Sims 3 Review | OMG, I'm Playing With Dolls
Something niggled at me from the moment I loaded The Sims 3 and began to design my Sims. It stayed with me as I chose a house for them and spent hours carefully remodeling it, choosing different types of flooring, knocking down walls to enlarge some rooms, upgrading appliances to more upscale models, and placing furniture in just the right spot. It stayed with me as I chose appropriate careers for my Sims, made sure they got to work on time, got to sleep at the right time, performed extra little tasks for their bosses and made sweet sweet love to one another.
Love...
It wasn't until I created a two family household with a gay couple and a lesbian couple who adopted two babies that I realized what the problem was. I was a grown woman playing with a virtual dollhouse. It's not surprising that I didn't realize this at first, I didn't play the typical making house role play games that a lot of little kids do, I spent more time looking for bugs and other creepy crawlies outside. Yet, as I directed my chubby Lesbian Sim (Lyth Sapphos) to make some apple waffles, I couldn't deny what I was doing.
That's pretty much all the review anyone really needs I think. If you play Sims 3, you'll end up playing with your virtual dollies for hours on end. It's rather a lot of fun I must admit and the colorful pixels and stunning game design do add a great deal to the experience.
Hate...
There's just a few bones I have to pick with the game:
- Although you can create gay couples and lesbian couples, as far as I can tell, polygamy seems out of the question. According to the creators of the Sims, marriage takes place between one Sim and another Sim, not one Sim, another Sim and her four sisters. I'm a little disappointed by this.
- It also seems to be impossible to create a single child Sim by themselves without having an adult around. This unfortunately rules out any 'Lord of the Flies' style simulations which I was ever so keen to run. I'm guessing you could perhaps make one adult Sim, a bunch of kid Sims then wall the adult Sim off until he or she dies of starvation, thus leaving the child Sims to take care of themselves, but I don't think I'm capable of that kind of cruelty, even in a virtual make believe sense. Or I'm not that bored with the game yet, one of the two.
More Love...
Overall would I recommend the game? Definitely. It's fairly intuitive, has a great deal of scope to it, which makes for excellent replay value (you can save copies of Sims at certain points in their lives and play out various scenarios to see what would happen,) and manages to actually engage you. Yes, you'll quite happily spend hours at a time watching your Sims go about the most mundane aspects of their lives with the air of a three year old at the Zoo watching the monkeys fling poo at each other for the first time.