Sims 3 was released on Tuesday, June 2, 2009. In store.

For those of us who are game nuts who follow release dates like the Holy Grail, this was something pretty significant. In fact, I almost didn’t go to the store yesterday to look for it because past experience has always been that a Sims release date on Tuesday was actually the shipping date… and a smart person didn’t look for the actual box in the store until Wednesday.

I figured I didn’t have much to lose. If it wasn’t on the shelf, I could always opt to buy the download online when I got home. But saving myself the three-four hours of download (maybe even more, from what the forums were saying) would be nice. Plus, me being me, the Sims series is one I have ALL the boxes/manuals for. More often than not, I end up having to reinstall it on a new PC – be it an upgrade of my old or just a crashed drive… somewhere or another.

So it was a very pleasant surprise to walk into Best Buy and see a whole box of Sims3 on display not even ten feet from the door. I walked over, picked it up dubiously, not trusting that it was the actual game. But lo and behold… it was. In fact, they had a whole shelf full of both regular and special editions.

That began a series of pleasant surprises with the Sims3.

Game Play

I’ve read where some folks have run across the normal issues – buggy installation. Rough graphics. Freezes. All the sorts of things that happen with a brand new game that requires a good bit more computer juice to run than the game before. My PC is not the top of the line (neither is it that bad), but it took to running Sims 3 smoothly. I had to adjust some of the pixel smoothers and video options out of the box to clean up the in-game graphics. But even with a family of six in a good sized house, the game runs better than Sims 2 did (could be because my Sims 2 had millions items of downloaded content, too!).

It took a bit of time to get used to the controls in Sim creation. But once I figured it out, I could roll with it. The one part that I’m a bit lost on is switching between editing your town and actually choosing a family to play. Guess I just need to fiddle with it a bit more.

Character Creation

The first thing you’re going to hear about when it comes to Sims 3 is the new character trait system. I like it. I think it really gives a lot of personal customization to a Sim. Younger Sims can only have a certain number/kind of traits, which increases as they grow up. Adult Sims can choose 5 traits to identify their personality – so I can make that Sim who is Insane, Hopeless Romantic, Family Oriented, Charismatic, and Computer Wiz (Kip). This trait combination also gives you options regarding that Sim’s overall life aspiration (Become a Creature-Robot Crossbreeder).

If you find out later you don’t like how your Sim turned out, earning life points will allow you to have a Mid Life Crisis, where you can choose different traits. Pretty cool!

I was really pleased to see the amount of options for Sim creation straight out of the box. There were many skintones (on a slider that allows you to adjust for the darkness/lightness), hair styles (for the first time, they included the option of white hair for all ages to help me build my Lunar colony!), clothes styles, and a great accessory selection that was separate from your outfits.

The color picker can change the color of a Sim's clothes on the fly.

It is easy to choose a type of clothing that you like and change the colors/patterns to fit your style. Just apply a pattern and use a color wheel and you’ve got thousands of choices for each shirt, pants, shoes, etc. It’s really very ingenious! Gone are the days that players have to create ten different shirts just to have it in all the colors people would enjoy!

I also like the little details that go into Sims creation – the ability to choose their favorite food, music and color. And how you can even choose the type and pitch of their voice. Really gives variety in the Simhouse.

Facial features also work on a slider, similar to the Sims 2. This part of creation took a bit longer for me to get used to navigating through, but after my 5^th-6^th Sim attempt, I was moving pretty quickly. My one complaint about Sim creation… there is just something about the adult men’s faces that I can’t get right. I’m not sure if it’s something to do with the way the cheek bones look to me… or their mouths… but my poor guy Sims all look a little haunted around the eyes. Like they’re about to run screaming out of the room, “You let HER create me? What were you thinking!”

Maybe I just need practice.

Item Customization

I could have spent forever playing with Sim creation… but since I wanted to actually, you know, PLAY the game, I had to then turn to house decoration. This became just as intricate.

Items also use the color picker to customize.

Items also use the pattern/color wheel for customization. Gone are the days of creating twenty different chairs of different colors just to make that perfect set. Instead, you plop a chair down, choose a pattern, then use the color wheel to change it to the color you like. You can take that and make matching love seats and lamp shades, etc!  The same for flooring and wall coverings. Everything can be customized by the color wheel. So if you want to turn the red brick bright blue, no problem!

The rigid grid structure of furniture placement is out the window. You can pretty much stick items wherever it pleases you, now using true diagonals! While I haven’t actually sat down to work with building very much yet, my initial experience has been positive. I like where this is going.

Sims Interactions

Once my house was halfway how I wanted it to be, it was time to set the Sims loose to watch how they interacted. I noticed a lot of things that I liked, right away. Time seems to move a bit slower through the day, but I found myself wanting to play on slower speeds (I’m the champ of high speed playing on the Sims 2). There are a lot of small things that make you want to stop and watch.

Kip and Fang are being flirty? Well that's nothing new!

I’ve only played through two Sim days so far. But Sims seem to be much more autonomous than in previous games — my Hopeless Romantic/Flirty couple (Kip and Fang) could often be seen sneaking romance in the bathroom or some sudden place when they happened to see each other.  You can see what impression one Sim makes on the other as they interact – if that Sim liked the interaction, thought it was boring, or just thought it was okay.

Sims’ happiness is highly based off of recent experiences and the environment. If they are enjoying music that’s playing in the room, they get a mood boost. If the baby starts crying, everyone in the room reacts to it with a negative mood hit. If they worked out too hard the day before, they suffer from aching muscles for a few hours. I thought that was very clever.

Daily aspirations are replaced by a hope/wish system. As the Sim goes along, you will see things that they would like to experience or do. This is usually based off their personality traits, but can also be things like teaching the toddler to walk or making a new friend. You can choose whether or not you want to work to fulfill these hopes by left or right clicking them – so you’re not always stuck with aspirations that you can’t/don’t want to fill. This gives a lot of room for choice and you always have something to work for.

Of course there are the great, unexpected Sim moments. Such as when Kip tried to potty train his toddler son… and got so grossed out by the smell from the training toilet that he literally ran out of the house and threw up on the front porch. I was laughing so hard that I couldn’t figure out how to take a screen shot!

Even when Sims are at work or school, you can choose what they do – work hard, slack off, make friends. I’m really looking forward to seeing what a few more Sim days will be like.

Sims Exchange & Store

The Sims Exchange is already hopping! I went there and downloaded various free hair colors (though I have yet to see customized eye color?), patterns and houses. Patterns are going to play a big part in downloads, I feel, considering how much can be done to customized the color of one pattern and apply it to clothes, furniture, etc.  Hair appears to be colored the same way – a pattern/coloration is applied to the hair style on the fly – which means no longer do we have to sort through a million layers of hair and recolor style after style. Fantastic!

Now… for the Sim’s Store. I’m a little iffy about this whole micro-transaction thing in games in general. For some reason, because I had already registered my key through a different means on the Sims 3 website, I was unable to get the free $10 worth of Sims Store Points. But from poking around the store, this is how it seems to work.

1,000 points = $10 + tax. So every 100 points is about a dollar or so in real life money.  You can buy points at the Sims Store website once you have registered and logged in.

You can choose what you want to download in the store’s website using your registered ID — there are already lots of hair and furniture items there to choose from. I’ve seen hair range from 50 – 100 points a style (50 cents to a dollar). I’ve seen furniture items range from 25 – 100 points each (25 cents to a dollar).

In my mind, I’m comparing these prices to the Stuff Packs we got in the Sims 2. I’m not sure if this is fair to do or not… there is are so many differences between these two content systems.

The perks of the micro transaction store is that you can pick and choose what items you want and not be forced to pay for a bunch of stuff you aren’t interested in. Also note, that each item/hairstyle you buy is fully customizable in pattern and color (I’d assume), so you aren’t just getting one sofa… you’re getting that one sofa in infinite styles and colors. Or that one hair style… can have any color applied to it – so could actually count as many hair types when compared to Sims 2.

I personally have enough content to mess around with for the time being and don’t plan on plunking down extra money at the store unless they release something I absolutely can’t live without. Seeing that I bought nearly every Stuff Pack for the previous game, it could be that this method would save me some money in the long run. Who knows. Are Stuff Packs now a thing of the past?

Content Integration

The last thing I want to talk about is the Sims 3 launcher itself. Not only does it launch your game, but it doubles as a content manager for all of our downloads from the exchange and the store. Note, once you have actually downloaded something, you have to choose to install it before it will appear in your game. This makes for a much cleaner interface for those who may have found surfing for the Downloads folder in the Sims directory on their computer to unzip new downloads to be difficult. And truthfully, it was rather unwieldy when you compare it to this.

It also feels as if Maxis is keeping a tighter leash on what kind of content can be installed into the Sims 3. I’m guessing there is still an equivalent of a Downloads folder somewhere on the computer. I haven’t experimented enough to find it. But if content must pass through the launcher to install into the game, does that mean hacked items have less chance of slipping in? And is this a good or bad thing?

If that’s the case, you know that someone in the community is going to make a program that installs hacked items anyhow. It’s just the way of the game.

Last Thoughts

Why, oh why, can’t you make Young Adults in a created household the children of an Adult Sim? Do Sims actually have to be old and crotchety to have a child who is a Young Adult? *huff* I had to make them Teens instead… even though Young Adult would have fit them better. Yes… I could just age them. But I keep my aging turned off until I want my Sim family to move forward in transitions (they follow the storyline and development of Wayrift figments as much as possible).

I’m already hoping for a SimPE for Sims 3. Any word on something similar? Creating figment families as crazy as ours in Wayrift requires many strange family ties… and only an in-game editor can recreate that. Here’s to hoping!

Note: I do realized from visiting the Sims3 forums that there are issues with the StoryProgession mode. But this review was just a first impression as I haven’t had a chance to work with more than one family in the given time I’ve played. There is an official work around for this on the PC, here.