Sims can now be made fatter than ever before, and the polygon count in their butt is greatly increased so they no longer look angular when you fatten them up. The rest is details.

I have been known to say that The Sims 2 was the best computer game ever made in our sector of the galaxy. I believe that was correct, at the time.  But then came The Sims 3. And it is good.

What I mean is that it is not good in the metaphysical “good vs evil” meaning.  It is a rather value-neutral tool, like its predecessors. But for those of us who have convinced ourselves (if no one else) that we have higher goals in life, it is rather disconcerting to come home from work, pop in the disk and soon after look up to find it is midnight.  Time is arguably our most valuable resource, and this game eats it the way grade school boys eat candy.  That is why I think the game may find a less than favorable judgment.  But that must be weighed against all the people who would have spent that time watching TV, or worse, idly chatting and gossiping. Eating their time would surely be a good thing. So in the end, who knows whether it is good or evil. But it sure is good as opposed to bad.

The Sims 2 sprouted a total of 8 expansion packs that introduced new aspects such as university education, seasons, hobbies and pets.  With Sims 3 we are back to  basics, but the game has picked up some of the greatest successes from those expansions, such as fishing and gardening.  The pets are still absent, and I would be surprised if there won’t be another expansion pack or many, down the road.

From The Sims (1) to Sims 2  there was a major upgrade of the graphics, from small simple sprites to detailed 3D characters.  The change to Sims 3 is much less noticeable.  There are more body shapes – it is now possible to make genuinely fat-looking sims, or muscular sims, not just the old choice between skinny and slightly chubby.  And it is possible to put pretty much any color or pattern on clothes, meaning you only need a different model for each shape, not for each color, as these are user-defined.  Hair too can now be colored directly when you create a sim, rather than by expert “custom content creators” who make pre-defined models.  But the graphics are not overall more realistic than before.  The game world is still a bit cartoonish, probably by choice. It is certainly not like the realism in roleplaying games such as Oblivion or Dark Age of Camelot, which could be easily passed off as actual photographs. The upside is that any computer that could run Sims 2 with a few expansions should also be able to run Sims 3 right out of the box.

Speaking of “right out of the box”, the game comes on a common install DVD for both Windows and Mac. This is still rare and bound to cause great joy among the Mac gamers. I popped the DVD in my laptop with Ubuntu Linux and WINE (a free environment for running well-behaved Windows programs without Windows).  The setup started without a hitch, and ran roughly 95% through before it stopped without a word.  I guess there are still limits to what it will run on, but man, that was close!  Better luck with Sims 4.  Unless someone makes an open-source competitor before that…

The biggest change is neither to the graphics nor the character creator, but to the gameplay.  Oh, it is the same old at the most basic level, the sims still need to eat and sleep and pee with alarming regularity, much like the rest of us.  But whereas the big jump from Sims to Sims2 was the introduction of the life cycle (you must have children because you die), so the new feature is the living neighborhood.  (Or should I say the dying neighborhood, as the non-player sims now also marry, have children, grow old and die, whereas in Sims2 they would stay young forever.)

In order for the “townies” (the characters you don’t play) to live their ordinary life, they must be smarter than they used to be.  This carries over to the sims you control.  They may still win the Darwin award if left to themselves, but it is far from certain.  They now start to get concerned about food 24 hours before they would actually die, and will take steps to feed themselves even if there is something funny to do.  (Some gamers may want to learn from them in that regard…)

The sims’ personalities are completely revamped.  This probably counts as the other big change to the game, besides the living neighborhood.  In the past, all sims had 5 personality sliders:  Sloppy-neat, shy-outgoing, lazy-active, serious-playful and mean-nice. Each of these could vary on a scale from 0 to 10.  For instance my self-sim would be have 0 outgoing points, having very little need for social interaction.  In Sims 3, all this is gone. Instead there are now a few dozen personality traits, of which you have five.  (If you grow your own sims from childhood you start with two for toddlers and add more as they age up.) Some of these are good, some are bad, and some just strange.

For instance, my self-sim would be a Good Unflirty Loner Genius Computer wiz. In fact, this was the personality I gave my first (and so far only) created sim.  And she does indeed behave disturbingly like me. Her goodness is essentially wasted because she has no one around to be good to. Except for the occasional wish to donate money to charity, she could just as well have been evil.  Nobody will know anyway. Or at least that was the case until I finally had the money to buy a cheap computer.  Now she is chatting on the Net pretty much every night. OK, so that is not like me, but then the in-game computer does not have a blog feature, it seems. So let us see if she ever gets to know anyone well enough to do something good for them.  It sure is hard to pull off in real life. Even before Sims 3 ate my day (and much of my night as well).