The Sims 3: More Awesome Than Before, More Annoying Than Ever

Let me begin by saying this: The Sims 3 is just as fun and addictive as the very first. It manages to recapture the magic I felt playing it for the first time on February 8th, 2000, my birthday, and four days after its release. The sense of surprise that a game about real life could be fun, the thrill of discovering little details in the gameplay you hadn’t noticed, and the realization of Will Wright‘s genius that made him my personal hero until the day I played Spore. It’s a feeling that I felt was missing from The Sims 2, which just didn’t hook me like the original managed to do, despite having some welcome visual upgrades. I can safely say that The Sims 3 has caused me to fall in love with the series all over again, and is likely to hook a lot of “core” gamers who have disliked The Sims for years. I recommend everyone even remotely interested should buy it right now.

With that said, I will now elaborate on all the things that infuriate me about the game, some new to The Sims 3, and some with roots that go all the way back to the very first game. There are plenty of reviews, like this one, this other one, and this third one from mainstream game journalists, which detail the wonderful experiences you can have with this game, so this is not going to be one of them. Instead, I am going to rant and rave about every tiny little problem the game has simply because someone has to.

My gripes come in three categories: problems with the structure of the new “living world” gameplay, small components that are (still) inexplicably missing or broken, and the fact that EA’s push for Sims 3 machinima has completely missed the point.


In order to understand some of the issues with The Sims 3, you need to know what’s new. Previously, the game was modeled on individual families: play as one household of sims in one location at a time. Every other location is frozen in time. Your sims can leave the house to visit restaurants, stores, and other such locations, but this freezes time back at the house. This created many peculiar situations, such as a father going out to the bar at noon, staying there until 3 AM, then returning home exhausted while it was still noon and the kids aren’t even home from school. The Sims 2 exacerbated this problem now that sims could grow old and die, creating strange situations in which a teenage boy and a girl could fall in love, but the girl would never grow older because she was a non-player character.

These issues are fixed in The Sims 3, as the entire neighborhood is being simulated all at once. A sim can go out shopping at 3 and come home at 8, and it’ll be 8 when they get home. In the meantime, anyone else still at home will have been continuing to live their lives. This comes with the added bonus of not having nearly as many loading screens to sit through. Meanwhile, the rest of the neighborhood will develop relationships, grow older, get married, move in, move out, have children, and pretty much everything except get promoted at work. I have no idea what’s up with that last one, as my police lieutenant character still has a “Traffic Cop” as a boss. In any case, this changes the overall feel of the game for the better while creating a great deal of its own unique problems.

The time-freezing of The Sims and The Sims 2 was certainly strange, but at least it gave players enough time to do what they wanted. Because of the compressed representation of time in The Sims (one sim minute is roughly 2 seconds real-time), it was quite difficult to juggle a career, a social life, and three-hour periods of making a fucking sandwich. Therefore, the best way to meet new people and socialize with them was often to go downtown. A sim can spend eight hours downtown to get to know three new people (because with The Sims’ weird representation of time, that’s how long it takes), and upon returning home there’s still enough time to use the bathroom before work the next day.

In The Sims 3, this is no longer an option. You have 48 (real world-time) minutes in a day, and that’s it. Given that job performance in The Sims 3 relies more on building up skills (which can be accomplished by reading books, playing chess, or painting pictures — for seventeen hours), and becoming friends with others seems to take much longer, maintaining both a job and a social life is extremely difficult. It’s just like real life, except The Sims has always been at its best when it sacrifices gritty realism for fun.

That’s not to say the increased realism in The Sims 3 is always a bad thing. The new mood system seems far more realistic than before; previously, a sim’s mood was calculated based solely on how full eight green bars were: Hunger, Energy, Comfort, Bladder, Hygiene, Social, Fun, and Room (how pretty the room they’re in is). Comfort and Room have been axed, and the green bars now just serve as a guideline for “power users.” The actual mood of a sim is now determined by “moodlets,” or little things with affect the mood one way or the other. Some of these are direct results of how full or empty these green bars are (i.e. “hungry” or “tired”); others are related to specific events (i.e. “stir crazy” from not having left the house, or “new car smell” from driving in a recently bought car, “dirty surroundings” from the sink being unclean, etc.). This is similar to the new personality system, built upon five “traits” as opposed to a bunch of overly restrictive statistics. It all makes a lot more sense, and it’s unfortunate that the rest of the long-broken systems in The Sims weren’t given such an overhaul.

Going back to the issue of time, specifically that it takes three hours to make a fucking sandwich, it still takes three hours to make a fucking sandwich. It also takes 30 minutes for a sim to get out of bed (which is kind of realistic, but not very convincing when the animation for putting one’s feet on the floor is playing for about 20 of them). It also takes about an hour to eat a bowl of cereal, 30 minutes to wash that one bowl of cereal, 20 minutes to close a laptop and get out of a chair, and 90 minutes to read a recipe for Philly Cheese Steak. This is probably familiar to long-time Sims players, but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t have been fixed; doubly so because time is an even more scarce resource in The Sims 3.

Oh, might I add that time is also still taken up by completely stupid, useless things? Another familiar thing to veteran Sims players is the tendency of sims to waste 45 minutes waving their hands angrily to the almighty hand of the player because they’re so tired, which is 45 minutes they could have spent getting into bed like the player told them to 55 minutes ago. This still occurs. It’s not cute, and it’s not funny. I know it’s a trademark of The Sims, but it was infuriating in 2000 and is still infuriating in 2009.

In addition, it still takes about four hours for two sims going in opposite directions down a narrow hallway to figure out how to move past one another. This time, though, such attempts will not automatically be canceled if they can’t figure out how to do it. There were several instances in which after four in-game hours of watching two sims tap their feet waiting for the other to move, I had to cancel a long agenda of using the toilet, washing hands, then making some dinner in order to tell a couple of idiots which direction to walk in. Again, a familiar experience for a veteran Sims player, and it will continue to be.

Another long-lasting problem arises in the character creation tools. The Sims 3′s Create-A-Sim mode is much more powerful, allowing a much wider variety of faces, body types, skin tones, hair colors, eye colors, and clothing colors. It has a few minor quirks — it’s not very clear that clicking the big checkmark button will prevent you from making any changes to anything ever again, for example — but it’s wonderful overall. Except, of course, for the fact that the player still cannot change a sim’s height. Every adult sim is just as tall as every other adult sim, and every child is just as tall as every other child. This severely limits a player’s ability to create accurate representations of themselves or others; it’s unfortunate because A) everything else is so much more customizable and B) this feature is available for frickin’ Nintendo Miis.

Other small issues are abound, and boggle the mind just as much as to why they turned out the way they are. Of particular note is the lack of hot tubs or diving boards, two types of objects which were available in both The Sims and The Sims 2 without any of the overpriced expansions. It’s quite confusing, and I sincerely hope that EA adds these back in free of charge. All in all, The Sims 3 has bits of confusing omissions or shortcomings which add up quickly.

All of that said, The Sims 3 is, as I mentioned, lots and lots of fun. It’s an addictive game that will suck you in, and its shortcomings aren’t major enough to derail the whole experience. On the other hand, if EA’s machinima-related hype got you interested, prepare yourself for an appalling anticlimax.

The Sims 3 can capture video of your sims doing their thing. It also includes a fairly basic video editor capable of amateurish-looking titles and transitions. That’s it.

Normally, a filmmaker writes a script before shooting, not the other way around. If you’d like to work the other way around, then The Sims 3 might work for your machinima film. Otherwise, prepare for a lot more work and frustration than it’s worth. Because The Sims 3 is always behaving as if it’s a game, and not a filmmaking tool, you are completely at the mercy of the game state in terms of what animation you can produce. Would you like the image of a leaking sink faucet in the background? Use the sink over and over and hope it breaks. Do you need two characters to have a fistfight? Sorry, they like each other too much. How about making a sim look in a particular direction? Good luck waiting for that to happen. Even getting my doppelganger sim to slam his head against the desk for the screenshot at the beginning of this post required too much waiting around and too much difficulty in pausing the game at the right moment. And don’t get me started on maintaining continuity between shots of dialogue; the randomized animations and inability to shoot with two cameras at once complicates that far too much.

It doesn’t have to be that way at all. It would be fairly trivial to give filmmakers a tool to trigger whatever situation they like; the developers likely use such a thing themselves for testing purposes anyway. Make it only available in a mode where the overall game isn’t affected, and the problem is solved. Unfortunately, because of this limitation, The Sims 3 is not likely to be used for a lot of good machinima. Anything that doesn’t look crude or uninspired takes a lot of unnecessary effort, often more effort than directing real actors.

The state of The Sims 3′s machinima tools is very sad. There are thousands of creative people without the ability to get actors or sets or cameras, and could effectively tell their story if only The Sims 3 had a better tool set. Without it, The Sims 3 machinima can only tell a very limited number of stories without looking laughably artificial. Perhaps it’s all right to some people, because nobody expects video game animation to hold a candle to carefully crafted animation or acting. The Sims 3, with such high quality character animation in-game, had an opportunity to change those expectations, and it missed it completely.

On a similar note, apparently absent, again, is access to the game’s scripting language for creating new types of things to buy or new gameplay. The rationale for this in The Sims 1-era was that some people might abuse the system and cause everyone in a player’s game to die horribly, and besides, the average player, no matter how dedicated and creative, wouldn’t comprehend programming. The arguments against this still apply today, the former refuted by the fact that reloading saved games and word spreading fast on the Internet prevents such damage, and the latter is complete and utter bullshit.

As a game, in and of itself, The Sims 3 has flaws, like any other game, while still being an enormously fun experience. Any more balanced review than mine will be happy to tell you why, and if you’ve ever enjoyed a Sims game before, you already have a pretty good idea. As a creative tool, The Sims 3 serves as a gateway drug for people to become artists, quickly catapulting them into the camp of people frustrated with how limited ones options are. In other words, it’s the first Sims for a new generation, and it’s likely to get even more millions of people hooked. But there are so many things which could have been better, both new problems and things that really should have been addressed after nine years.

Oh, and what the hell is with the musical score in The Sims 3? What was wrong with the excellent Mark Mothersbaugh soundtrack in the second one? The best song in the entirety of The Sims 3 is the one remix of a Sims 2 song, and the rest are like annoyingly cliché Broadway showtunes. Sorry, I’ll stop.

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