I’ve been on vacation for about a week now, and I have another week to go. It’s been pretty good so far…father-in-law brought us a few things they had in storage for us (a sectional, an oak desk and a steamer trunk that, according to family lore, narrowly missed going down on the Titanic. We created Robin’s office in what used to be our old workout room, and so the one computer that seems capable of running The Sims 3 is now taking up space on that lovely oak desk.
I can’t remember when Robin started referring to my Sims games as “Tropical Fish”. Possibly sometime in the Sims 2 years. My Really Old Computer, the one that I used to attempt podcast recording with, did an admirable job with The Sims 2, right up until the last few expansion packs. I loved the animated style of the characters, the sense of humour built into the interactions, and the fact that by the end of the expansion releases, you could practically build or do anything you wanted (what I didn’t like was the fact that anytime you wanted to go somewhere, you had a loading screen that, by the end, would take upwards of 10 minutes to load).
Unfortunately (for me), it seems that while Sims 3 has gotten rid of that pesky load screen problem, it’s also done away with most of the whimsy that made Sims 2 so engaging. No alien abduction pregnancies for the guys, for instance. I also miss the University EP, as it gave my Sims something to do in the Young Adult years other than work on getting to the top of the job ladder (though I guess it kinda mirrors Real Life in that most of the folks I know have either dropped out of, or not bothered with college/university, and they’re still somehow managing to make their obscene mortgage payments).
One of the other often-identified issues was how long it took to do something in-game. Going to the washroom doesn’t need to take a half an hour. In an hour-long period, I should be able to have the Sim make breakfast, use the toilet, and take a shower. Apparently this was supposed to be addressed in Sims 3, though from my experience (and it could just be computer performance), it seems to take longer. I can remember going through about 5 or 6 generations of a family in Sims 2, feeling fairly engaged with all of them, and only getting annoyed with the lag on the household after about the 5th generation. Sims 3? I don’t think I’ve gone any farther than about the 3rd generation of any given family. I wound up hitting rock-bottom with gameplay recently, and it annoyed me enough to restart a new game with new characters – I had a character who, with school/work, her gardening responsibilities, job, job responsibilities…couldn’t find a mate. When I’d finally manage to get her out on the town, she couldn’t find a single, attractive guy to save her life. She finally wound up having to adopt so that I could even make a stab at a third generation. I’m rather hoping that when I am finally able to upgrade to a newer computer, it runs the game a little smoother.
You might be asking yourself why I’m still playing if I have such complaints? Well, the open-world concept is great. I enjoy the fact that I can send my character to the park or the bookstore and not have to wait for a load screen. There are a bunch of jobs and professions (yes, there is a distinction made), and you directly control the outcome of your worktime by either playing a mini-game (like the ghostbuster profession), or by using a dropdown menu to choose your activity while you’re in a building.
Then there’s this tendency towards almost crazy/creepy stuff. Like the ice-cream truck that parks for hours outside my Sims’ home, usually at night. I’m not sure if the local ice-cream guy is casing the joint, it’s an FBI sting (I swear, that’s a legal Plasma Fruit bush, officer!), or one of the homes on the block has gone multi-family and they needed a place to park the work truck (I live in a neighbourhood that, in Real Life, is multi-fam, and I kinda hope my Sims are above all that. It leads to some pretty gnarly parking concerns).
Add onto this a propensity for the guys at EA to build Gnomes into everything…in Sims 2, you could steal someone’s lawn gnomes, but that’s about where the joke ends. Sims 3 takes it further. MUCH further. The gnomes are alive. Seriously. You put a gnome in your garden and it moves around. Sometimes you gain a gnome, often you lose them. You buy a washer/dryer? You can find a laundry gnome (or at least, that’s what *I* call them). Same deal…they move when you’re literally not looking. The last weird gnomelike critter I found is in the recent Pets expansion..looked like a little wiener-dog wearing a sweater and a toque, hanging around my Sim’s doghouse. I seriously thought it was someone’s glitched pet until I realized that the family dog could use it as a chew toy, and the family cat could use it as a scratching post. Again…stop looking at it for awhile and it moved, finally disappearing from the lot entirely (and the Sims themselves aren’t fooled…one of the conversational topics, “share secret” is “The Gnomes…they’re alive!”)
Again, I’m hoping that an upgrade in computers will help make the game more dynamic for me, to the point where it doesn’t feel like a game is taking forever to do very little. Right now, I have to play on medium speed, and I had to quit when it took an hour for a sim to close the fridge, cross the room, and sit down at the table to eat. I wish I was kidding. If I did that in real life, I think Robin would probably have me hospitalized…
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