Five Game Changing Sims 3 Expansion Packs | Part Two

Read Part One. Go on. Read it. Read it now.

The Sims 3 Seasons and Weather

All the previously mentioned expansion packs deal with the fact that the sims is a stable, law abiding economy and that is one of the many issues which makes the game boring. No doubt a weather expansion will come along soon enough and there will be days on which it rains and days on which it snows, and days on which it frosts and kills all your delicate saplings that you've been trying to garden. This is the one expansion pack which will probably actually make it to fruition in reality, but I hope when it does that the weather will have more impact than just looking pretty. Real weather isn't a few drops of rain on otherwise perfect day. It is tsunamis, hurricanes and droughts. I want dead homeless sims in snowdrifts, damnit!

Sims 3 Reality Bites Expansion Pack

The reality bites 'expansion pack' would simply remove the 'testing cheats' facilties of the game. That's right, no cheats. This last one isn't really an expansion, more of an anti expansion. It's so easy to cheat in The Sims 3 that once you discover the cheat codes, you'll probably use them out of sheer force of habit. Why take three weeks to level up your cooking ability when you can enable testing cheats and just have your sim read cookery books for three days straight, clicking negative moodlets away as soon as they arise?

A lot of games have cheats, but most aren't game breakers in the way that The Sims 3 cheats are. Seriously, type 'testingcheatsenabled true' into the little blue bar and your game is essentially over. You can do and be whatever you want, have as much money as you want, buy up all the lots in town, anything. Other games have cheats, but they'll only serve to give you so much of an advantage. Take the Tony Hawk Pro Skater series for instance, where you can get a cheat that gives you perfect balance. It takes a little something out of the general skill required to play the game for sure, but the game still has plenty of elements which require more than just perfect balance to unlock and enjoy. In fact, even if you unlock all the cheats in the THPS series, you still won't necessarily beat the game. Unlike in The Sims 3, where you pretty much well 'win' the moment you open the package.

Why the Need For Carnage?

Long story short, The Sims 3 is supposed to be a real life simulator, but it is nothing like real life. There are no economic pressures, no natural disasters, no truly bad sims acting independently of the ones you control. Playing The Sims 3 is like playing some horrific Stepford community, and after a few weeks of flipping out with joy over the fact that you can change the color of the wallpaper you will be so bored that you'll chew the game disk rather than start another interminably bland game of life on Valium.