So I have a confession to make, I’m a fan of the popular series of games known as The Sims.  You have heard of it correct?  (I’m being sarcastic in case it does not translate well)  It probably all started really with Sim City 2000.   I can’t remember how I got it, but someone got it for me to play on my family’s first computer way back when it first came out.  It was such a great game back then.  It seems simple now compared to the games they have out today, but back then it was one of the most complex games I had ever seen.  All the different plates one had to keep in the air in order to build a successful city are what made the game challenging, but of course the real fun in the game was building a city up and then knocking it down through natural (or unnatural) disasters.

Regardless, I was already a “Sim” fan and knew that when the original Sims came out I had to try it.  Instantly I was hooked.  Soon I was creating custom homes for my Sims and downloading all the interesting custom community created content I could get my hands on.  It was a very addicting game not only for me, but for many others.  Soon expansion packs followed the original and added more content and features.  I never collected all of the expansions for either the original game or the sequel, but I did have a lot of them.  I would often find ways in which to “kill” my sims so that I could have their homes haunted, much like the destruction of cities in Sim City 2000 this was a favorite practice among Sims fans.

That brings us to the third incarnation in this series: The Sims 3.  I haven’t played a whole lot of it yet, but thus far have enjoyed it.  There are a few things that irk me or seem missing when you compare 2 to 3, but all in all it’s still an enjoyable game that will only get better as EA starts to crank out the expansion packs.  Here are some of my initial thoughts about the game:

• Create a Sim:  This is one of the most greatly improved parts of the game.  It lets you get very detailed with skin tones, eye and hair colors, weight, and muscle tone.  In other Sim games for build you kind of just had skinny, average, and fat.  Then for skin tones you had a set of pre determined tones to choose from (although more could be downloaded from the web).  In Sims 3 you get to play with all these different settings via slide controls and can get very custom looking Sims with it.  I wish however you could play with the height of the Sims as well.  It does not seem like that would be a very big thing to add.  Also the selection of clothing and hair styles is a bit limited as EA wants you to spend your real money on in game content.  I think I’ll pass and wait for the free community content to get rolling.
• Open Neighborhood:  This is probably the greatest improvement in Sims 3.  In previous incarnations of the game when you wanted to leave your lot and go to another one you had to endure a loading screen and wait until your destination lot was loaded up.  Not so in this version.  In The Sims 3 you can simply walk where ever you want in your neighborhood and go out and interact with the other sims that live there.  Also in previous versions of the game when you left your lot it was saved in the current state it was in which you left.  So if you took your Sim to the store at 2:00 PM game time and spent two hours of game time at the store it would still be 2:00 PM game time when you returned to your lot.  In the Sims 3 if you leave your lot at 2:00 PM and spend two hours away from your lot it will be 4:00 PM game time when you return.
• Only four families or households per neighborhood:  In previous versions you could put many different households into each neighborhood, pretty much as many households as you had available lots for them to occupy.  In The Sims 3 you are limited to four different families or households per neighborhood.  However you can have as many neighborhoods as you want.  To me this is not a huge deal because of the way the game is played now.  In the previous two versions if you select a family or household play as for a while and then leave them to go play with a different family or household time basically stops for the one you are not playing with while you’re playing the other.  In The Sims 3 if you open up one family or household, time starts up again for the whole neighborhood including your other families or households you created in that neighborhood.  So they will continue to advance through the game without you.  I do not really want them to advance to much without me, so I will probably only play maybe one or two households per neighborhood.  What’s nice is that EA filled each neighborhood up with many more computer generated sims for your sims to interact with.  In previous versions they would only give you a handful to start out with and it was sort of up to you to fill up the neighborhood.
• Vampires?:  In The Sims 2 (I believe it was added in the Nightlife expansion) you could be bitten by a vampire and become a creature of the night.  However that seems to be missing from this version of The Sims.  I know a lot of the features from the expansions of The Sims 2 are missing from 3, but that seemed like a little one they could have kept in the game since they kept a few of the other smaller expansion pack features.  I know I enjoyed that feature and I’m pretty sure a lot of other people enjoyed it as well.  Hopefully they’ll bring that back in a future expansion.
• Public Buildings:  In The Sims 2 (again starting with the Nightlife expansion if I remember right) you could go INTO public buildings and interact with other sims or objects.  In The Sims 3 however the camera simply waits outside while your sim(s) go into the building and do whatever it is they have to do.  You still can buy things at these buildings, but instead of browsing around the store you get a menu with a list of things you can buy and how much each one will cost.  Not exactly a deal breaker, and again this is something they will probably add in a future expansion pack.  It would have been nice though to see this feature turned on from the get go.
• Graphics:  The graphics in this version are good, but they are not the step up in graphics The Sims 2 were compared to The Sims.  This version simply looks like a cleaned up version of The Sims 2, but that’s not a huge deal in my opinion.  I thought the graphics for The Sims 2 were fine and work well for this game.  It was time to reboot and start a new game anyhow as you can only add so many expansion packs before the game really starts to feel bloated and weighted down too much.  So the smaller jump in graphics quality is not a big deal in my humble opinion.

So I suppose that’s about it.  Some reviews I read out on the internet about the game mentioned that they had a difficult time running the game on their older hardware, but I did not experience that.  That’s probably because I ran the game on my Core 2 Quad with four gigs of ram and one gig of video ram.  It ran like a dream on high everything.  That of course doesn’t mean it should necessarily run like a dream for everyone, but if you’re having trouble try turning the video quality and what not down a little bit.

Oh and there were also some reports of the Securerom DRM making another appearance in this game much like it did in Spore, however I did not notice it at all.   I believe that EA only put the Securerom DRM in the downloadable version of the game and I went and purchased the DVD version of the game.  Can anyone confirm that?  I’d say purchase the DVD version at your local store, but if you’re set on getting a downloadable version I would try to wait it out until EA releases the game on Steam since Spore on Steam used Steam’s DRM rather than Securerom.