Category: Reviews

Endearing semi-bugs(?) aside, my recent Sims playing has been comparatively uneventful. I played a family through several generations; then, on advice to interact more with the non-active households to watch how those evolve, I set up a larger neighborhood, moved in every family I’d ever created, and spent a lot of time having my active Sims visit the ones that were running by themselves.

The result seemed to be that all the Sim families I wasn’t actively playing immediately got a new baby — presumably by adoption, since none of them acquired new romantic partners or spent any time pregnant as far as I can tell — but that otherwise they seemed rather static. The evil, mean-spirited Lars and humorless, snobbish Lisa still had fights, but still continued to live together until their family left the neighborhood entirely for no reason I could see. They didn’t seem to make changes to their houses, either. Maybe they can’t buy things when I’m not there to buy them new stuff. Or maybe it was just that they weren’t very proactive about job-finding on their own, so didn’t have the cash to make changes.*

Anyway. I’ve spent far more time playing with this than I originally intended to do, and I am still finding lots of neat and unexpected interactions; the amount of detail and care that has gone into the whole game is phenomenal. Many short-term interactions in it turn out to make good anecdotes, too — sometimes because they run into odd corners of the simulation, but not always.

I continue to think that it doesn’t tend to produce good long-term story, because there’s no arc structure. In this respect, it’s being true to what it is trying to simulate: my life also yields the odd anecdote but overall lacks narrative structure.

Continue reading “Sims 3 in review”

Experiment the second (and a considerably longer play this time than Doofus vs. Delores). To introduce the cast:

Harry. A Good, Frugal, Neat Bookworm whose life goal was to become a secret agent.
Lisa. A snobbish woman with no sense of humor whose life goal was to have a net household worth of more than 100,000 Simoleans.
Lars. An evil, mean-spirited character with a good sense of humor whose life goal was to become emperor of evil.

These were all siblings, and I figured that the good/evil dichotomy between Lars and Harry, and the funny/unfunny between Lars and Lisa, would produce plenty of conflict (always the basis for a good plot, I figured). And indeed they did fight a lot. Lars enjoyed picking on Lisa, but also found her so boring that they didn’t interact for long. Lars and Harry enjoyed one another’s company at first, but soon Lars’ evil nature made it impossible for them to get along. Rather pathetically, for a while Lars had a goal of becoming friends again with Harry, but I eventually cancelled this when it became clear that it was simply impossible.

Because they were all created at around the same time, they all died at around the same time too. Lars went first, then Lisa. Unfortunately, Lisa happened to die while Harry was cooking. The pan was forgotten on the stove while Harry watched Lisa being Reaped. The inevitable fire ensued. The Reaper noticed the fire but said he’d be back later because he didn’t feel like doing any more reaping on an empty stomach. And come back he did: the fire got extinguished, but Harry died anyway later the same evening. He was the only one not to get his life’s wish fulfilled, incidentally — possibly because he’d spent so much of his neat-freak life making beds and cleaning toilets.

Continue reading “More Sims 3 experiments”