23 October 2011

The Sims 3: Spiny McSpleen's Official Review Post

Posted Saturday, 20 June 2009

I'll say right now -- I haven't been looking forward to making this review, but as I haven't made an entry in the better part of a month, I thought I'd get it out of the way.
First, my own experience with the game.
I got it on the release date and installed it almost immediately. It was here I discovered the game to crash after a very short time (the longest time between startup and crash was 35 seconds). I defragmented, I updated my video driver, and (at a great personal loss) I uninstalled The Sims 2 -- not without backing up everything, of course.
Though defragmenting and uninstalling The Sims 2 was probably beneficial for my computer as a whole, I think that it was the driver update that stopped the crashing. In fact, I suspect that all of my problems with The Sims 2 crashing could probably be attributed to out-of-date video software, also. So, two birds with one stone (I intend to re-install The Sims 2). However, regardless of my efforts, I still have an unsupported video chipset, the performance of which is even more mediocre than I had anticipated. A view of texture resolution and Sim detail coming from my computer borders on the laughable.
Before we delve into the innermost workings of the game, let me address a few of the pre-release concerns that people may still have.

Above all else: SecuROM. Fortunately, thanks to the person who started the class-action lawsuit against EA for their inclusion of SecuROM in the game, Spore, SecuROM has been conveniently left out of The Sims 3, as EA opted to use a disc-based rights-management programme instead.
Next, in-game advertisements. I don't know if that was some sort of distasteful April Fool's Day joke, but that rumour spread like wildfire and has been proven to be completely untrue. Whether the adverts were never there in the first place or if EA decided to drop the idea for whatever reason, there simply are no real-world advertisers setting up shop in The Sims 3.

Now... the positives about The Sims 3. Don't get me wrong -- there are several significant improvements in gameplay and customisation, relative to The Sims 2.
First and foremost, Create-a-Style Mode. By far, the best addition to the series. Create-a-Style Mode allows you to customise the appearance of 95% of the game's furnishing objects, building materials, and clothing designs. In the past, if one wished to decorate one's Sim's house with a single type of wood, one would probably need to download many different object editing tools and edit all of the objects' textures to become a single type of wood. With The Sims 3, it's just a matter of clicking on a few things. Certainly, it can get rather micromanaging at times, but Sims Division have included a number of preset object styles with every object and material, in case you don't feel like editing something. Also, you have the option of saving anything you do edit as a preset so you don't have to keep editing the same objects over and over again.
Unfortunately, there are a few things that cannot be re-textured or re-coloured, such as books on a bookshelf, leaves on a plant, and several decorative items.
Also notable is Create-a-Sim Mode. Sims' body-mass can be edited more freely with the usage of The Urbz-esque sliders. The more to the right the slider is, the fatter the Sim becomes. Sims' muscle-tone can also be edited in this way.
Several people noted that The Sims 3 did not have a pre-release Sim editor as with The Sims 2 and The Sims. This is mostly because Create-a-Sim Mode, used in tandem with Create-a-Style Mode does everything that Body Shop and SimShow could do, but within the game itself. All of the Create-a-Style textures and colours afforded to furnishings and building materials are also available to Sims' clothing and accessories.
I do rather fancy the contiguous neighbourhood -- being able to click on things away from my Sim's house, then having him go to that location and do things there. I like being able to have my Sim collect things that he finds in the neighbourhood. There are gemstones and rocks for the science-types, rare seeds for the gardeners, bugs for the bug-collectors, and fish for the avid fishermen. Fish, of course, can only be found by fishing in bodies of water, but everything else is scattered throughout the neighbourhood.

Now that we've discussed the positives, we shall proceed to the negatives. And there are a fair few.
First, the most glaringly obvious of the whole lot -- community lots. Remember being able to zone a community lot in The Sims 2 and then being able to go there and set items for sale? Y'know, like groceries, clothing, and videogames?
Not possible anymore. The Sims 3 makes use of buildings known among the community as "rabbit-holes" to let Sims purchase things. The player is not allowed to see inside the building, much less build one. There are no possibilities for building custom retail establishments on community lots. Certainly, you can build walls, floors, and a roof on a community lot, but the custom building can only be furnished with objects that are available to residences. No more freezer, produce display, magazine rack, or clothes rail... no more cash registers. If you played The Sims 2 for the building of community lots, The Sims 3 will prove very disappointing.
Despite the grand level of clothing customisation in Create-a-Sim Mode, the actual Sim face editor in The Sims 3 is very much more limited than that of its predecessor. You can't make the same major changes to a Sims 3 face than you could in The Sims 2. Personally, I liked being able to shift all of a Sim's facial features up with the "Face Height" slider in The Sims 2 -- however, the same option in The Sims 3 will shift each feature up at a different rate -- eyes go up faster than the mouth, for example.
Also in Create-a-Sim Mode, there are far too few hairstyles available. In this game, there are only nine or so styles to choose from, where its predecessor began its life in 2004 with fifteen.
Another great disappointment was the lack of a piano. The pianoforte has been a staple of The Sims series -- along with the diving board, armoire, and miniature train set. None of those objects made the final cut in The Sims 3, either. But, what especially stung me, as an admirer of classical music is that, not only is the piano absent from the game, but that is seems to have been, for all intents and purposes, replaced by an acoustic guitar. The guitar is a commoner's instrument, made cliché by years of misuse by pop singers. I know that a guitar is more portable than a pianoforte, and The Sims 3 being about portability of objects, given that the entire neighbourhood has now been opened to street musicians and painters, but why could the piano not have been an instrument for the home whilst the guitar was the instrument for the road? It's illogical. Unless they think they're trying to market to a demographic somewhere in the lower-middle.
Another annoying thing is how Sims enter cars. They make no endeavours at all to open the car door and get in. They just disappear from the sidewalk and re-appear in the car.
Also in the realms of annoyance, if one pays close attention to Sims' computer screens, one can see that the activities being carried out are not synched to the animations of the Sim using it. Windows will open and close on their own, typing text will animate onscreen when a Sim doesn't even have their hands on the keyboard.
Someone from Sims Division said in an interview months before the game was set to release that "you can play Sims 3 on your grandma's computer". The implication was that this meant they were striving to make the game compatible with as many operating systems as possible. Now that the game has been released and I, with my, admittedly, pathetic laptop, have played it, I can safely say that, so long as your grandma has a thousand-quid, top-of-the-line desktop computer, yes -- you can play it on your grandma's computer. The Sims 3 is more computationally-demanding than The Sims 2 was -- obviously, no attempt was made to find ways to make it compatible with any systems other than those with Windows XP or Vista. Mac owners have reported so many bugs that the game becomes unplayable. And me? It seems that I fall under the 77.4% of the gaming community who need to replace my video card if I ever hope to play the game up to a fraction of how it was intended. Oh, wait... I can't do that because my computer is a laptop! My video chipset is hardwired into the motherboard -- I can't replace my video card without replacing my entire computer!
So, here's the overall point. I have a great deal of difficulty in believing that Sims Division worked for five years and needed to have the release date pushed back four months in order to finish this game. So many things have been either overlooked or omitted that it's almost obscene to think that this is the successor to The Sims 2.

Overall, I give the game 3/10. The creativity is there, but the means of carrying it out is sketchy at best.

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