The Sims 3 By Esmeralda on Jun 22, 2009 - Updated Oct 15, 2011

The Sims 3, the latest in the long-running ‘Sims' series of highly entertaining life simulator games developed by Maxis at EA Games, has just recently been released and those of us who, like myself, have been longterm diehard Sims 2 fanatics have gone out and bought it. So, what's the story with this new version?

Well, not all good, sadly. First impressions have not been great ones, both for myself and for many others on the Sims support forums that I belong to. The first major problem is with the way the new redesigned Sims look. The default Sims faces are very rounded and bloated-looking, with double chins, and there is no way to completely improve on that, unless you install third-party mods (more about that later). These faces have now become so notorious that the Sims support sites refer to them not-so-affectionately as ‘puddings'!

Another problem is poor AI, especially poor pathing. Sims just stand around staring vacantly rather than do anything, almost as if Free Will had been turned off, and when they finally do decide to do something, they still stand there for ages before they actually do it. This makes the game very slow and tiresome, particularly for those of who are used to the lively pace of The Sims 2.

The new game has also turned out to be bug-ridden and glitchy, with many people experiencing random crashes and other oddities. I've had a few crashes, and had a strange experience in which the Repo Man arrived at my family's house and went through the motions of confiscating all our furniture, but did not actually take anything. He left, doing his evil laugh, and my Sims were crying about having their belongings taken away, but everything was still there!

The biggest bug, one which is causing a lot of annoyance and which the game publishers, EA, are aware of and hopefully planning to fix, is the inability to turn off ‘Story Mode', a new ‘feature' which causes the Sims in your Town other than the active family that you're playing, to do random things of their own accord such as get married, have babies, move out of the Town, and so on. Many players don't want this feature, and there is a button with which to turn if off, but it doesn't work. EA has issued a workaround of adding the switch ‘-disablestoryprogression' to the properties of your Sims 3 executable file, but that only works in Windows and doesn't help those of us who play on a Mac.

Another problem is the conspicuous-by-its-absence disappearance of the Bodyshop applet that was included in The Sims 2, in which us creative types could create our own distinctive clothes, faces and genetic features. There is no facility to do any of that in this game. The nearest thing provided is a new in-game feature that gives the ability to choose different colours and patterns for clothing, furniture and building items on the fly, but this is severely limited.

And something that makes many of us feel cheated, is the introduction of ‘rabbit hole' community lots. This means that when you send your Simmies off to have a night out, you can no longer watch them enjoy themselves. Instead, they vanish into the building you send them to, and all you can see inside the building is an empty floor plan while a progress bar comes up on the screen to show you that they're dining or whatever you sent them to do. They then re-appear and go home. It was really pointless to include something like this, and it is very frustrating.

So is there anything good about this game? Yes, with all the usual EA releases of expansion packs and bug patches, it could still be good. In its vanilla form, I do recommend it, but with reservations because of the pudding faces, the bugs, the slowness, and the difficulty with creating custom content. However, it does have some good new features and I have begun to enjoy those once I accepted the many big stumbling blocks that it is so riddled with.

There is still fun to be had, and the best example of this is the addition of many and varied new personality traits, of which your Sim can have up to five at the same time. There are 65 traits from which you can choose, including Couch Potato, Brave, Daredevil, Evil, Insane, Kleptomaniac, Computer Whiz, Bookworm, Neurotic, Hopeless Romantic, Inappropriate, and many others. This does really add a fun dimension to the game and is an excellent feature.

For instance, I had a rather pompous ‘Inappropriate' Sim go on his computer, and I chose ‘Make an inappropriate forum post' from the computer's pie menu. He did so, and received an insulting reply a short time later! Sims with the ‘Evil' trait have ‘Steal candy from a baby' as an option, and I witnessed my ‘Evil' Sim of The Joker, of his own free will, bend down and snatch something from a toddler: when he stood up again, he was licking a lollipop and laughing cruelly. There are now loads of new actions you can choose from each Sim's pie menu dependent on their own individual traits, and these are definitely a lot of fun.

Now, for how to fix the problem of how awful the new Sims look. The very best Sims support site, ‘Mod The Sims', has been coming up with quick and extremely useful methods of how to improve upon this problem, and they have done a great job. The below three mods are must-haves:

1. 'Rick & Delphy's CAS slider hack' (http://www.modthesims.info/dow nload.php?t=344369). This gives you the ability to move the facial feature sliders and body shape sliders in ‘Create a Sim' way beyond their normal travel. You can now finally create more realistic-looking faces that aren't confined to being pudding-like. (You can also make some wildly UN-realistic Sims too, if you like! I like!)

2. 'Default Replacement Eyes for TS3' (http://www.modthesims.info/dow nload.php?t=348047). These replace the dull default eyes with brighter and more detailed ones that have much more realism.

3. ‘Custard Anti-Puddingface Texture Replacer' (http://www.modthesims.info/download.php?t=349158). This much-needed mod replaces the flat, doll-like default skin with much more realistic and lifelike default skin.

Note that all of these require a bit of extra work to install in your game – read the install instructions carefully there, as it is no longer a simple case of just sticking everything in your Sims 2 Downloads folder. It's still quick and easy when you know how, but you do need to read how to do it. I am eternally grateful to these creative individuals for making these mods and sharing them with us all.

Overall Rating:

3/5 for the game as it comes out of the box

4/5 for the game with the above mods installed

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The below screenshot is a comparison of how my Simself (a Sim made to look like oneself) appears in The Sims 2 (left) and in The Sims 3 (right). The Sims 2 version is a good resemblance that has been noted by many friends as quite uncanny (though it is younger-and-prettier-looking than the real me, unfortunately!, but the Sims 3 version, which I made before installing the above-mentioned mods, was the best I could accomplish in that game and looks nothing like me. So be warned! Install the mods or be doomed to looking like a pudding!