The Sims 3 Ambitions | First Impressions

Let's start with the good things first, shall we? Oh my god tattoos! Oh my god, the ability to buy buildings and fire people! Oh my god the ability to build monsters and unleash them upon the world! Oh my god, playing the sims and not having to make your sims quit their jobs just so you don't spend 20 hours out of your sim's day with the game on fast forward as your own real world life eeks away.

Is the Sims 3 Ambitions awesome? Yes, yes it is. Is it worth buying if you enjoyed The Sims 3 base game but found it a little bit tiresome being locked out of all the rabbit hole businesses? Yes, again, yes it is. I'd gotten to the point where I only played the Sims 3 for the pleasure of building houses and occasionally setting sims on fire. The Ambitions expansion pack has rekindled my interest and the only thing being ignited now is inspiration. Whatever that means. (It means I'm burning inspiration like fossil fuel.)

But wait, there's more! More! Sims in Ambitions can now do laundry! Finally! You can buy actual washing machines and dryers and hampers and hang washing out on the line! This may seem like a strange thing to celebrate, but it always struck me as weird that toilets clogged every other day and sims had to clean kitchen counters and fridges, but their clothes never got dirty.

Now for the mandatory whiny bit...

I got The Sims 3 Ambitions expansion pack on launch day. I didn't have to queue at midnight, but that's largely because EA has demoralized its fan base to the point where an expansion pack isn't really all that exciting anymore. It was however, exciting enough to purchase it as soon as it came out, so kudos to the developers, programmers and artists who make The Sims 3 a great game to play in spite of EA's continuing efforts to nickel and dime the franchise into oblivion.

So, first impressions. Well, my first first pre impression was not to buy it online. I could have done and I would have saved about $15 bucks doing so, but EA sent me to a country locked site and demanded my credit card details. Newsflash, EA, large swathes of the Western world have Pay Pal accounts, and not all of us want to use credit cards with your service, especially when your terms and conditions carry reassuring phraseology about you employing 'adequate' data protection. Those niggling and perhaps petty issues aside, I didn't really feel safe downloading The Sims 3 Ambitions. It's hard to pinpoint why, after all, I have a pretty decent collection of Steam games, all of which I downloaded online, but for some reason, downloading from EA just felt wrong. It felt dicey and unprotected, especially as EA's primary form of DRM in The Sims 3 franchise so far has been disk checking.

Dismiss all the above as hostile paranoia if you want, but now we come to the game itself. The install was hassle free and neat, however I was disappointed that Ambitions, unlike World Adventures and The Sims 3 base game, came with no free store points. Would it really have killed you EA, to provide a little free store content with the expansion? Or am I being greedy? After all, you do get to download the 'Ultimate Career Bundle' when you register your copy.

The Ultimate Career Bundle? Oh yes, the Ultimate Career Bundle! From the title alone, you can imagine how impressive this bundle is. You no doubt drool imagining the many wonders that must lie within.

Let me run through the contents of this ULTIMATE bundle real quick:

• Two hospital gowns.
• Three new hairstyles. (They tried to bulk it out by putting the same hairstyles in twice, once in brown and once in grey and making out as if modifying a hairstyle to fit an elder sim from an adult sim was an achievement, and claim that there are 7 new hairstyles, but they're insane if they think we're that stupid.)
• Three ornaments. (Ooh, ornaments.)
• Some wind sucky thingy.

Seriously. That's it. But is that all? No!

Sims 3 Ambitions comes with a whole new town, Twinbrook, which is actually pretty well made, and a town I'm looking forward to exploring. If you want to play in Riverview, Sunset Valley, or a custom made down, you need to add the new buildings to it, which are the Fire Station, Salon, Junk Yard and Consignment Store.

If you poke around in 'Create A Sim', you find a few neat new hairstyles and some new clothing to match the new professions. Build / buy mode also has a few more treasures for you to enjoy also. Including furniture for work, like drafting tables and stools, and home furniture like beds and build items like doors. So this expansion pack isn't quite as devoid of new content as it first seems to be.In fact, much of the new content emerges slowly as you play the game, as opposed to being obviously there when one first boots up.In other words, EA seems to have actually listened and added content to the base game and not made you go to the store to get it. Hurrah!

Could this perhaps be a ploy from EA to increase satisfaction by seeming to under-deliver and then turning around and over-delivering? I don't know, but it's working.

Of course, expansion packs aren't just about new content, they're about new game play. We'll be looking at that in the next hubs I write, in which I'll elaborate on statements like 'OMG tattoos!'