The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

Natalie, way back in the day, got me into The Sims. She was a big fan of fucking around with the original, and had all the expansions and so on, and in the course of dating her, I learned what all the fuss was about. I was never super into it, perse, but as soon as I got past what I thought everyone did with it (ridiculous murder of people) and figured out what people who enjoyed the game did with it (working to make characters and build stories around them in the dollhouse framework of the game) I started to dig it. I did so so much that I bought The Sims 2 the day it came out, and had a lot of fun with it. I never dug into all the expansions and shit, but I’ve played Sims products off and on, and I always tend to have a good time.

That’s the background to me playing The Sims 3, if you didn’t understand. Again, they’re not huge games I play forever, but I enjoy fiddling with them. Upon watching this Quick Look and learning that the console versions were full-featured this time around, I figured I might as well Gamefly it up and give it a shot.

I really must say, I was pretty impressed with The Sims 3 on 360. It really was the full-featured game. You had a full house-builder, all the menus and options of the full game, and so on. You could even design your own clothes and patterns inside the game, and if you had EA’s Project Ten Dollar code, could connect to their online database of more stuff to download and customize, which is not something you see on a console game very often. It even has pretty good support for controlling multiple Sims. From what I understand of previous console versions (I never played those), you could only really have one Sim in those. This game actively tells you to make a big family, which is certainly an interesting touch.

I had a good time, making my lesbian couple (Why do I always make lesbians, I wonder? My theory is because I want a household with romance, but I also want to personally associate myself with all my Sims, even though part of the game is telling stories about people who aren’t you. I guess I ignore that part.) and their son, and setting them out on their way. The little Perks system and Lifetime Goals actually add a lot to the game. It adds a more game-oriented system to what you’re doing than in previous games. Sims 2 had a “want” system where you had this list of constantly changing wants that you could succeed in to make your Sim happy, but these are much more far-reaching. The Sim will tell you their wants, and you can decide whether you slot them into the four “Wish” slots each Sim has. Complete a Wish, and that Sim gains Lifetime Happiness, and what wishes the Sim has come from the various personality Perks you pick when building the Sim. (It also affects their AI, of course.) It’s a lot closer to making an RPG character, actually, but not in a way that’s intimidating. Everyone knows what the “Flirty” perk is going to do, where they might not know what a skill in an RPG does. You can try to create a Sim that is perfectly suited for attaining their goals, or pick a weird variety of perks and see what happens. It all depends on your approach and what you want out of the game. Personally, I always just make my Sims grind lots and lots of skill points. I’m just wired that way as a gamer. It also just kind of shows off what I could accomplish if I wasn’t spending time with stuff like The Sims 3.

In any case, it’s obvious, no matter how impressively complete the game is, that this game is made for a mouse. Building a house is painful using a stick, as the interface just isn’t optimized for it. I had real trouble adding an extra bedroom onto the house I bought because it was just wanting me to use finer control than the 360 stick could handle. I found some workarounds eventually, but it took me way, way longer than it should have. If you’re one of the people who really likes building a dream house, this version may make you really frustrated. Similarly, there are a lot of load times in this game. I had it installed to the Hard Drive, but there were still serious loads while you jumped around town to get shopping and such done. One of the PC version’s goals, as I understand it, was to have a seamless world between house and town and such without load times at all. The console versions really don’t make that happen. It’s not the biggest deal in the world, but when you accidentally pick the wrong menu option and have to go through two load screens to get back to where you were, it is sometimes frustrating.

In the end, I enjoyed fiddling with it, but I’m glad that’s all I did. Frankly, I got more enjoyment out of the one dollar Sims 3: Ambitions I bought on iOS. (Okay, that was an on-sale dollar, but come on, everything on iOS is on sale for a dollar fairly often.) It has most of the features of this full version (They split some features among three different versions for some reason, but as long as you do some research about what features each version has or doesn’t, it’s no problem) and has a much better interface. You can build in the iOS version much easier than in this one, and it still gave me more than enough of that Sims experience to sate my own personal craving for it. (Note that I’m someone who played a Sims GBA game to completion. This is much more a Sims experience than that weird game.) Sure, you don’t have quite the range of clothing and such in it, but it’s still enough for you to do some nice customizing. At the same time, if you’re a hardcore Sims fan, and do like having every option in the world, you’d be better suited just getting the PC version, I’d think. I suppose there might be people out there who liked the original Sims, but don’t have a good enough computer to run Sims 3, and I suppose the console version would be right up their alley. It’s not a bad product, but there are better versions of it out there.