Sims 3 is the follow up to Sims 2, which you’re probably going to guess was the follow up to the first Sims game. Sorta. I mean, there’s a long list of Sim expansions- which is not to include the long list of Simcity games- so if you count any release as a new game then this is more like Sims 15. But we’ll just call it Sims 3 for brevity.

Random Fact: As of March 2009 (9 year after its initial release), the first Sims game has sold more than 100 million units world wide. Sims 3 sold 1.4 million copies in its first week.

And, to sum the Sim games up- you play as few as one person to as many as an entire family through their daily lives. They get up, you tell them to get dressed. You tell the Sims not to eat chocolate cake for breakfast but instead make themselves a healthy breakfast with eggs. You get them out the door for work. The Sims all have life goals and things they want to accomplish, and it’s your job to make that happen or not happen as you desire.

Now, a lot of people will go on about how no one can really know why people consider the Sim games fun. Other people will go on about how it offers them the chance to live out alternate fantasy lives. But, I think that’s all a load of crap. I understand why these games are fun for people. It’s the same reason that the Real Time Strategy games like Starcraft are popular- the micro-management of limited resources to accomplish goals.

Instead of gathering resources to build troops, marshal forces, and assualt the objective, you have to get the Sim out of bed, make them make breakfast, get to work, yet still achieve their life goals. I am not a fan of the Sim games. I don’t see the point in directing a Sim to do the dishes when I can get up and do that myself. It’s just not exciting or all that interesting. However, I guess that’s just me.

My wife, she loves these games. Well, she likes certain aspects of the games. My wife enjoys crafting a house using the architecture portions of the Sims game. She likes to create small families of young parents and baby children or several roommates just moving out for the first time. She likes to fill their houses full of things that express the character of the people she has created.. She likes to create these beautiful and perfect lives. Then she turns these lives, lives she has meticulously crafted to be as real and life-like as possible, into a nightmarish hell from which a brutal and nasty death is the only escape.

Deaths like being attacked by a swarm of bees and then being struck in the head by a meteor. Or being abducted by aliens, forced to bear their children only to die tragically in a swimming pool accident mere hours after the child’s birth. Or, lock a Sim who is afraid of ghosts in a haunted house.

Gibbering insanity in a Sim is a terrible thing to witness. Terrible.

Well, that’s what she did within hours of the installing previous Sim games. She’s been at Sims 3 for weeks now, and has yet to torture a Sim to death. Which says a lot about the game, in my Un-Humble Opinion©.

In broad terms, Sims 3 is a big improvement over the previous installments of the Sims series. The development team took a lot of time, and bothered to pick out relevant feedback from the fan base, and crafted a well-designed Sim game. From the opening of the world, the improvements in the building interface, and the character graphics and builder.

In previous games, the world of your Sim ended at the front lawn. You could not send your Sim wandering through the neighborhood to spy in windows. Everything stopped existing at the property line. Sure, people could come and visit you, but that was it. Sims 3 has opened up the world. You can send your Sim jogging through the whole town.

Watching someone jog through town. Yeah, that’s an exciting game right there- watching a character jog. Hold me back, don’t want to get too worked up over jogging! Woo! That’s almost as much fun as a loading screen.

Speaking of loading screens. In PC games one of the things you just have to accept is loading time. Because the graphics engines with PC’s can handle a lot of traffic the designers have really loaded the games up. And that takes time to load. Sims 2 took time to load. A lot of time. One of the longest loading portion was the building tool. For the record, the longest was going from your Sims house to another location, like to dine out. It could take as much as 15 minutes. But just to change your wallpaper could take 5-10 min each time. Thankfully, the Sims 3 team has greatly reduced the amount of loading time the whole game needs, and very specifically the building tools. Which doesn’t sound like much, but as you could sit for 5 minutes waiting for one portion of a game to load, I think it’s a significant improvement.

Of course, I could be wrong. Maybe you enjoy sitting and staring at a loading screen. I don’t, but maybe you do. Whatever.

And, the building tool itself have been greatly improved. From the ability to quickly add space and whole rooms, to placing furniture without having to go back and select it each time the tool has made it easier to create the worlds they want to play in. And I am always behind making it easier for a player to be involved in the root elements of a game.

The largest root element of the game are the Sims themselves. Without the characters this game would be empty houses. Here too the design team made a lot of improvements with the addition of personality traits and more life goals for the character. But there is one specific character trait I think needs to be pointed out- you can make your character Evil. Not Pol Pot sort of evil, but like the hand-wringing melodrama super-villain Evil.

Which is a lot more fun and involves a lot less genocide.

So, broadly speaking there have been a lot of improvements in this latest iteration of the Sims game.

But.

And, there are some buts here.

One of the things that I actually liked about the previous version of Sims was the ability to create and upload custom content. The Workshop in the previous game made it easy for people to load up things they had made for the game, from recolored objects to brand new things that were created from wireform and new skins.

In Sims 3 this ability to create new things for your favorite game has been removed.

In a 20th Century business model, EA Games has restricted the ability of the player community to add their own touch to the games they have purchased. Rather than pursue a 21st century business model that actively encourages community collaboration and contribution, EA Games has elected to put a strangle hold on one of the most popular games of all time. I think this is a serious step back, and rather typical of EA Games.

Also, in line with Maxis’ slap-shod production values, Sims 3 is buggy. From installation issues to ongoing game wrecking problems, Sims 3 is another notch in the belt of a low aiming QA process for Maxis. Maxis does claim that all glitches are due to the end user downloading and installing an illegal copy via the bit torrents. I think that is a load of crap.

Personally, I really hate it when a studio releases a bugged-out game. I have invested not only my money but my time in this game, and I expect a finished product. Not the last stages of a beta test. And, I especially do not like when a company fobs their responsibility off with claims of illegal downloads.

Take responsibility for your game, Maxis.

In the end, there are a lot of production side problems with Sims 3 from both the publisher EA Games and the studio Maxis. Are they enough to kill the game sales? Not among the hard-core or occasional fans, no. Over all it offers a lot of improvements from the previous version of the game- reduced load times, improved tools and character interaction, and opening the world to allow travel from one game area to another.

If you liked Sims 2, you probably already own Sims 3.