Sims 3 Ambitions Guide | Interior Designer
The first of the new professions available in The Sims 3 Ambitions expansion pack that I tried was Interior Designer. Why? Because one of the most perennially interesting things about playing The Sims 3 has always been (for me) the ability to create homes for sims. In many ways it's just a 20 something year old woman playing dolls as if she were 5, but then again, when I was 5 I was too busy hunting bugs to bother with dolls, so I still have doll playing quota to spare.
Interior Designer is precisely what it sounds like. You are invited into the homes of other sims, given a design brief and a budget and from there the only limit you have is your imagination. The challenge here, is that unlike in your own home, where CTRL+ SHIFT + C and 'motherlode' gives you all the funds you need, you actually have to stick to a budget as an Interior Designer, which, for a perennial cheat like me, adds a bit of sparkle to the game.
There are a few new bits and pieces to play with included in the expansion pack. I was happy to see that new doors, beds and couches had been added, however there are still no new stairs and even worse, there are still only three stereos to choose from, which just seems unnecessarily sparse. If you go store shopping you can add a ye olde gramophone type stereo to your inventory, but that still leaves you with a fairly pitiful selection.
On the plus side, the game now includes a trampoline. Weeeee! And a 'fireman's pole' that for some reason is in the 'recreation' section of buy mode. Recreation indeed.
But enough of the 'not enough toys' whining, what about the game play? Well, I quickly discovered that even though I'd shoved a roof through my client's new loft room, they were pleased with the results of my renovation regardless. I also learned that it looks as though merely moving a piece of furniture about makes the client forget that they owned it already. Perhaps this is a glitch that will be fixed in later patches, or perhaps it is designed to be reminiscent of clueless rich humans who have so many pieces of furniture you can move a chair from one room to another and they think they got something new. Like Ozzy Osbourne.
Unlike human clients however, who might raise objections if you knock walls down, build entire extensions and move their kids all into one shared bedroom, sims are remarkably stoic when it comes to accepting the designer's job. In my second design job, I simply sold the contents of the second bedroom to boost my budget (and when funds ran out anyway, the owner's prized guitar). All that happened was the sim in question said he regretted ever hiring my sim and still paid her the agreed fee. Sweet!
Sims 3 Ambitions, making gamers incompetent even in pretend jobs.
