tiny up as soon as I saw the burglar and he's not quite ready to call the cops yet.
And the first place she goes is...the bathroom. That's been, like, the hub of the house's drama tonight, hasn't it?
Aaaaaand she's stolen the toilet. I commend her dedication in unbolting it and freeing it from the water lines.
She strikes next and swipes....
...the halogen floor lamp every college student living off-campus is issued.
But hey! Tiny's hot-headed! When he sees her he'll....
...walk right by.
Yes, there's no option to even interact with the burglar. Tiny might as well be still asleep or on the moon for all the good it does him. Yes, my reaction is about the same as hers.
I'm left to conclude that this is some sort of elaborate passive-aggressive shunning designed to shame the burglar into surrender, given that look on his face. I have no idea what he thinks he's doing, but he thinks he's doing it really well. Seriously, you look up "shit was so cash" in the dictionary and you see that face.
Oh, thank God, the police. Save me from the smug alienation!
Were you afraid that Sims 3 would get rid of that elaborate dance where each Sim chicken-walks in some elaborate choreography to get to a point where they're face-to-face and stumble around like stupid-drunk co-eds trying to mosh? Oh, don't worry, if anything, it's worse than ever. "Okay, step just a bit to your left...no, no, your left. Okay, now I'll turn just a bit...no, you keep facing me, here, come back here, now I'm going to I'M OVER HERE YOU STUPID okay, that's better, now I'm arresting you."
Girlfight.
I...guess he...likes it?
Even laden with a commode and a floor lamp in her tesseract bag, the burglar managed to thoroughly trounce the beat cop....
...and walk away from the scene of the crime very slowly.
Yes, apparently unless you have the trait "brave," there's nothing you can do to interfere with or even interact with the burglar. Weak.
"I hate to rain on your parade, but she walked out the front door with your intimate plumbing and lighting apparatus. I'm sorry, I failed basic judo at the academy."
"Don't you have, like, tazers or guns or anything?"
"Sure, $5 from the EA online store." (Just kidding.)
Left unsaid: "I put up less of a fight than an indignant marmoset, but that was still physical contact, which you managed to avoid altogether in your own home, sparky."
"This toilet and I spent four glorious minutes together...."
The nose is my fault. Everything else...I just don't have an explanation for. He looks like he's reciting a monologue from Taxi Driver in the spirit of his burgled plumbing.
Yes, I must buy them a new toilet, or...you know, I don't even want to imagine. It's bad enough when the shower's broken and they start giving themselves sponge baths in the kitchen....
So let's at least trick out the toilet for them. At least it's not corduroy.
So yeah, inside of 24 hours they get the one critical item of the house stolen under their very elongated noses and Sunset Valley PD puts up a slap-fight for naught. You'll notice there was no welcome wagon, unless the raccoon-woman counts.
So I'm going to put this family aside for now. As far as what was originally intended to be "a quick reaction" goes...yeah, that kinda got outta control, didn't it?
Let me just breeze over the high notes right quick, in pictoral form, below the cut.
So let's start with a simple premise: let's render four cockatiels as people. Easy enough. Let's take the default human the game spits out at us....
...and give him a yellow and gray mohawk, like Tiny Moo. Kinda.
First thing you'll notice, if you're just coming in off the streets from Sims 2, no more three-or-four hair colors baked into each style. You can set individual, 16-bit colors for the roots, the tips, the body and the highlights, so cockatiel hair is finally feasible. Whee.
Let's give him some nose, just to hammer home the whole "bird" thing. You can play with facial deformity sliders to vaguely-human extremes, and there's already a few mods out to take the sliders to strange and disturbing birth-defect places.
So. Here's his default clothing. And here's what might be the best idea to come from Sims 3 and the most difficult to articulate: create-a-style. The clothing meshes don't have textures baked onto them -- you can apply any number of different patterns to that piece of clothing or furniture or appliance or almost anything. And in each pattern can be up to four different colors you can set to any 16-bit color you like. For example, let's take this checkered shirt....
...and change the colors around. Note to the right that there's a big circle and four smaller ones to its right. You can tweak the value of the big circle (which would make color changes across the object) or each of the individual circles, which would just change one particular color on the shirt.
Like this. Same shirt, same pattern, even, just different colors selected. That's a fantastic level of customization (but it's superficial, and that's a recurring theme, I'm afraid).
If you want to wear corduroy, you can. You shouldn't, but you can. You can have a corduroy bookcase, refrigerator, couch, bathtub, Toyota Prius.
If you want to wear a brushed aluminum shirt with corrugated steel pants, go right ahead.
The game ships with a metric buttload of patterns, and the community's already spit out a bunch more -- not even limits of good fashion sense need apply.
But Tiny's a gray and white bird, so we'll stick with those colors.
For formalwear, let's start with the basic tux. Note the rounded-squares to the right -- two for the top and bottom of the tux, one for the shirt, one for the tie.
Just drag the color picker around or type in RGB or hex codes to get the specific color you want.
Here's half of a good idea: traits. Your Sim can have up to five traits, and they will affect what the Sim can do, how the Sim reacts to outside stimuli, or what stimuli come looking for him. The traits can be good, bad or balanced, and there's no benefit for taking a negative trait. If you come from the RPG world, you'll understand the idea that the good things must be paid for -- that a good trait should be counterbalanced by a restriction elsewhere. Not so much.
In the traits as well as in a few other aspects of the released version of Sims 3, I'm finding good ideas not followed through to satisfying conclusions. Take collecting -- you can amble about town picking up bugs, precious metals, gems and meteorites, but there's little you can do with them, apart from turning them into more money. It's a basic part of the game concept that just doesn't resolve in a satisfactory way.
So once you've chosen (or randomly rolled) your Sim's traits, you can pick their lifetime aspiration. Do you want to ascend to the top of a specific career track, maximize skills, have a big family or break hearts? Tiny wants a big garden, presumably so he can tromp around in it like a pint-sized Godzilla.
I threw in Moosie (changed to a female just for variety's sake) and custom-entered hex codes for her shades of gray. Thankfully entering grays in hex is dead simple -- found #777777 to be a nice medium and #555555 to be a suitable darker gray. Finally something even my stupid color-blind self can't screw up.
This was Moosie's default swimsuit. Note the tab to the left of the color squares. I just set the color for the top to the typical grays, then dragged the tab and dropped all of the colors onto the bottom and....
...Voila.
So here's Muffin. I really like how just straight from the box he looks kinda like a blonde Danny "Jonathan from Buffy" Strong. And he's got that wary "what are you about to do to me" look....
So I gave him slippers. They're not bunnies. Gophers, maybe? Just awful bunnies?
For Biscuit I went to town on her makeup. It's not something I like doing or even feel vaguely confident (that whole chromatically-impaired thing) in, but I just threw on some basic generic options and she looks appropriately teenage-rebellious.
Younger ages get fewer traits -- Biscuit and Muffin only have four, but Biscuit's definitely excitable.
Plan A was to have the lot be siblings -- but that's a no-no. So Tiny and Moosie are siblings, Muffin's Tiny's kid and Biscuit is Moosie's offspring. *shrug* Don't ask me.
Then the game gives you $20K and lets you pick where you start.
Given that your options are extremely restricted with $20K and there's maybe one house in town that's both cheaper than $20K furnished and has two bedrooms, it's not so much of a choice as it is an ethical question if you want to use the "freerealeastate" cheat or not. I did, but only to populate some other pre-built Sims into the city; for the birds, let's keep this by-the-book as much as possible.
This is what $20K gets you in Sunset Valley. Not much.
Of special note is that items can now be placed at angles, and the grid is now subdivided, allowing for greater flexibility for item placement. They're incremental improvements, not game-changing features, but they're still welcome.
Here's the new control bar. There's eight tabs on it now, and that's actually easier to navigate than you'll think at first. There's only six motive bars now, and you'd think that'd make upkeep easier, but I've actually found it worse -- I'm finding the motive decay to be profound enough that I spend more time spinning those plates than I ever did in Sims 2.
As ever, the mood thermometer-bar in the middle-left starts as the summation of your motives -- max the motives and you max the bar. But now added to the mix are moodlets -- temporary conditions that might add or subtract from the mood. Negative moodlets -- being in the dark, losing a game, being embarrassed, being on fire (yes, seriously) will take the bar down, but positive moodlets (won game, got kissed, got promotion) pump it up. And keeping the mood high is critical, as mood affects your work performance, your hobby output, your ability to learn, pretty much everything in the game.
The game speeds are significantly slower than in previous iterations, mainly because of story progression. Here's the idea behind story progression: while your Sims are doing their things, the computer's also letting the other Sims in the city lead out their lives, to one degree or another -- they'll come walking by, go to work, meet each other, and occasionally move out of town or die. (Theoretically you can turn it off, but apparently that doesn't entirely work out of the box.) So while you control your Sims, the computer's trying to approximate all of the other Sims in the background. Whatever algorithm is running that story progression scheme is far from optimized; even your fastest speed is still soggy tedium (there's been a patch which purports to improve performance, but I'm not rushing out to install it). Story progression is, again, half of a good idea, the second half being apparently successful implementation.
So yes, the first thing to do with the new family is to get them reading. I don't want someone with skill level 0 in cooking to burn down the house again.
Of all of the progress that the game's made -- every Sim has a cellphone, for example -- newspapers are delivered every morning at your doorstep, whether you want them or not. They can't be canceled. After a week you get seven decaying newspapers on your front stoop inflicting a negative moodlet on anyone who wanders near. It gets to the point that no matter how spotless you keep the rest of the house, you end up needing to hire a maid just to take care of the newspapers. For a game with such clever and interesting tweaks, it's a baffling oversight.
There are now four "wish" boxes, no fears. Every once in a while a new wish or two will pop up in the top window, and you can "promise" it to one of the four boxes below. (Note that fulfilling a wish in the top box gives you no credit. I keep making that mistake.)
Tiny wishes to take a gardening class, so he just hops in a taxi and jets out to the science center to study gardening. It's expensive but worth it. To get to the map view, you just scroll out with the mouse wheel until the magnifying glass pops up and click on it. They've made the transition from map view to breathing-down-your-neck view as seamless as possible -- not that it's entirely successful without moments of invisible or gray-textured objects, but it's a reasonable approximation.
Here's Tiny getting out of his class. This is the max zoomed-out level before going to the map view, I think.
And a spin of the scroll wheel takes you to this view.
Work environments and special locations like the science plant are rabbit holes -- your Sims disappear into them, and you can't see inside those environments until they emerge. It's the same idea as when they'd disappear in the carpool to work in Sims 2, only now there are actual buildings involved. It's a pretty solid compromise, I think.
Also of note is that while at work you can select "tones" -- you can work hard, you can take it easy, you can suck up to the boss or hang around with your co-workers, and each tone affects your work performance, your motives and your relationships. It's a significant improvement to the game.
So Tiny's going to build a garden armed with his new gardening skill. We buy a water sprinkler (under "appliances," not "plumbing") and note that it sprays water across a five-by-five (and I immediately think of Eliza Dushku) area, so we wall that area off with a tiiiiny wall, just so we have an easily-bypassed visual reference.
When someone in the house gets a significant skill in handiness, they'll be able to upgrade the sprinkler to turn on automatically. Yes, handiness can upgrade all sorts of items, from stereos to computers to stoves to teleporters.
Muffin and Biscuit are in high school, but they can take part-time jobs, and Biscuit signs on to work at the bookstore.
Biscuit also wants to take guitar lessons, so we click on the theater in downtown and send her on her way.
Tiny starts planting seeds. Seeds can also be fertilized with foods or fish caught from nearby bodies of water.
Biscuit just emerged from the theater, and I'll send her over to buy some skill-learning books from the bookstore next door.
There is a crapload of book-learnin' in this here game. You can learn skills, read recipes, learn new songs for the guitar (there is only one goddamned musical instrument in this game and it's the guitar, but more on that later), brush up on catching certain fish, get parenting tips or just books for bookworm Sims to devour at leisure.
Zooming out a bit from the bookstore here, and this is the city's central park. It has chess tables, picnic areas, grills, even mini-ponds for fishing.
In addition to the aforementioned ores, gems and bugs, you can also find seeds around town -- both for mundane flora and the more exotic and incredibly useful plant life as well.
Biscuit's taking some time out to fish -- fishing's about a billion times more useful in the game than it ever is in real life. Believe me when I say it's part of the necessary skill set to eternal life.
There's a few dozen recipes in the game, and this time, from fridge to face they all look exactly like they should. This, unsurprisingly, is macaroni and cheese. (And if you grow your own ingredients, the meal quality, as you'd expect, can take a big bounce.)
Aaaaand Moosie starts running around in the water sprinker like a mad woman. This struck me as odd until I realized the game's significant shortcomings.
One musical instrument: the guitar. No hot tubs. A foosball table, but that's about it for group entertainment. A ton of extant content from Sims 2 has gone missing in this version, and judging from the motions of the Sims when interacting with various props, most of the content on here has been recycled from Sims 2 to one degree or another. For all of the game's improvements, if you came from enjoying Sims 2, you're going to have at least one moment where you look for your old favorite content only to realize it's not there anymore and for no discernible good reason. And like Yahtzee, I can only conclude that it's to drive sales of downloadable online content via micropayment (which is really just taking the expansion-pack phenomenon and reducing it even further into absurdity). Which might be a fantastically shrewd idea from a business standpoint -- from a gameplay standpoint, it's infuriating.
So, yeah, Moosie's playing in the sprinker 'cause it's probably the best she can do.
How many times did you see this in previous Sims iterations? DAMMIT GIRL AH'M TAKIN MAH BAFF.
And Tiny's mood gets docked thanks to an "embarrassed" moodlet.
Let's play with create-a-style now that Muffin and Biscuit are tucked away in their identical beds -- I dunno, just throw a few insane textures and patterns on there, for the fun of it.
Much better.
Aaaaand we can't get through one night in Sunset Valley without the game slowing down and the ominous music playing. No, of course they don't have a burglar alarm, as they cost $900+, and I completely forgot about the burglar....
I do like her stealthy gait.
Neighborhood watch: YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG.
Mind you, I woke Tiny up as soon as I saw the burglar and he's not quite ready to call the cops yet.
And the first place she goes is...the bathroom. That's been, like, the hub of the house's drama tonight, hasn't it?
Aaaaaand she's stolen the toilet. I commend her dedication in unbolting it and freeing it from the water lines.
She strikes next and swipes....
...the halogen floor lamp every college student living off-campus is issued.
But hey! Tiny's hot-headed! When he sees her he'll....
...walk right by.
Yes, there's no option to even interact with the burglar. Tiny might as well be still asleep or on the moon for all the good it does him. Yes, my reaction is about the same as hers.
I'm left to conclude that this is some sort of elaborate passive-aggressive shunning designed to shame the burglar into surrender, given that look on his face. I have no idea what he thinks he's doing, but he thinks he's doing it really well. Seriously, you look up "shit was so cash" in the dictionary and you see that face.
Oh, thank God, the police. Save me from the smug alienation!
Were you afraid that Sims 3 would get rid of that elaborate dance where each Sim chicken-walks in some elaborate choreography to get to a point where they're face-to-face and stumble around like stupid-drunk co-eds trying to mosh? Oh, don't worry, if anything, it's worse than ever. "Okay, step just a bit to your left...no, no, your left. Okay, now I'll turn just a bit...no, you keep facing me, here, come back here, now I'm going to I'M OVER HERE YOU STUPID okay, that's better, now I'm arresting you."
Girlfight.
I...guess he...likes it?
Even laden with a commode and a floor lamp in her tesseract bag, the burglar managed to thoroughly trounce the beat cop....
...and walk away from the scene of the crime very slowly.
Yes, apparently unless you have the trait "brave," there's nothing you can do to interfere with or even interact with the burglar. Weak.
"I hate to rain on your parade, but she walked out the front door with your intimate plumbing and lighting apparatus. I'm sorry, I failed basic judo at the academy."
"Don't you have, like, tazers or guns or anything?"
"Sure, $5 from the EA online store." (Just kidding.)
Left unsaid: "I put up less of a fight than an indignant marmoset, but that was still physical contact, which you managed to avoid altogether in your own home, sparky."
"This toilet and I spent four glorious minutes together...."
The nose is my fault. Everything else...I just don't have an explanation for. He looks like he's reciting a monologue from Taxi Driver in the spirit of his burgled plumbing.
Yes, I must buy them a new toilet, or...you know, I don't even want to imagine. It's bad enough when the shower's broken and they start giving themselves sponge baths in the kitchen....
So let's at least trick out the toilet for them. At least it's not corduroy.
So yeah, inside of 24 hours they get the one critical item of the house stolen under their very elongated noses and Sunset Valley PD puts up a slap-fight for naught. You'll notice there was no welcome wagon, unless the raccoon-woman counts.
So I'm going to put this family aside for now. As far as what was originally intended to be "a quick reaction" goes...yeah, that kinda got outta control, didn't it?
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Sunset Valley's police force desperately needs funding.
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Why do people say this?
...because autonomous neighbors have been known to kick the asses of burglars.
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Oh man
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The one heartening bit of info is that the online community -- which was always resourceful -- has started to figure out the intentionally-obfuscated file systems to generate more custom content. I don't think it'll ever be as customizable as, say, Sims 2 -- most significant gameplay modifications seem subject to the Highlander rule, "there can be only one" -- but now there are custom skins, eyes, and some social interactions have been tweaked as well, so they've already gone farther than I thought.
Still, no strip poker table yet, so between that and the hot tub, the grad-school sim's going to have to wait.
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"I'm left to conclude that this is some sort of elaborate passive-aggressive shunning designed to shame the burglar into surrender, given that look on his face. I have no idea what he thinks he's doing, but he thinks he's doing it really well. Seriously, you look up "shit was so cash" in the dictionary and you see that face."
I literally laughed out loud at this XD The whole burglar thing was freaking hilarious! (I'm sure to play it out was a bit annoying though XD LOL!) Awesome that the cop got beat down LOL! Wowsers :P
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And we might see GDBM sooner rather than later....
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So while you control your Sims, the computer's trying to approximate all of the other Sims in the background.
...and the fact that apparently turning it off doesn't work so well really, really really turns me off. Come on, Maxis, what part of "IF IT AIN'T BROKE DON'T FIX IT" do y'all not understand?
The Style Creator and such look fairly awesome, but yeah, still not running out to buy it.
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It's not a bad game, but it's uncomfortably jarring for Sims 2 fans, and it's certainly not what it could've, should've been.
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Loved the story though, especially the burglar going straight for the toilet. She musta got tired of the outhouse. The police's enthusiasm for doing their job reflects mine on getting this game. If I get back into the Sims, it will be with Sims 2. If it ain't broke, stick with it.