The Sims 3

Introduction

            Continuing on from last week’s review of the recently released game, Murdered: Soul Suspect, I’ve decided to look at the prequels of the games from E3 that are scheduled to release at the end of the year. The game under the microscope this week is The Sims 3.

            The Sims 3 is a strategic life simulation game developed by EA Maxis and published by EA, released on June the 2nd 2009. Throughout this half a decade, numerous amounts of expansion packs have been released to add on content to the game and increase its playability, such as increasing the amount of careers available and the number of things a Sim can do. The game has sold over 10 million copies since its release, making it the best-selling PC game of all time. The sequel, The Sims 4, is scheduled to release on the 2nd of September.

Gameplay

            What makes The Sims 3 extremely successful and loved by many is its extremely complex levels of gameplay, and offers the player a multitude of options to what he/she can do with his/her Sim, an imaginary human species who speaks a different (also imaginary) language from Humans, just like its predecessors, The Sims and The Sims 2.

 

*insert Macklemore lyric*

            Pre-made Sims exists across all worlds (or neighborhoods) and all have pre-decided occupations and traits as set by the developers of the game. Players can decide to take control of a family, or create their own unique Sim in Create-A-Sim.

            Create-A-Sim allows you to have full control over what you want your character to look like, and what traits and lifetime wish (a game mechanic basically meaning what the Sim wishes to achieve in their future) you would like your Sim to have. Blonde? Redhead? Short? Tall? Hot-headed? Plucked eyebrows? Killer facial hair? The choice is yours.

He looks like a John Smith

            After creating a Sim, you can choose to play their created character in all the available worlds. As soon as this is chosen, you have to choose the housing in which you want your Sim to reside in. The choices would be quite limited in this area, but because it is just the start of the game, this wouldn’t really matter as long as your Sim has a roof over his/her head and a bed to sleep in.

You WON'T live here at the start, this is just some false advertising

            Yet again, a variety of options is available for you to choose for your Sim to do. Find a job? Buy some books? Go to the park? Sign up for skill classes? Burn down the kitchen? Get married in a day? The choice is yours once again.

Two game mechanics worth mentioning is the skills and needs of the Sims. Skills refer to things your Sim can learn and improve on, resulting in better performance or understanding depending on whether or not certain aspects of your Sim’s life would require it. The Logic skill, for example, aids careers requiring it such as when your Sim is a detective or another career which requires Logic.

This game requires you to understand pictures

Needs of the Sim refers to the things they need over the course of a day. Just like human beings (surprise, surprise), they need to use the toilet, eat, shower, sleep, and having fun, yes having fun is a need don’t ask me why. It is the job of the player to make sure to keep these meters at decent levels so your Sim will not piss on the floor, stink, sleep on the floor, die of hunger, or of stress. Yep, a life simulator would have you playing as though you are going through your own life, but you probably forgot to shower, pee, sleep and eat while playing this but at least you would be having fun (I hope).  

bladder = pee, energy = sleep

What makes this game “Sim”-ply awesome

Learnability

            If you’re playing The Sims 3 for the first time, you will notice how easy the game is to pick up and just start playing. Unsure of what to do next? Yeah, that question usually NEVER comes up when you’re playing this game. It grabs your attention by the neck, and soon you’ll be absorbed into the game doing what you think is best for your Sim, and doing tasks that would otherwise seem entirely boring and mundane in the real world, such as eating morning cereal.

            Disclaimer: if you do not like simulations I cannot confirm you would feel the same as what I have written above, just saying.

Extreme amounts of variety

            I have praised a game once or twice about some amounts of variety, but honestly The Sims 3 takes the cake with its unprecedented amounts of options and things to do for the player’s Sim, especially when the base game is coupled with most of the expansions. The base game itself still does offer a good amount of options and is extremely fun to play too, of course, but most games are always more fun with more expansions.

Ready to burn 300+ dollars?!?!

            This variety I speak of refers to things like shopping for new items to put in your Sim’s house, catching a movie, playing chess in a park, eat from your neighbor’s fridge, order pizza, and WooHoo of course. The list goes on and on.

Extreme amounts of depth

            Every Sim in the game is like a multi-layered onion, with different skills and traits all lending to different reactions and thoughts depending on what the skills and traits are. With day and night cycles available in all worlds, each world comes alive during either cycle, with some having a more happening daytime, while other worlds have a more happening nightlife, both of which contain a wide amount of activities the player can have their Sim participate in. 

Sims version of "bitch i'm fabulous"

With all these different elements all coming together and delivered as one whole game, it results in an extreme amount of depth and detail that any player can and will notice as they play the game and become fully immersed in it.

Tons of character (Sim) customization options

            Want to create yourself? Want to create your friends? Want to create your enemies? This should help. Basically, to sum it all up, people who play fantasy RPGs or any RPGs for that matter, would DREAM of this amount of customization. 

I almost died the first time I created a Sim

What makes this game “Sim”-ply bad

Repetitive over a long time

            What I mean by repetitive over time is not to say that the game is not replayable by any means. Repetitiveness and replayability are two completely different things. 

The game is repetitive in that as you play one Sim more and more, and progress in things such as jobs and juggling multiple relationships, it starts to get repetitive day by day, in game. It actually starts to get as boring and mundane as real-life, waking up > going to work > do stuff with limited time > sleep. This cycle actually repeats just like real-life, and unless the player does something different with the Sim’s life, all the player will do is triple fast-forward the game 80% of the time only until the “do stuff with limited time” part, this can be both fun and repetitive, but as time goes on, fun usually gets replaced by droll or boring and that is a real problem this game has, it simulates life SO WELL it actually gets boring, in essence. I seriously cannot imagine doing that cycle controlling 5 or more Sims, that is pure torture. (Take it with a grain of salt and think of it as me complimenting the game in a bad way)

So.... interes-- zzz

Oh, and about the replayability aspect, this game is very replayable, you can always make different decisions when you start all over and it results in differing gameplay, making it a new and fun experience, depending on what you do with your Sim of course.

Glitches and Bugs in Newer Expansions

            There’s a reason why they say “check your work before submitting” because if you don’t you may be in for a bad experience. Glitches and bugs are similar to that (methinks), except the player suffers instead. This game has several game-breaking glitches and bugs that would require hard resets of the game just to get it going again.

I laughed a little too hard while including this one

            Just to list one example, there is a bug in Sims 3: Showtime where if your Sim wins a SimFest, an equivalent of some stage performance that showcases Sim’s talents with a winner at the end, the Sim would just stand still on the stage and because the stage is apparently taken as a separate instance of the ground, sometimes he/she would just stand in the middle with the host of the SimFest doing absolutely nothing. A hard reset of the game would be needed to clear this all up.

            Bugs and glitches like these should be cleared up immediately but apparently EA does not take priority in creating these fixes, resulting in players having to hard reset their game half the time due to these bugs, making general gameplay an absolute nightmare with problems that shouldn’t exist in the first place, and if it did, it should be fixed immediately.

I laughed less at this one

Increasing amounts of lag over time

            I am not really sure if this is the same for people who own just the base game, but for those who own the base game + most expansions and attempt to play about an hour of the game, I am sure that at the end of it, they will experience extreme amounts of frame drops and frame-by-frame gameplay, rendering the game completely impossible to play, even after quitting and loading the save file of that world.

            Without going too technical, this is the result of very bad programming on the part of EA, creating extra vehicles for no particular reason during the course of the player’s game time, and not deleting them from the world, creating a pileup of extra things the game has to detail, even though the player does not even see this, resulting in frame drops over time, this can be solved by downloading 3rd party software that removes these extra objects, but then that begs the question: why should I download something that helps to remove these extra objects, shouldn’t this be done/solved by the developers of the game? Yeah, EA.

            Other things such as “elevators in high-rise buildings only fitting one person” also add on to this pileup resulting in Sims completely stuck in their actions due to these sometimes-glitching elevators.

INTRODUCING A LIFT THAT FITS... 2 PEOPLE!!!

             All in all, poor optimization results in this horrible amount of lag in the game, making the game unplayable and no one likes to play a game that moves frame-by-frame, no one.

MOI HONEST RATING

Gameplay: 4/10 – Now I know I said how good the gameplay is with the variety of things a Sim can do in a world, but I can’t discount how horrendously laggy the game gets over time, and no matter how good your gameplay is, no one can experience it well if your frame rate (basically the number of frames a game runs at per second, the higher the better) is a single digit. This also takes into account the repetitiveness of the game.

Simulation: 8/10 – The story rating is replaced by Simulation, as a story is non-existent in The Sims franchise, with the player in charge of writing their story. In essence, this means how well the game emulates and pulls off what it is trying to achieve. In this case, the game aims to create a life simulation game and it manages to pull it off pretty well, with its variety of real-life-like options such as going jogging, watching TV and sleeping. WHAT I CAN’T DISCOUNT IS HOW IT’S TRYING TO SELL ITS IDEA OF MARRIAGE IN A DAY.

The kid makes this look like promotional art for a horror game

Graphics: 9.5/10 – The graphics of the game is an absolute feat for its year of release. I would say the graphics was top notch with what was available in 2009, and is still decently good even in 2014.
 

Impressive for its time

Sound: 9/10 – The sound is once again, pretty good for the year of its release, suitable sounds for every occasion your Sim goes through + Sim-translated songs on the stereo makes this component as good as the graphics of the game.

Depth: 10/10 – Without a doubt in my mind.

Learnability: 8/10 – Might be hard to those with short attention spans and those who particularly dislike simulation games and is somehow forced by friends to learn. Yeah, those situations.

There must be something you wanna tell this woman

Replayability: 9/10 – Wanna make a new Sim with new traits in a new world? Take 15 minutes and you SHOULD be done and ready to rumble.

Overall: 8/10 – A game which has everything going for it except gameplay. With severely lackluster gameplay due to poor optimization and repetitiveness, the game suffers because of this. Honestly, if a fix came in to solve that lag over time issue, I think this game would be something I’d don’t mind playing everyday. But sadly, I doubt this fix would come soon, if not, at all.

Summary

            The Sims 3 is definitely a solid game of its time, flawed today by the incrementing lag but otherwise still a decent game overall and is still loved by many in the community. Now this would be the time I would suggest buying the game but I would much rather you wait for the release of Sims 4 on the 2nd of September!

            A big thank you to all you readers who have continually supported me over the course of these reviews and have given me feedback on the previous reviews, I will definitely try my best to write as best as I can.

            Drop a comment below if you want me to review a game you have been playing, I’d definitely try and see if I can make a review out of it. This idea came to me because this game was something that a few people wanted me to do, so I did, and I had fun writing a review on it, so if you have any game, any game at all, you want me to review, go ahead and drop a comment!

            As always, have a great weekend and see you next week in the next review!

#SIMS4HYPE