More Awesome Than You!

Okay, here's the crap they DON'T tell you in the shitty reviews written by tards and shills.

First Impressions:
1. LACK OF SECUROM IS TOTAL LIECAKE: Game attempted to phone home and whined about activation when DENIED. YOU CAN HAZ SECUROM!
2. Selection of available CAS things VERY limited compared to TS2. For instance, you CANNOT EVEN BE PROPERLY BALD ANYMORE. See if you can guess how I noticed THAT so fast.
3. Enforced Legacy-playstyle: Switching to a different household forfeits current status. At minimum, all wants and progress towards wants will be lost.
4. Shiftclick very limited compared to TS2.
5. Navigation is an extremely ARGH-inducing experience, reverts back to pre-Manual Navigation annoyance where you have to babysit a sim to its destination before you can tell it what to do there.

If you are a Legacy-style player, TS3 MIGHT be better for you. If you are more into having an entire neighborhood of sims to play with...TS3 is categorically insuperior in every way found so far.

Continuing Impressions:
1. Sims in TS3 are just not as good-looking at their TS2 equivalents. Yes, they are more detailed. Yes, you can trick them out in ways that you can't really do with TS2 sims. But they're still ugly. And this is coming from someone who *ISN'T* a heavy CC user: I basically use EAxis default skins, EAxis default eyes. But the fact of the matter is, TS3 sims are just ugly. Why? I am not qualified to say. They just ARE. It took very little effort, even for someone with my complete lack of artistic skills, to throw together a sim that looked passably like someone familiar, or at least, wasn't ugly. I have spent an hour fiddling with the damn thing, but nothing I do produces something other than a pudgy, doughy-faced, slopey-foreheaded ape.
2. The neighborhood map has an overwhelming sense of simultaneous clutteredness and claustrophobia. There is an overwhelming number of floating icons, each barely distinguishable from the other. And I like buttons. Is this bad? Well, hard to say. Buttons are good. But they float chaotically without the sense of order that was present in TS2.
3. Build mode: TECHNICALLY, build mode is superior to its predecessors. However, it suffers from this same sense of poor screen utilization, combined with a sense of flightyness. In TS1, everything seemed to fit together well. This sense continued in TS2. In TS3, I have this sense that the thing is simply too fidgety, and the glitz and sparkles obscures the actual FUNCTIONALITY. When you draw out a room, the entire thing appears in a sparkly shower. The effects overwhelm the functionality. As a veteran sims player dating back to TS1, I find the build mode to be confusing and awkward. That should tell you something.

Gameplay:
Well, I can't say much about it at this point. The overwhelming sense of STUFF I HAVE TO CONFIGURE has kept me from seriously playing the game so far. I've dabbled slightly in the premades, but honestly, the CONTROLS ARE JUST TERRIBLE. I realize they're similar to TS2's in many ways, but let's face it, the controls in unmodified TS2 are ALSO awful. Sims refuse to obey my commands to GO HERE and then DO THAT. At least having to tell them to run there in order to get anywhere isn't quite as critical, but that's again only because everything now moves so SLOWLY. Except the CLOCK. The CLOCK seems to still be moving at the same 60x speed that previous incarnations of the game ran at. In any event, I just find it so overwhelmingly awful that within 30 seconds I'm seized with the urge to go back to TS2.

Okay i just gotta ask this since i've been dying to know since it was announced.  I have never seen any kind of answer to this.

How does the kleptomaniac trait work?  I mean if you steal everything not nailed down in a sims house do they just walk around peeing themselves and crying about lack of food until they die or do they get new furniture?  Naturally since it's Eaxis that made it i'm skeptical about it.

Someone who was at one of the events in the UK that got to play said a sim stole a trash can from a park. I can imagine if they're allowed to steal anything and everything, soon the neighborhood will be empty. I'm going to make a klepto sim anyway to test it out as soon as I get it installed.

Hmm, sounds worse than I thought although SecuROM didn't come as a surprise. Still I'm downloading it because I'm probably crazy or a masochist or both.

That's exactly why i've wondered about the kleptomaniac trait.  If you really can steal anything and it doesn't get replaced the neighbourhood is going to end up very very empty.

Damn the files i was downloading are deleted.  Anyone know some files that'll work with those from post #75?  I'm missing 10 files.

THIS IS SO EXCITING

Watching other people perpetrate a bit of mischief brings a grin to my face  :)

Is anyone here at MATY surprised?  Nope, didn't think so.
Probably so they can sell us these things in EPs or via the online store.  Either that or to support some crappy deal EA made with T$R.
This has been the big DO NOT WANT from the community for months, years even, ever since news of this first leaked/was released in early interviews and articles.  Every sims site I've visited has raised this point as a major DO NOT WANT.  Why did EA not listen?
Yeah, we might start breaking out of the limited parameters they've set for us.  This is EA's game dammit, not a sandbox / doll house / story teller / movie maker for the players.  EA shall maintain complete control of what players can and cannot do in the game.  Even if that means sales suck.  EA will just blame the sales suckage on the early release of the pirated copy.  Time to put on your tinfoil hats, because I'm wondering if someone in EA's corporate structure didn't authorise the leak to pirates, just to cover their asses if/when the sales suck.
Well, obviously it's gonna suck with pre-awesome suckage.  You haven't had time to begin to awesomize it yet.  It sounds like it may not be worth the effort.

I have updated my continuing impressions in first post.

I am really enjoying the fact that Pescado is playing an unmodded game. LULZ!

Seriously though, I am because by the time I get it, hopefully there will be some 'fixes' available.

Yeah, I know...'Death To EMMA'.

I want to get it, just to watch the train-wreckiness of it.  But to play it srsly?  No way.

From the way it sounds, it might be a good thing to stick to TS2.  Besides, weren't various modders planning to write their "amazingly complex and awesome™ mod I wanted to write all along, but couldn't because there was always another EP around the corner".  I'm still hoping to see some really cool mods come out in that vein.

I'm not impressed at all. The clothes, make-up and hair make me want to gouge out my eyes, the furnishings are in weird places (at least to me); bookcases are in the storage tab. Yes it was easier to move to community lots. But somehow in all of this I am left frantically searching to find the place to take art lessons, and trying to make it to the stadium to watch some sport.
One cute thing: Sims get a happy moodlet from buying new stuff.

A happy moodlet? Heck does that mean we are going to spam buy things just before a sim goes to work in order to get them premoted? DNW!

There was a 5 hour happy moodlet from fulfilling a wish, and a 30 minute moodlet for buying new stuff. I am finding skilling excruciatingly slow, and that's with both the genius and bookworm traits.

Securom on Sims 3 what a suprise. ::)

EA will see shit soon. Or is it tomatoes?
This will be very good PR. :D

Hopefully I soon will experience the Sims 3 gameplay.

All I have seen on underdark sites is a goddamn promo disk. which is miles away from the real game.

Pes, if you are the one who pirated this. You are doing Securom and his cronies a big favour.

I believe this is a scene release from RELOADED. I can confirm that the torrents out there are a full working version, not a promo.

No worries, Skadi. Nightmare is a complete douche who frequents PMBD and never reads.

Heres a good laugh
http://bbs.thesims2.ea.com/community/bbs/messages.php?threadID=78b2635e90504268d119761e7f35ee3f&directoryID=225&startRow=1&openItemID=item.225,item.43,item.61,item.104,item.41,item.127,item.23

I know what I'll be doing when I get home tonight. If I don't like it, I can cancel my preorder and keep the cheap as free version. =p

Congrats to the moron pirate that has released this so early.

Yep I already canceled my pre-order,screw them they ain't getting my cash.My CAT! has other ways of dealing with this.

I don't support piracy (*cough* sorry, but I can't lie), but still I fail to see how the actual demonstration that DRMs can do NOTHING to stop piracy to any extent might support Securom cronies.

I think it's obvious that Nightmare is a moron, as Nightmoron apparently thinks that SecuROM is a "he".  Nightmoron also believes that software can have cronies.  Quoting the proof, in case it's deleted:


BTW, wb Skadi.

Yes, welcome back. (I kept it from earlier post, because knowing my luck, you already had a welcome back thread already and I'd be raking in face by saying something here)

Ground is rake free Jelly. There is now mumbles that this is not the full release, that it is missing content. I still think it isn't good enough to be worth $89.00.

ORLY??

Interesting....

I don't like the camera much in the game. Like if you slightly move your mouse, it moves the camera way too far, so it's hard to take decent pics. And I didn't like the neighborhood. It's way too cluttered and it took me forever to find anything. I finally found the cemetary after looking for it for quite some time, but it's hard to tell residential and community lots apart in the game.

Even with the lot sorting function it is way to cluttered. So has anyone worked out where you can take art lessons? I went to the gallery, but that was just looky looky.

I noticed the files are still in .package format, just like TS2. Doesn't this mean it will be easier to mod in the end?

.package is just the name that EA decided to use for their files.  What matters is the internal format; we've still waiting for Pes or the SimPE team to confirm whether the internal format is moddable.

Well i redownloaded the game from scratch and got it installed and working 100% now.  Gotta say i'm liking it so far. Here's some tid bits.

EAxis sense of fashion SUCKS.  Half the clothes look like complete ass (we knew that already though right?).
Sever lack of hair style and clothing choices.  The color tool kind of makes up for this.
Sims look like playdough can't wait for some new skins.
Stupid annoying censor that is more blocky than sims 2 somebody please get rid of it.

The coloration tool is EPIC and should have been in the sims AGES ago.  I can make clothes EXACTLY how i want them and not use the fugly EAxis crap.
Insane and Evil traits are halarious.  My sim jumped into the pool with her everyday clothes and went to bed in them.  She changed into formal wear when she woke up.
There's actually a reason to use community lots like the gym you get a buff making skilling faster.  Also you can't keep exercising all day your sim gets fatigued and the next day has muscle cramps.

I haven't figured out how to swipe stuff yet despite having a want for it.  I figured it'd be an option over every item in the game but no.

Released what? Are you trying to imply that I'm Reloaded? Uh, sure, that's why I had to ask Pes how to unwrap an .iso, because of my mad tech skills. Do go on with your bad self.

Also, game version is 1.0.615.00107. Exactly what proof do you have that this is Alpha?

I've watched some gameplay videos on youtube, and I gotta say I really like what I've seen. I really think I'm going to enjoy playing it. Even if it doesn't replace TS2 forever, it still looks like fun for a while.

The internal formats are somewhat inscrutable. I cannot find anything comprehensible inside the script package, as they appear to utilize a nonstandard compression or encryption that is unlike the other files. There are also very few of them, meaning if they are even susceptible to overrides, you will very likely be limited to only a single modder, as the files are almost certainly giant blobs and therefore will likely not be responsive to selective overriding. You are going to be stuck with either EAxis, or a specific singular modder's vision at any given time, most likely. No more TS2 mix-and-matchness.

I find myself morbidly curious.  In current tight economic times, I'd definitely like first-hand experience before I shell out the bucks.  Guess my computer will be busy tonight.

That's bad news.  I hope that they are just compressed, and that we manage to find the decompression algorithm.  Almost every piece of CC that I use is to mod behavior, rather than to add objects or decorations or clothing.

However, if I was just stuck using your mods, that wouldn't be a complete disaster.

That's what I was afraid of. But everytime I'd say something about that on any sims forum, I'd get the standard "don't worry about it, the modders will figure it out", etc. I think EA purposely made TS3 like this so they can sell us their crap from the Sims 3 Store. If we had the amount of cc as there is for TS2, they wouldn't sell as much.

Looking at the files, it is probably quite easy to do the Squinge type of hack to a single object/interaction at a time - altering things like the advertising and autonomy, and how it raises the room score etc.   Those details are kept in xml files that are easy to decode and edit, and are easier than the old pie menu way.

I'm with the moo. If I had to choose between modders, it would be Pescado all the way.

I have much faith in y'all.

That would be cool if it was true... But base games usually don't come with much. Remember, they want you to "buy" their store crap plus expansion packs. I'm sure we will all definitely "buy" everything that comes out, won't we, pirate cats? ;)

Since recolors are now pretty much obsolete, I hope that meshes can be brought in. I get so bored with maxis clothes and hair, even with unlimited colors.

I just hope there's a way to disable the blur soon. I find it very obnoxious and it seems way bigger than the TS2 blur.

Yeah, but that's only surface-level obnoxiousness. The truth is TS3 is surprisingly light on the surface-level obnoxious behavior, perhaps because you ONLY REALLY GET TO PLAY ONE FAMBLY, and therefore, it becomes rather irrelevant what everyone else is doing. While it would easily be trivially possible to wipe out a particularly obnoxious action, this really does nothing to resolve, say, stupid behaviors associated with it a specific action that is otherwise good, such as the annoying navigational queue stomping, or otherwise simply making the game less micromanagement intensive...although to be fair, with only ONE FAMBLY to play, micromanagement may be all there is to the game.

Ah! The MATYcian love, I expect no less from you. Send me your phone number, you might win the lotto and I´ll call ya :D

I don´t think leaking an early beta of a game that has Securom will do any benefit to the gaming community. It is true that the news is that a securom version was cracked. But they could have waited to the release day to compare between the real deal.

You can play more than one family. It works just like TS2 in this way. You just zoom out until this button comes up to go back to the neighborhood view and select a new family to play. I'm planning on playing all my families in week-long cycles.

Again, what proofs do you have that this is an early beta/alpha version? You're spreading that both here and at the BBS, under your SBlade handle. You wouldn't be spewing rumors, now would you?

Yes, but do previously played families wait patiently for you to come back?

No, according to Pescado, they either die in fires or breed hideous mutant offspring while you are looking the other way.

Doesn't switching families cause you to lose progression?

It depends on the autonomy settings. If it's on high, they'll get married, have kids, etc. without you, but if it's on low, they'll just continue going to work and taking care of their basic needs so they won't die. I have my game set on low.

So I presume the aging off cheat won't work...damn...guess there is motivation to keep the sims 2 around...Anyways, any idea on the new foods avaible in the sims?

There's an aging option in the settings.

Will be set on low, kthxbai. =0)

That behavior is controlled under "Story Progression". However, if you stop playing your current fambly, you forfeit all your current want progress, and possibly godknowswhatelse. All in all, the game is not well tailored for multi-fambly play...and you are utterly hosed if you are trying to do something in two fambys simultaneously!

What do you mean by want progress Pescado, are the wants not like TS2?

It doesn't really sound like I'll be leaving TS2 for this, but I'm certainly intrigued enough to give it the old college try.

Yep, I'm sticking to TS2. *goes on CC downloading binge because my elders still need un-fugly clothes*

Remember those "Boink six people" wants?

Either that, or maybe there's something like "Work out for five hours."

Oh, and- mind if I spread the word? Leave links to this in a few places I know are frequented by other Simmers?

What happens now?

Does this mean awesomeland has averted apocalypse?

Does this mean only the tards in the fan base are moving on?

Can someone with the torrent post pics of the game's fail?

As you can see by PM, I speak of something I´ve tested it myself. If this isn´t a Beta, this is the biggest shit I´ve ever seen.

Well, colour us surprised. TS3 is shit. If only someone had predicted that.

PM, shmee M. You linked to the Demonoid torrent page. The one that lists it as "full game". The one I also downloaded. Nothing on the page you linked mentioned anything about it being a demo. Not one comment, and I went through all 206. So your point?

Notice that I'm not arguing that it's the biggest shit you've ever seen. It's up there on my list. I'm keeping my list of gripes until I've had a couple days to play through.

Parrot, I haven't been taking a lot of pics and none of the UI or popups. I'll get on that. Here's a couple in-game. Notable is that game pic sizes are defaulted at 1024x768 and there are no thumbnails taken. Also, I'm at highest graphic settings:
(http://i42.tinypic.com/4h8k0k.jpg)

(http://i42.tinypic.com/331kuqb.jpg)

You cannot have multiple households in the same neighbourhood. That is the stupidest thing I've ever seen.

Who the hell thought this was a good idea?

Zazazu, those are some fugly ass sims.

You seriously can't play more than 1 sim family per 'hood?

Question for Zazazu: Are the sims naturally chubby, or did you make her that way? Can you change their weight to begin with?

@IAmTheRad and cklayne, and anyone else who either lacks reading comprehension skills or has a limited attention span:

Selective reading = fail

I know it's hard for some folks, especially some noobs, but for pity's sake, READ THE WHOLE THREAD.  Asking questions that have already been answered and making comments that show you stopped reading at a certain point is tres annoying, and serves to solidfy your appearance of stupidity.

This is not the BBS.

I have read the whole thread, thanks.   ;)

From what I've gathered, here and other places, you can *technically* play more than one family, but by doing so you forfeit all progress.  I was simply asking for clarification on this, not asking anyone to preform brain surgery or learn rocket science.  Yes, I made an account (actually, I had one previously, but was usually in lurk mode and apparently lost it in some house cleaning) to ask a question.  Shock and horror!  :P

You seem to have the gist of it, n00b.  If you require further clarification, I suggest arr'ing it yourself.

Well it appears your houses can be subject to random acts on move in. My house was on an indian burial ground, meaning 3 ghost sims where on the lot. You can interact with ghosts as normal sims it seems, but what annoys me is that they use the house appliances. The fire death ghost made dinner and burnt it. I forsee fire!

A lot of the animations are copy+pasted from TS2, I only saw a couple of new ones and they looked odd and jolty in comparision to the others. There also seems to be contact problems with objects and sims, so there are air gaps in interactions. This happened in TS2 as well though. The fights were short (a few sim mins), but it seems that if your sim does have 'performs well in a fight' traits it actually works and they win more, not awesomeware, but it's better than totally random.

In fact my general opinion is: like TS2 but not as good.

That's why I'm lukewarm at best about buying TS3.  All the other content and comparisons between the two games really make TS3 look a lot more impressive than TS2, and then I see the sims themselves...

They don't have any personality.  The faces don't have any character.  They're just spheroids with faces stamped on them.  There's no distinct definition to any of them.

The skin tones are flat and react oddly to lighting. Also, you have no sliders for facial features. You can only choose from a limited number of noses, eyes, etc, though things like hair color and eye color give endless possibilities. All the sims are fugly. In her defense, she was making a face in the second picture.

I made her that chubby. She's slightly over the midpoint on the weight slider, no muscle tone. You can definitely edit both in CAS.

I thought there were supposed to be sliders? I could have sworn there was something in a review of the game about easily-customized facial features. :(

There's sliders to customize face pieces its a tab next to the templates.

Anyone seen the "teach toddler to walk" animations yet?  They are seriously messed up.  The hands don't connect proper to the toddler at all at any point.

Also they seem to pull all baby and toddler food out of their ass.  Although i'd call that an improvement no running across the house to the fridge to grab a bottle of milk or bowl of mush.  Toddlers also finally sleep like normal sims so they don't need to take 10 naps a day.

...So they've basically given us Mr. Potatohead, with customizable hair and eye color?  That turns out looking doughy?  Ugh, uber-fail.

Pulling food out of their ass is no surprise, since they have a tendency to put everything and anything in inventory. Any time they read a book, they put it in inventory. Papers? Inventory. Freaking guitars get popped into inventory by default.

I'll go through CAS again and see if I can't spy the sliders. Kind of bit more off than I should have starting with a two-sim household.

Can't hold off any more.
Likes:

• Load times are great! 22 seconds game load, 18 seconds to 'hood view.
• Saved camera points still work, though the numbers available are 5-9 now. 4 is locked by a new speed type.
• There's no What's This? on move-in. You do get the occasional Check Out New Object for new purchases, but not as frequently.
• More friend type variety...Friends, Good Friends, Best Friends. It's possible there are more, I just haven't seen them yet.
• Collectibles! One of my sims is focusing on finding seeds. She has apple, lettuce, tomato, and several unknown seeds. I haven't had her plant them because she hates the outdoors. You can also collect bugs and butterflies. Maybe more.
• Texture customization is pretty intuitive.
• Love the bikes.
• Build/buy object image quality is great. Imposters are high-quality.

Dislikes:

• No options to determine how a sim gets around on a case-by-case basis. I'd like it if they biked one day, took a cab to somewhere far off, and maybe just hoofed it to the neighbors'.
• The buy display interface is odd. Room sort is all jumbled up. Type sort has some odd categories.
• Edge scrolling is hella oversensitive.
• Even minor wish fulfillment gets a choir of angels? All you did was buy a $100 object. Sound effects well done, but too frequent.
• Some of the side effects you get from traits don't seem to match. An excitable vegetarian friendly schmoozer slob chose to go to a community lot in formal wear. Why? If anything, she should have worn pjs.
• Sim and clothing textures are of poor quality. Light reflection on sims is often done in jagged lines and somehow just doesn't look right. Edges on clothes are also kind of jagged/fuzzy, as is hair.This is with all options maxxed.
• Want divving uneven. One of my sims always had tons of wants thrown at her. Another went two days without popping up a want.
• On making a meal, even when near-death hungry, sim will cook it and then walk off to another activity instead of sitting down to eat.
• No numerical value for relationship score.
• Energy seems to drain incredibly fast. Sims need almost eight hours of sleep, and sometimes even a nap.
• Pathfinding. Sims will stand there staring at the air, waiting for a sim about 10 feet away to pass them.

All-in-all, I can see some definite potential, but it feels very unfinished in a typical EAxian way.

I wonder what's up with taking screenshots. I've taken some print screens of the game and they all look very dark and I've noticed this for all the screenshots from the leaked game. The game itself isn't that dark, but I've had to adjust the brightness and contrast for all the screens I get.

Awesomesauce! One of the comments at the arr site mentions that 'it runs even better than ts2' in his 4 year-old-machine. I'm going to take his word on that, cuz I really don't want to get a new video card.

Considering that it accomplishes this by essentially stripping most of the game, that doesn't mean much.

Enforced Legacy Play? Bleh.

I'm all for playing my own challenge and intend on making a TS3 version of it, but I do hope the game doesn't make you play like that constantly.

Is there no "time freeze" option for families not being played to prevent aging, births, deaths and the like?

You know this comment is amusing coming from you.  :P There is, in options, game options tab, the option to uncheck "Enable Story Progression". This is specifically suppose to block things like marriages and spawning. Right now, I'm playing a single sim household across the street from my initial roommate setup. I can see the roommates going off to work and to community lots. It also looks like they bought a crappy car for their empty carport. After a week, I'm planning on checking in on them.

Interestingly, I stopped the first house at 2:00 AM Thursday. When I added the new house, she opened up at 2:00 AM Thursday. That was messy.

Was this the kind of cruddy 1 bed/bath with a row of flamingos outside? I had the same thing. A ghost buster showed right up and I asked him to get rid of them. There were some nice gemstones in the back yard amongst the weeds.

On tabbing back from desktop view to the game, things go very bright. I suspect it's done some odd changes to the brightness and contrast to give it the next-gen look. Screen captures are awful here. Anyone tried Fraps?

What is surprising? I like the asylum challenge, for example, but would hate it if the general gameplay forced that style of play on me.


On the upside, it sounds like spares won't be quite so annoying anymore. It sounds like you can just keep your heir home and send the spares off into the world to be eaten by the time stream. No more of this 6th generation heir is best friends with a the 2nd generation aunt malarkey.

I wonder if you still get life insurance money from dead relatives that die of old age on another lot...

Seems like neighborhoods would full of death; killing Sims for doing things you don't want them to. If your Sims are 'posed to be poor as fuck but have a job they go to every day while you're not playing their particular house, now will me buying shit while you're not looking?

And for those of us few who have never played a challenge and know nothing of Legacy play, would essentially need, oh, I dunno, 50 - 100 different neighborhoods so that the one family that you're actually playing, won't have any cross play with any other families that have their own goings on? Does that make sense? Basically I'm a nutso micro-manager and I don't want anyone doing anything without my control.

Also, do you have the choice to not follow your Sim to work if you don't want? Boring work is boring.

??


It learns to speak English or it gets the hose again.

Yes, the entire world has a single timeclock for everything, which means it is pretty much IMPOSSIBLE for anything to occur simultaneously in two houses. If you want to coordinate two famblys having kids at the same age, it's a nearly impossible juggling exercise, and you probably won't be able to properly name them, either

That reminds me - do the sims name their own spawn based on the locale, or are you forced to name unapproved babies born to sims you aren't playing?  I'm actually not sure which would be worse.

Does anyone know if there are any videos of actual (non-shill) people playing TS3 that have not been removed by EA for "copyright violations"?

How can gaming videos be a copyright violation?

Really? Can't you just play one house, get the spouse pregnant, then skip over to the other house, do the same thing, and then let time take its course? I realize that it might be difficult to get the timing exactly right, but it seems to me like you should be able to get it within a day or so. There's nothing keeping you from playing one household for a few Sim hours and then switching to another, is there? I got the impression that you were supposed to be able to peek in and out.

Also, re: the name thing -- I remember reading something about notices popping up when important things like births happen, and possibly something about you having control over the names. Have you guys experienced any births in your neighborhoods yet and can confirm that? (If you're playing with story progression on low, maybe not).

I was wondering that myself. :P

You forget that it's not about whether something *IS* a copyright violation, but merely about whether various weak-nerved individuals can be bludgeoned with legalese.

This is why I refuse to use third-party hosting services, preferring to rely on networked resources and domains I control. No youtube, no Botophucket for me.

A few that are working as of now:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hT1K1qzYK5g
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxNHGOIEjeQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljGFFoaaoJE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHH_oET2C1U
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0iTMZLyT64

Nothing too fascinating...the really decent ones have been removed.  The third one is of woohoo w/ craptacular hearts/rose petals.  I recommend going to Google Video, searching for sims 3 gameplay and sorting by date.

I believe it's "If your Sims are supposed to be poor as fuck but have a job they go to every day while you're not playing their particular house, now will be buying shit while you're not looking?" meaning, "You make a family that's dirt poor, and get them jobs, and they go to work while you're playing another house, increasing their net worth, will now be buying (potentially expensive) stuff without my OK?"

Ah, thanks, I guess.  I was searching google video, but didn't realize you could sort by date.  I guess I'll just have to wait for the torrent to finish tomorrow.  Or the next day.  :P

Video snip - http://tinypic.com/r/5ug23a/5

The YouTube videos are not impressing me that much.  The WooHoo, in particular, looks like it's been ripped frame for frame from TS2 with some cheesy-looking petals falling down.  The fireworks from TS2 were better.

Just out of curiosity, how long did it take for some hacks to come in TS2?

Yeah no... I'm just trying to figure out how to marry off a sim. Pamela Snoot (CAS) is perpetual best friends with this guy, who is still showing as just a best friend despite the fact that she has the option to woohoo and try for a baby in bed. Under romantic options, I have all flirt options and the amorous hug option, but no kiss option. Kiss is only available in bed or under her special trait options...Great Kisser. In TS2, they'd be potty training a toddler by now.

FYI, you can totally live off the land. My one girl is making about $115/day from harvesting on community lot trees. There are picnic baskets with free meals in the town square. They can also nap on lounge chairs, or ask to sleep over at a friend's. In fact, her unemployed boyfriend who admits to having no money sleeps at her house every night.

Bloody hells!  I go away for one weekend and there's a "horror pre-release".  I guess I'll be firing up uTorrent so as to be able to annoy myself.  Six pages of this so far has not made me optimistic (especially Zaza's screenshots).

Oh hey, I just remembered:

Did the "choose the Sim's voice" feature make it to the release, or was that all L&P?

When I created my sim, there were three voices I could select from and then a pitch shifter which apparently did nothing.

Huh. Good to know.

About a month, but TS2's scriptcode was very similar to TS1's. TS2 also wasn't encrypted to prevent modification.

Really? In some of the videos that got taken down from YouTube I saw them use the pitch shifter and it sounded like it made a difference to me ... They didn't spend too long on it though.

From what I've read in this thread (And yes, I read all 6 pages) this game doesn't sound like it's even worth the CD it's coded on. And that's with the obviously pros the game has. It's the cons...and the MASSIVE amount of them that have pretty much turned me off to TS3 like it was a fat, ugly chick that smelled like bacon and gym socks. I'll be saving my $50 for something I'll actually not regret buying after 2 hours.

Like Splotch, if you have a reasonably new mac with an intel processor, you should be able to play. Early reporting suggests the crack works. I am about 4 hours away from being able to try it out myself, but I probably won't get to it until tomorrow evening.

Quoted for posterity.
Man, are you in the wrong forum.
Go back to the chans where you can be a sexist internet tough guy without being called on it. Here, you are going to be shredded, your head eaten and forgotten about.

From the pics & videos I've seen, this seems to have a TS1 look & feel to it (e.g. the thumbnails of the sims).

Oh look, a bug.

Finally figured out why I couldn't get romantic actions between the couple or a status past best friend, despite their being best friends for over a week and having woohooed. It looks like the relationship levels score separately. Far as I can tell without actually seeing the code (like I would understand it fully), filling the score for a level prompts a pass through to the next. I never got the pass through. After verifying that it worked in another household, I went back to the trouble couple and enabled testing cheats. I lowered the relationship. Tried increasing to best friend and doing romantic actions. No kissing available, no romantic interest relationship level. Then manually dragged the relationship bar to the apex. Lo, one flirt later they were romantic interests. All went smoothly from there.

personally, I like it when you're riding your bike and cars just run you over from behind and then *pop* there you are again at the back of the car, still pedaling away like the car was just a piece of scenery animation...oh wait!  It was.

Adding to the teach toddler to talk mention earlier, yeah, the script is pretty screwed up. Twice I've had both parent and toddler freeze completely, only remedied by deletion of subjects and reloading the family, of course losing all wishes in the progress. Only major glitch I've really spotted so far other than typical Sims gameplay quirks. Care is advised when teaching your spawn how to talk.

Alright, so I joined to express my opinion about this game. The people making it sound horrible are over exaggerating, IMO. I just got done playing for a few minutes and it was pretty fun, I'm actually trying to do all this as quick as possible so I can hop back on.

The graphics look good and the camera is nice, though I still haven't gotten used to the new UI on the bottom.

I went to the park and found some random guy sleeping on the ground, that was interesting. So anyways, I hit SHIFT+CTRL+C (I think is it) and it brought up the console. I tried the 'boolprop testingcheatsenabled true' and it told me that 'boolprop' was unknown so I tried just the latter... and it WORKED! Awesome, now, because I can wonder around town and check everything out without having to worry about completing things like eating, sleeping, etc.

Anyways, back to the game itself. Without giving anything away, really, the added options are pretty cool (especially the trait specific ones). Also I DO have to agree that there aren't too many appearance options like hair and clothing. I can see that probably being annoying if we can't mod the game.


Here's some photos showing the game. They're downscaled, the actual res is 1680x1050. Sorry if they're too big, I tried to find a spoiler or hide tag, but couldn't.
(http://i146.photobucket.com/albums/r255/eaglesoccer016/Sims%203/TS32009-05-1901-46-03-51.jpg)
(http://i146.photobucket.com/albums/r255/eaglesoccer016/Sims%203/TS32009-05-1901-45-54-19.jpg)
(http://i146.photobucket.com/albums/r255/eaglesoccer016/Sims%203/TS32009-05-1901-47-06-26.jpg)
(http://i146.photobucket.com/albums/r255/eaglesoccer016/Sims%203/TS32009-05-1901-43-56-10.jpg)

The sims don't have shadows.

Whut? They do in the pics right above your post.

One post Tasty Tourist knows more than KBC, news at 11.


Your tea cosy is boiling your brains again.

Just thought i'd mention this since NPCs now go through pregnancies properly.  It's now possible to impregnate half the women in the town and get an insane amount of kids from doing so.  I decided to give it a go to see just how many the guy can spawn.

Anyone else think this would make a nifty TS3 challenge?

Dude, the Sims does not have spoilers.  This is not the kind of game where you get to the end and find out that Snape killed Dumbledore.

I don't see any sim shadows.  I see shadows of the objects not the sims.  The sims do not throw shadows on the table they are sitting at nor do you see their head above the table in the shadow on the ground

Inge, two of the sims' shadows by the picnic table are behind the table/other sims.  You can see the other sim's shadow to the right of white-skirt-wearing woman's butt.

I suspect a tight tea cosy.

Ok I see them now.  That's a relief!  There's something not quite right still, but anyway it's better than nothing.

You're nothing but an Uncouth Undesirable :P

At least they included leftovers and rugs in the base game.

Cheers, those are the first images I've seen. I love the flowers and the surround detail, pity they've managed to lose sim detail in the pudgieness.

So, ttech, are you going to "spoil" us?  What kinds of social interactions does your absent-minded, insane, inappropriate, evil, grumpy sim have?

Nice to get a report from someone who has spent at least a couple of hours playing the game.  Thanks, that was great.

Oops, sorry Pescado, I forgot how much you hate thanks.  Still, your report in the first post of this thread suggests you spent more time in the game than the person I just quoted.

Now to decide who I trust more when it comes to The Sims games: the person who has kept my game playable for the past 4 or 5 years, or some random person making their first post.  Decisions, decisions.

EDIT: grammar

There were things I hated about the game but that I hoped were glitches or things I could fix in the 'options'. now i see more than just myself getting the same crap - the camera movement is sad.

I really like create a style though. I got sick of hearing the eaxians talk about it, but i guess it really was worth getting excited about.

I'm not sure I'll be able to stand the game in the long run or not. Why do the Sims walk so strangely?

Someone said when you zoom out you can pick a new house to play. how? all i get are filtering options and if i click a house i only get an option to visit the house i clicked with the Sim I am bound to. I've switched houses by going to "edit neighbourhood". is there an easier way?

Sims heads are too big and why the hell can't you make their eyebrows thicker or thinner?

"absent-minded, insane, inappropriate, evil, grumpy sim"?
*Perk* /me sits up and pays attention.

Tsk tsk, Inge, double posting?

Tsk tsk Rhaydon, tsk tsking?  :P

Double, double Witch, tsking doubles?

whatever happened to that "asain-ness" slider??  :-\

Those screenshots are wholly unimpressive. This topic is just solidifying how much I DNW this game.

EA destroyed the Sim City franchise with Sim City Societies, now they destroyed the Sims franchise with the shit heap they're calling The Sims 3.

I just found the my documents\Electronic Arts\The Sims 3 directory. (I only saw EA Games in my documents)
In search for a way to put my own music in the game. And am a little dissapointed that you can have only 1
radiostation to place music: Custom Music.

Don't you let that dirty thing follow you home Tasha...you're not keeping it.

This will probably equate to zip but I noticed that although some news agencies have picked up on this already the BBC haven't so I sent them an email directing them to this thread. It would be nice to have our point of view at least looked at. Some of the other news articles are so ignorant, a brief over view of this thread would have solved their dozens of innacuracies (one suggested that EA are being punished for removing SecureRom - SecureRoms not gone you twit, if anything they're getting bad karma for lying to us. Not that I believe in Karma but anyhoo..)

I have a question about playing different households.

In sims 2 you can go from 1 household to another in 1 click.
Is it in Sims 3 only possible to go to the "Main menu" then "start a new game"
to go to a different household?
When I play 1 family I can't see an other way to switch between households.

It begins to look like every household I play is a new neighborhood. I hope I explained it correctly.

It's called change active household. Let me see if I can remember how to do it, cause it is a pain in the arse to do.

Is there any possibility that it might be there by design?.
One of the things that bugged me about TS2 was that any of a sim's friends/best friends could instantly be turned into lovers by a single romantic action. This new design might be there to make sure that romances start as romances, and friends stay friends past the critical point...

I'm not saying that is the best way to do things, just an observation.

Either that or it IS a indeed a bug and I've just spouted some nonsense.

I've been waiting for someone who has a copy of the game to mention this too, as this was one of things I was looking forward to. So far the sims I've seen in screenshots and gameplay vids have seemed very samey.

Also, I hate this whole enforced legacy gameplay business. Why, oh why couldn't they have made it so you can choose the autonomy level for individual households?

This dictatrix is not happy about losing control.

*bangs iron fist on table

So, is Securom only in the Download version? Because some are saying this...

We won't be sure until the game comes out, but that is the rumour.

Ah okay thanks. I was just wondering because people are arguing about it on another forum, one saying it's in the game, the other that it's only in the download version.
Whatever. Didn't "Bon Voyage" has Securom already either?

Yeah, all titles from BV had securom. EA are giving lies and propaganda that Securom is not on the disc for TS3, but the only way I can see that happening is if the version on the torrents is a pre-release. I'm more inclined to believe they lied.

What SecruROM? You are obviously downloading from the wrong group if securom has infected your system, don't use the launcher the usual stuff. My copy is clean, when properly no-cd cracked. If your version has it, get a new crack or iso.

The NFO lists it as being securom protected, but I have obviously ensured that I am securom free.

Actually, with this sort of kneejerk, pointless reaction, you guys are acting more like sheep than ttech is. Whoever they are is obviously un-sheeplike enough to have arred the game, for one thing. Additionally, they have taken their time to post a capitalised, grammatical, correctly spelt post outlining a few points of interest, to which they have attached screen shots. They didn't say the game was unequivocally great, nor did they say that it was irredeemably bad; they simply noted their experience with the game so far and added their opinion that it was not so black as some would paint it.

As for the rubbish about it being their first post and, therefore, not to be trusted, the insinuation is childish and invalid. Imagine that there is another forum, one which Pes, say, is not yet a member of but that you are. Imagine there is an ongoing discussion to which Pes, newly joined, contibutes his first post. Do you automatically dismiss his observations as incorrect and untrustable because he is a 'noob'? If so, then you are an idiot. Judge a post on its content not just on the poster's join date.

People are allowed to have differing opinions, you know, especially when they are prepared to present them in a cogent and considered manner. Sometimes, some of you behave like the coke-fiends of my acquaintance who treat anyone who doesn't want to partake of their drug of choice as though they are engaging in some sort of moral attack when, in fact, they are merely expressing a personal choice.

Yes, BV and all TS2 EPs/EPs released after BV had SecuROM.  <looks like I was ninja'd by Skadi on that point>

The torrent sites are including the following instructions with their TS3 download:

That suggests that the torrent is an image of a disk-based copy.  The torrent sites also advise that the copy protection on the uncracked version was SecuROM, so it looks like the disk-based copy may indeed have SecuROM.

Of course, this is merely speculation based on the available evidence, and I will be happy if I am proved wrong when the game is released.

Perhaps Pes isn't the best example there FB.

EA confirmed several times that there will be no Securom on the disk: http://bbs.thesims2.ea.com/community/bbs/messages.php?threadID=9c697e66b53cb9826ee6a642c297d163&directoryID=225&startRow=1&openItemID=item.225,item.43,item.61,item.104,item.41,item.127,item.23#3dd4e4f42bb309388dfc6c17cf007a2b
I'm so hoping this is true...

I deliberately chose Pes because his opinion on games is so widely respected around here. I am not stating that ttech is, necessarily, a maestro on the same order as the FOJ, I am merely trying to illustrate the point that, in the absence of any obvious idiocy in a post, you have no way of knowing anything about someone's abilities or capabilities from their first post in a forum.

But this is the internets, this is how it works. It's hardly like people were all 'zomg n00b gtfo!!11!', a little light hearted ribbing isn't really worth the effor of climbing up on a soapbox, surely?

Did they actually claim to release a securom-free game? As far as I am aware, they only claimed that the measures enabled were not as harsh as the Splotchoid ones (such as online activation).

FB, the point you are missing is that we haven't had any non-glowing, non-biased reports prior to this thread.  (Nor do I claim that any of the reviews in this thread - including Pescado's - are non-biased.)

The reviews in the magazines that we have seen tend to be glowing - and are usually by people who are quick to point out that they are "real" gamers who don't sim anyway.  The only other reports about the game to date have been from people who were bribed with visits to those "creator" camps they had earlier in the year.  Hardly unbiased reports.

We have already heard how wonderfully super-groovy and ultra-cool the game is from the bribed "creators", from the magazine reviews (by confessed non-simmers), and from EA's glowing pre-release reports.  We want the other side.  We want to hear what it's REALLY like - how the game is going to piss us off and annoy the crap out of us.

We don't need someone coming here and saying "Those doomsayers are wrong guys, in my EXTENSIVE EXPERIENCE OF A COUPLE OF MINUTES PLAYING, I discovered that this game is so much fun ... and this thing is really cool ... and that is really great ... and I really liked ..." without really saying anything negative about the game.  It just sounds too fanboyish / fangirlish.  Besides, we've already heard about what is great about the game.  That's what EA's marketing department has been telling us now for ages.

If I were you cassblonde, I would wait on the video card until the game comes out, that way you can see which cards are going to have issues with the game, a la the nvidia bug. Someone mentioned earlier in this thread about video card issues.

You forget that, as usual, I start on the moral high ground and that, therefore, it is merely a gravity-assisted step down onto my soapbox. Hardly any effort is required.

Anyway, I was merely amused to see people who have not, apparently, arred the game, or played it, poking at someone who has done both of those things and who has taken the trouble to contribute their impressions in a fairly well-written post.

sorry if it's been mentioned before, but anybody know how to kill some sims....
pools don't work to drown they can climb the edge... lol, three games+24EP/SPs to get that
fires are hard if you have multiple sims... they all run into the room and scream like panzies and interactions with anything other than fire and walking are locked out
haven't tried starving yet... but suspect they will go to a restaurant or any public place with a grill or other...

also, any idea who the seamingly unrelated goth ghost is... the one in the goth graveyard... i can't find her on the family tree!

EDIT:
my computer
2.2GHz Core 2 Duo
GeForce 9800GTX+
3GB RAM
runs the game great at max settings 1920x1200, haven't checked FPS yet but the game isn't laggy yet

So I decided to go ahead and bite the bullet so to speak,and download the game despite my original plan not to yesterday. I have to say, the similarities between TS3 and TS1 seem pretty striking, at least to me. Their faces have a somewhat creepy quality to them and are all extremely similar-- I played around in CAS for quite awhile, and had a very difficult time getting a distinct sim that I wanted to play.

The good:
-I like the "opportunities", particularly the ones for the career. My main sim biked over to the local Black Gnome Market at four a.m. and gathered intel for her job, which I thought was kind of cool.
-The customization options available-- sort of. The actual meshes available are very limited, but the fabric swatching tool is nice, at least at first. After the novelty wore off, I found myself wishing there were more pre-made options available.

The less-than-good:
-No memories. WHY? I realize they could be annoying and glitchy at times, but it bothers me that my sims will have no memories of getting married, giving birth, and so on.
-This is minor, but... no coffee maker? Much like my life, ALL of my sims drink coffee daily.
-Cooking now takes a REALLY long time, at least it did for my sim. She was two hours late to work and almost starved to death while trying to make waffles. I can see myself using the "quick meal" option a lot.

Those are just the things that jumped out at me. Honestly, it's not quite as bad as I thought it would be, but I can't see it replacing TS2 for a lot of players.

Wouldn't surprise me, or maybe that's in the collector's edition - they said there was content on that plumbbob drive.

anybody else think that the torrent might not be the final build... or might be a developer/executive copy to show the big wigs at ea, i say this because it does seem awfully light on content and whatnot... and it load in less than a minute two when you include actually going into the neighborhood to play, compared with the sims 2 i get like 10 minute loads on boot when you include loading the hood.

also, anybody else remember hearing about a tool that allows custom hood making to be released shortly after the game goes on sale?

edit:
sorry about all the posts so quickly didn't mean to spam the same thing worded differently... again sorry

The creator camp stuff will be downloadable from the exchange when it properly goes live.

There is supposed to be a second hood available to registered owners from the exchange. Is there anyway to see what build number is on the torrent release?

Does anyone know how to do the gardening thing?  I can't find anything in the buy/build menu that would make a vege garden, nor were there any seeds to buy at the supermarket.  Halp!

A Maxoids word is not gospel. This is what Humble said

quote:
The game will have disc-based copy protection - there is a Serial Code just like The Sims 2. To play the game there will not be any online authentication needed

The same is true of every expansion of TS2 after Bon Voyage and guess what they had? His statement doesn't say no securom and as someone else mentioned the leaked copy is an iso which is an image of a disc, yet the description says securom is the protection method

you could take some classes from the science center place that will give you some seeds to plant, they'll be in you're inventory, click on them and select plant, then plop em where you want to grow them, don't know where to buy seed though...
also, WTF 400simoleans to take a class? expensive...

sorry bout double post... didn't see this post when doing last one...

I have the same card (which is pretty much fried, I think, I had to underclock it in order to play TS2) and the same amount of RAM as you. It works! I have 2.66GHz Dual Core though (and it seems the game runs bit better on one core only). You should be ok. With all settings maxed, you shouldn't experience any particular issues (I have yet to play a huge lot, but the graphic-intensive-looking sea didn't cause a choke). The only thing that takes ages is saving the game. Understandable, 'cause it saves the whole "World" instead of just your simmies' house.


You can definitely press the 'Map view' button and look at the whole hood while your sims are doing their things at home. That's all I can say at this point. I'm not even sure you can visit another lot without your family coming to visit. I forgot :)



Okay, well, I'm not sure what to think after playing for 2,3 sim days (Agnes Crumplebottom). UI is... weird. Not sure if it's but ugly or it just takes some time to get used to it. I haven't touched CAS, except when changing sim's appearance, the game takes you to CAS  ::) It might be a good thing, cause TS2's 'Change appearance' window was too small. The hair and make-up section seem very limited.

The rabbit-hole concept might be a good thing too, in the long run. Sometimes you just want things done. If there were just rabbit holes than the whole thing would so suck. But the normal ones are there to satisfy are peeping needs. Also, I tried to visit another family's home, but they weren't in, so Agnes couldn't go  ::)

The Legacy-induced gameplay is a major drawback. If it doesn't get looked into it, I sure won't play it for as long as TS2.



Phyllis - You won't need the disk after installing and the crack comes with the image fie. At least the one I got. Also, I couldn't open the setup.exe with winrar so I guess it's fine? (I got mine from direct download links in that post 75 linked in that other thread :) )

In my experience, seeds are typically found around town randomly. They're pretty small though so you have to look close. I usually find at least 1 every time I go to the park, and usually more.

I think you can also plant the fruits and vegetables you buy from the store, but you usually need a certain gardening skill to do so.

Once you actually have a seed, click it in your inventory and then click plant, and then you can choose where to plant it. No specific things to buy in Build mode for it, you just plop it down wherever.

So far I've been enjoying the game quite a bit, but on the other hand, I agree with the naysaying about the family play. I like the wishes and opportunities, and losing them when I want to play another family or having to finish them up first is a pain in the butt. Also, I REALLY wish story progression/aging/etc. were a household-by-household option, not global ones. As it is, I'm gonna have to turn story progression off if I decide to make a seperate family to play, because I'm one of those people that MUST control everything.

I don't want my little computer people to run off and get married when I'm not looking! >:(

So i got this about an hour after i got up yesterday, thanks to rapidshare. I played all of yesterday up to about half twelve at night. I first made a sim-self and my bf. I couldnt really make them look like us, even when i figured how to use the advance facial features. My boyfriend could tell it was me because of my blue hair and brown root but that was about it, but i was happy at how diffrent cas was. Not alot of clothes to choose from, and when you recolour a item of clothing it automatically becomes CC.  i picked the traits for us both, big one being im good and hes evil. I went to get us a house and could only pick from four, quite disapointing. So after getting a house, had to get jobs, groceries etc. So after a few hours of playing i wanted to try switch families, and it took half an hour to find out how. Once id finally got to the neighboor hood view via edit town there wasnt any good families that i wanted to play so back again i went to them sims i made. Now i was getting annoyed at what little funds they had and how expensive everything was so i entered the motherlode cheat and did up there house. I was trying to get a baby and it took about the 20th try for them, first time wohooing, but when ever i tried before hand, even with a wish from both of them to have a kid, they kept pushing each other off. So finally theu were pregnant, and one of the cutest wishes my bf sim want was to have a little girl, sad to say it was a boy. The animation for the baby suck, my self-sim has long hair and everytime she held the baby her hair would cover it. So i wanted to give the other families a benifit of the doubt, and i went to try get to them again, and i forgot how to. Now i just pressed edit town when my comp turned its self off. So i thought it may have been a graphics card problem, i had spent all day and night on it, it was probably too hot. So off i went to make some cofffee, so annoyed that they dont have it in the game. So i turn my computer back on and loaded it back up, went to click on my family and it shut down again. Now i stsrted getting worried, got my boyfriend to look at it, turned it back on he fiddled with the graphics card option turned all fans on, now ghis took about half an hour and it was fine. Loaded up the sims and it shut down again, so i left it, till this morning and now my computer wont even turn on.  i really enjoyed what i played, even if there was lack of new animations.  Sorry if there is any spelling mistakes using my phone.

Hello Angelina, congratulations on your first post at MATY. :)

Memories have been replaced by variable duration moodlets, apparently. Part of this is beneficial, if it allows greater datafile cleanliness. Previously, sims that had EVER interacted with ANYONE basically had to be retained FOREVER. This would be a disaster in an endlessly expanding neighborhood, so perhaps the filesize won't explode in a BFBVFS....we will only know when we can open it up in a neighborhood editor and see what disasters have occurred.

It exists. In fact, it's quite detailed, including a bunch of incomprehensible names for no real purpose, as there is no actual distinction. Macrocaffeination is no longer something that exists, though, as coffee does not grant energy, but instead the ability to ignore energy provided you recast every 3 hours. If you are not attempting to function without sleep at no energy, it provides a short-term mood boost followed by a penalty after the 3 hours.

Food is also considerably less important, yes.

I have to say, TS3 is more of a "game" than TS2 was. Unfortunately, GAMES have poor longevity. TS2 was a toy. You made your OWN games out of it. TS3 is a game: You play it their way, beat it, and dump it for the next shiny thing.

(http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/crapola/grammartime.gif)

why, thank you. Ive been a member for a while always lurkin, but i forgot my login so made a new one,  just so happy i cant vent my frustration at the game here, everywere else its NOT ALLOWED and u get shouted at  :'(

You're pretty much doomed to be shouted at. Only instead of people shouting at you for criticizing the game, you will be shouted at for your horrible grammar and abuse of punctuation.

As a lover of Maxis sims... I am severely disappointed with this game. I was hoping to find Brokes, Pleasants, Newbies, Simovitches, Oldies, Burbs, etc. Basically the ancestors of the Pleasantview sims and the Sims of TS1. However, the only returning Sims appear to be Goths, Bachelors, Mrs Crumplebottom and Kaylynn Langerak, which makes no damn sense as she shouldn't even be born yet.

How disappointing. I wanted to see Bob and Betty alive. Now they apparently just don't exist.

And the game itself... well, it's confusing, and all the boxes can be annoying. I dislike how the game practically tries to force you to play one family. Sims are pretty good at looking after themselves. One Sim actually woke up in the night to go and feed herself.

Is it just me or do Sims take forever to even get a crush on each other, let alone fall in love? I had two Sims flirt with each other repeatedly and they aren't even in love. Just best friends. Strange, I seem to remember that in TS2 if Sims so much as looked at each other funny, they would fall in love.

And it creeps me out when I bring up the pie menu and the Sim's face is staring at me. It's so dang creepy.

The buy mode is very perplexing. I eventually found a birthday cake in Outdoor Cooking. Yeah, I don't get it.

well im sorry, as i said on my post i am trying this on a mobile phone, so please excuse the grammar, punctuation and any spelling mistakes. I am trying my best when every five minutes i get disconnected from wlan.

no, confuses me too, especially since i can't get Cornelia and Gunther to woohoo, they're friggen married for christsake...

Errr, Pes, she did apologize/explain any bad spelling/grammar/punctuation in her initial posting...
e.g.

                           thanks

Sounds like married life to me  :P

Re: The interaction non-options:

One thing I've found is that the menus are gradually contextual - after you've done a few "romantic" interactions, more and more "romantic" interactions will appear - IE you have to kiss for awhile before you can give a massage, etc. I think it's an interesting aspect to gameplay, but I haven't decided if I like it or not.

Aha. This is helpful to know.  Aside from everything else (the doughy looking Sims, the neighborhood aging), I don't think people who use TS2 for storytelling purposes are going to like this very much. Also, the Exchange problems going on right now are providing yet another example of classic EAxis customer support (i.e. none.)

Just a quick comment about enforced "Legacy-style" play: most Legacy players I know don't only play one houseshold. Often they play multiple households, continuing to play the spares when they move out.  I never had a huge problem with Generation Two Sims wandering around when Generation Six came along: sometimes I found useful things for them to do much later on.

If I get it,  which doesn't seem very likely, it probably won't hold my attention for long.  I much prefer toys.

Question for you awesome people:

If the retail disc does turn out to be infected with SecuROM, will the cracked .exe from the arr'd version work to get around it?  I've been trying to decide whether I'll return my pre-order if it does happen.  I'm leaning toward "lying liars don't deserve my money", but I want to make sure of my options first.

Also, is it just me or do these Sims seriously run to fat?  The thin end of the scale just looks on the slender side of normal; shouldn't we have emaciated Sims to balance out the obese ones?  Or at least have a couple string beans running around.

if the arr'd version really is really real and not a pregold version yes, if not, IDK

If the versions aren't the same, I'd imagine it won't take long for someone to come out with a proper no-cd crack.

I doubt the  arr version isn't the version being released on June 2nd. If it was released prior to Gold status, I think there would be a case for that.

yes, in all likely hood this recent leak is mostly identical to the one for 2 June, of course barring any changes made when the booty was plundered.

Actually yes, it is a little fitsy... sorry.

No, not lazy, just an idiot. The problem is that the keyboard takes a moment to recognize that I've pressed SHIFT and when I type quickly it doesn't register the stroke as a capital letter. Other times I get the shift on the first few letters of an acronym but it'll conk out in the middle making my letters FUBAR and look like this FuBAr. I really hate that and I need to get a new keyboard, but that's really off topic now isn't it?

Well, there's a tendency to overcriticize, especially in this situation. Because EAxis should have learned by now. All-in-all, it's a pretty good game that definitely has potential and in many ways is more challenging than TS2, but some of the bad points are screaming for mods. Others are balanced by the good. Yet others just aren't fixable...Build mode is extremely awkward, and there seems to be some problem with placing windows where they'll initially appear okay, then the next second the wall is filling them in. Vertical scrolling in Build and Buy doesn't work well for me.

They are jagged and, yeah, not quite right. This was my light reflection beef from before.

Not that I know of, and even that had me stumped for a bit. You have to go to Edit Neighborhood, then something like Modify Active Household. Then it yells at you that it'll be wiping your sims' promises (aka, Pescados gripe about want progress).

I started off the relationship with her asking if he was single and complimenting him on his appearance (both under flirt). Neither had commitment issues or any sort of trait that should stop them from having the kiss interaction. I tried with identical sims (trait-wise) and was able to get them to romantic interest in just a couple hours. With these, they were best friends, with me spamming Great Kiss...kiss/makeout, eventually living together, making a baby...yet no status change. Definite bug.

Yes, you can definitely watch other things while any and all sims you are following are off doing other things. I use the time they are off work to track down collectibles or new people to befriend, or just watch others go about their day. The town square, especially, is always really active. You'll get a popup when your sim is done with a class or on their way home, and a little tracker do-job when you have them selected, ala the sim trackers on SC4:Rush Hour.

Copying styles is actually pretty easy, if not obvious. In Buy/Build, click on the Create-A-Style button (the palette). You can create as normal, or you can click on an existing object part and drag to another object, then pick the "section" to be matched.

Interesting quote from bit-tech.net (http://www.bit-tech.net/gaming/pc/2009/05/18/the-sims-3-hands-on-preview/4):


This is a pretty good and fairly detailed preview. Scroll down and read the last sentence and have a laugh.

Here's an album with 17 screenshots and notes on each. Enjoy. (http://s232.photobucket.com/albums/ee18/ZazazuAbubu/TS3%20previews/)

That was interesting, Zaza.  It's good to get some shots and insights from someone who is playing.

Is it some kind of reflection on our society that they all seem so chubby?  I know there's been a push for more realistic body types -- and hey, I'm an extra chubby myself -- but jeez louise!  This is, like, overkill.

Thanks for the pics.  The scenery looks fine.

Sims look pretty good indoors???  All these sims look more cartoony than the TS2 sims.  There's also something about their eyes that makes them look like plastic robots or living vinyl dolls.  TS2 sims had a more realistic look.  I found that I wanted to play the castaway sim on the television more than any of the sims in the other pictures.

Hopefully there's some way to create slightly less goofy sims or TS3 is going to get excruciating really fast.

Thanks for the look, Z. IMO, compared to how the TS2 sims look right out of the box the TS3 sims don't look half bad to me.

All I can really think to say now is that I won't be dropping The Sims 2 anytime soon, but I won't be dropping The Sims 3 either. It genuinely doesn't suck massive... well not as far as base games go.

Thanks for those pics, Zaza. I do think the Sims look a lot better indoors. Out of doors, especially for the light-skinned Sims, they look really odd. I'm really looking forward to some custom skin tones, but except for the weird lighting issues, I don't think TS3 skintones look any worse than TS2 Maxis skintones.

I think the eyes are the best of these new Sims ... watching video and seeing the eyes move around is really awesome.

Re: the "fatness" issue ... I've seen some TS3 Sims that look pretty thin, in their face as well as their body. It seems like it's easier to make rounder faced Sims though, which is why we see more of them. I don't know ... I think a lot of people have somewhat weird ideas about how human beings are shaped. Most people in real life have rather roundish faces. It's only on TV and in the media that you see people with ~chiselled jaws~ and such. But we like to imagine otherwise about ourselves, I suppose. I think part of the reason too that the TS3 faces look so round and chubby is down to shading on the skintones. I'll be interested to see if some good custom skintones affect the way the faces look.

NOT an excuse, especially for the walloftext. You are on notice, too, choobooby, for suggesting that there is some kind of free pass for crackberriers. Besides, even if the phone explains the capitalization, it doesn't excuse the apostrophe abuse. Spelling and grammar count, people. Don't make me eat your heads.

WARNING!!!
I would make this flashy, but then it would be annoying.

Guess what? Unticking "Enable Story Progression" does not work. The household I'm playing is right across the street from the first one I started, which had two singleton women. They had a guest come over, so I took the chance to spy inside. There was a toddler on the floor. A toddler named Haeju Schmoe (awful name), meaning he was the son of one of the roommates. Neither roommate had a romantic relationship, and they certainly hadn't been getting busy when I left them. Now I find out that Ms. Schmoe was getting it on with Milton Townsend.

Traditional Legacy play is fully enforced, it would seem. Not happy.

Well!  Tsk tsk upon Ms. Schmoe!  Brazen hussy!

Seriously, that's so annoying!  This game is not going to meet my goddess-complex needs.


ETA: I wonder if I could manage to take a couple of hours off this afternoon.  I want to explore this horrorshow for myself so much that it's making me nuts!  There's something very wrong about that.

Yeah, that's the dealbreaker for me.

It'll be too late by then.

Four-month delay and they still didn't include an option to totally disable global aging?  EAxis fail.

Hello, long time lurker, first time poster.

Is anyone else having problems with the music playing in their game? I can't hear any music in build or buy modes, although options tells me there should be some there. (It also won't play via the music tab in options). It doesn't play from the stereos either, although when I fired up the game for the first time last night there was some playing.

Aging and story progression are two different options.

Edit: Zazazu, did you try changing the autonomy levels?

You seem to have to hover on top of the stereo to hear the music coming from it. Not that you're missing much, the selection is very short. They should have ripping the music from TS2 and actually give a proper selection of favourites for our sims. I recommend muting the music, getting a stereo for the happy mood, playing in windowed mode and listening to your own pirate cat music.

I have a particularly lovely collection of Sea Chanties, by the Tabby Cats.

This is so sad... it's as if EAxis is encouraging players not to give a hoot about their Sims and if they die or fall in love or get fired or buy shit you don't want them to have, then it's all just a bit of a laugh.

What was EA thinking? WHY do they have to do the stupidest things possible?

And on another note, how the hell do you get your Sim to bike? I bought one and placed it in all kinds of different areas around the lot. Nothing's working, when I click it it says there's no interactions available. What am I doing wrong?

I was thinking that too. My game should finish downloading by the time I get home this afternoon. The reviews aren't making me happy. I still doubt I'm going back to TS2 though

Just a guess - in TS2, sims needed to gain skills in order to do things.  Do they need to skillinate on anything to learn how to ride the bike?

Or, alternatively, it could be one of those actions you initiate through clicking on a Sim, like going for a hike in TS2.

The bike has to be in your inventory, then they should use it automatically to go places except work/school most likely. Yeah, it's weird.

Let me guess: fishing in the pool is a "feature" too?  From this guy's inventory, you can tell he's actually catching stuff, too.

http://www.gamesguide.nl/artikel/10352/de-sims-3---doorspoelen/

Yuk.  Now I wonder if it's even worth torrenting.

Going back to the pics you posted on the previous page - I'm really starting to hope that this isn't the gold version.  I mean, they are kidding right?  They didn't really give the repo man one of those horrible backward baseball caps, did they?  *Wonders if it will be possible to kill the repo man and replace him with a sim that is smart enough to know how to wear a cap*

Right, I tested all the music and the only one that actually works is custom. Odd. I have found that folder but can't find where the other music is stored, does anyone know? May have a play around in there if I can get to it.

Oh snap  :D

Bike will work from the rack for going to community lots. I haven't figured out how to change the transportation mode for work. You're supposed to be able to, but for the life of me I can't find this fabled transportation options menu of which they speak.

It's a trait perk.

No, because that shit is global. I don't want the sims I'm watching standing around staring at the air until I tell them what to do. Will look at it, but if it's going to create zombies, forget it.

Dawnkay, mount the .iso and then open it through My Computer. You should see a folder called "Crack". The .exe crack is there, as well as another file. That other file is a keygen.

All signs point to this being the final version. Anything you read about "beta version" smells of shilling or wishful thinking by bootlickers.


I've found two locations, unsure which is more important than the other:
\ts3\GameData\Shared\NonPackaged\CustomMusic
\My Documents\Electronic Arts\The Sims 3\Custom Music


Check the crack folder, you stupid noob.

I doubt it exists. My teenagers and adults use the family car to go places sometimes, but other times use a taxi, and they will always carpool for work unless you tell them to use the car yourself.

When your sims are in transit, there is a dropdown menu from the action. Click that instead of cancelling the action and you can modify things.

Oh, well, that's a genius spot to put it  ::)

I guess it makes some sense, but seeing as how you're usually in a car for maybe 10 seconds at most, it's easy to miss.

Thanks so much Zazazu.

OK my Sim started automatically taking his bike when I told him to go somewhere. He still runs to work if he's outside his house and he's late, even if his bike brought him into town.

I had the realisation when playing just now, how awesome the game would be if it behaved as it was advertised - imagine if you had control over every house at once, and all you had to do was zoom out and click a new house to play it. I think it would make all the little annoyances even littler, and all the difference in the world.

Yes, in stating my own opinion, I know more than this 'KBC' character.


The 'spoil' tags I was referring to was something to hide the pictures, because I didn't know if they would stretch the forum for people using small res monitors. Also, he wasn't that exciting.


Meant to post back earlier but I was too busy playing the game. It's pretty fun, but I can understand if the same people who are going of heresy already want to deem it a 'horrorshow'. Anyways, figured I would register to give people good news but I see that y'all are all just EA haters at heart and stuck on the thought that this game is trash, so I think I'll be going. It's just a shame I won't be around whenever you try the game for yourself and have to eat your words... Yes the game may have a few problems, but overall it is a good game and worth playing over TS2.

You smell like a shill or at least a bootlicker. Perhaps if you were less stupid and managed to read the entire thread you'd know that many of us actually ARE playing the game.

if you check the .exe date, you'll notice that it's about april !
that's means the version around the net of ts3 isn't the final release, but probably and RC. (Release Candidate)

anyway, the fact that all sims look like a children, the old one too, remain :P
i think it looks too children style for my taste -.-

MATY is not exactly a place where you can bounce in and say "No, it's great!".  If you really want to convey your positive impression of the game you're going to have to do better than that.  Why are the things that bother everyone else not bothering you?  What are the things that make it worthwhile?  People are posting these sorts of impressions, and they're interesting to read in a way that "This game is good, losers" is never going to be.


Most of us hate EA because 1) They install nastyware on our computers in a futile attempt at copy protection and 2) We see the potential in the Sims games, and hate to see how badly EA screws them over with lack of bug-testing, listening to the community, etc.

I've played for... way too long. Several several hours.

The Bad:
Interface is cluttered, like Pescado said. Bothers me a little
Its' hard to make different looking Sims. Sliders are there but the change they make is rather small. You manage but it takes some teethgritting and going back and forth the sliders. All Sims tend to be very round faced and look pretty much like you see in the screenshots and videos. Very hard to get away from it.
Way too little clothing/hair styles. CAST makes up for it a little but still, shapes are shapes.
Skins look better then I expected but still have this icky plastic sheen.
Makeup looks fugly and phoney. Looks decent with natural colors that are close to skincolor but any more radical colors look terrible and don't fit the face at all.
Sims are still god damn stupid. I get a lot of whining for not being able to sit down when another Sim already went there. Siblings/parents/etc ( twins! ) still refuse to go to bathroom/toilet at the same time ( no privacy plx! ), presumably if they aren't RLY GUD FRIENDZ ( my two Sims who were lovers didnt' seem to mind eachother ).
They said there won't be as much having to go to pee. But it's there, oh it's there.
Skillgrinding. Much more so then in Sims 2 I feel.
Testing Cheats don't give the usual pie-menu as in Sims 2 :( no playing around with stuff. Can still move motives and such and reassign Traits / force aging to older.
In the end, not a whole lot to do. Get a job, breed, grind skills, repeat. Of course I'm kind of a stupid Sims player.
Babies look hella creepy.
Some things are just plain confusing: no idea how to get married :S No idea how to force-age toddlers/babies before 6pm on their birthday ( birthday cake made my adult age to elder, doh... might've been because I had Testing Cheats enabled ).
STUFF takes forever to do. Between skilling, working and taking care of basic needs, I feel like there is little to no time to be social. It may All Be In My Head though since I'm a stupid Sims player. Having more then one Sim in the household adds to the stressfullness :/


The Good:
CAST. Deserves all the woohaa there is of it. My only problem with it is that I have hard time focusing down on what I want since the choices are nearly limitless.
Sims look prettier. They aren't beautiful, but at least they aren't as ugly as in Sims 2 ( without CC ).
Game runs fast. For now. And my puter isn't amaizing HC gamer rig. More like a Sunday gamer rig.
Interactions based on your Traits are fun. The moodlets ( buffs/debuffs ) are also a bit funny. My Neurotic Sim sometimes gets a small debuff for not checking the faucet for leaking and a buff if he checks it.
More freedom with placing objects is for the win.


Shall go back to lurking nao.

Some tech sites are alleging that the leaked copy was, in fact, from the digital download version of the game--an edition we have been told *would* include securom and phoning home. It's not clear as yet whether or not EAxis has violated its promise about the retail edition, so perhaps we oughtn't jump the gun on it.

Uh, so if we play another household our other playable households will start reproducing with townies without our control?  ???

If it was a digital download, then why do we have to use a no-CD crack with it or whatever? I think it's the CD/DVD version.  :)

How did you turn them on? Using "boolprop testingcheatsenabled true" as in the last game doesn't work.

Woah, interesting! Can anyone else confirm this?

I agree.  If ttech had read the entire forum, he would have noticed that the important thing when posting about the game is to include facts with your opinions.  The Sims 2 has attracted so many different sorts of players throughout the years that it's impossible to simply say "it's great" and expect everyone to share your opinion.  Instead, a good poster (Pes, Za, etc.) will say why he/she does or does not like the game -- and will give information beyond what we can find on the official site.  Do I think I'll end up liking TS3 more than 90% of the people here at MATY? Yes.  Do I think that gives me the right to disparage the forum and its regular patrons/founders?  Hell to the no.

So what you're saying is that EA has managed to discover a process where they can make modifications to the game up to the very minute it's put on shelves? Or perhaps you're just an idiot.


Smells like EA-based cover-up.


BAD NEWBIE! NO DOUBLE-POSTING!

Well, I'm just repeating the story I'd read. But were I to wager a guess, I'd say that the digital activation exists precisely for that reason; after it phones home, it would not require a crack (like Mass Effect or something).

Thankfully, using the crack and pointing out shortcuts at the exe instead of the launcher solves that. But I'm still optimistic that the retail DVD version won't have it. But I'm a sucker for positive thinking, so...

Has anyone with the game determined whether there are any supernatural creatures beside the ghosts? Even in the base game for TS2 sims could get abducted by aliens. Of course, I don't expect the range of creatures we have for TS2 + exps, gotta milk the fanbase as much as they possibly can, but I'm curious as I do have more fun with the vampires or witches. I'd check myself, but it's been 24 hours and I'm only at 56.7%. Hurr.

Yes.

Several other posters have already pointed this out. However, the leaked version DOES contain a disc image. Probably won't know for sure until June 2nd, though.

I didn't realize this, thanks for the tip. I'm all for having my Sims' houses coordinating properly, but don't particularly want to spend hours on end making sure the bedspread matches the curtains.  :P

Just remove the "boolprop".

As far as I can tell, there are no aliens or vampires, which admittedly sucks. Somebody else feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.

EAxis themselves have confirmed this in a number of interviews.  Their thought is that now that you can touch/talk to/woohoo/reproduce with ghosts, they are the base game's supernatural creature.  Anyone have a ghost baby yet?  I'm personally not such a big fan of the ghosties but am really curious as to what a "ghost baby" looks like and how it behaves.

I would like to see you upload a video where you show us your grammar skills when using a phone. Bitch.

Angi, don´t takee the gremmar murons tou seriuos hera.

This is MATY. Land of assholering and MOAR fight for the sake of fighting

Ghost babies? That's a complete DNW for me. Reproducing with a ghost kinda negates the point of ghosts in the first place. :/

So has anyone tried to disable story progression, aging, and set the free-will to low? I was under the impression if we did those things basically families would be like they were in the Sims2, except they they would go to work and you would see them around town... they wouldn't make any big decisions on their own. And as for the wishes resetting, if you played different houses in the Sims2 often when going back to the original household, wants and fears would be reset.  Is the wish resetting somehow more of a problem to players than Sims2 want resetting?

I've never had wants reset when switching between households. Unless a playable sim has gone on a date with another playable sim from a different household, I've never seen the wants change. Just me?

The more I'm seeing of Sims 3 the more it reminds me of a beefed up CONSOLE version of the sims 2 franchise.  All the collectibles (the giant bugs made me laugh) just smack of Sims 2 castaway.  While I enjoy Castaway, I've never played it with the level of addiction that I have sims 2.  Nor have I ever had the urge to make up little stories about my castaways.

While there are some things I've seen that look like they would be fun they just don't seem to warrant having to start over again with a base game.  I can just fire up the old PS2 and play the "gotta collect them all" game (or just play BV as it was intended) for a few hours without the hassle of no-cd cracks and all that annoyance.  And for the cost of sims 3, I could just round out my sims 2 game with the EP/SPs I don't have (that is if the SPs go on sale--what's with them still being so damn expensive!).

But since I'm nosey, can someone out there tell me how baby birthing goes down in sims 3.  Do you have to call for an ambulance to get the mother to the hospital (since she was shown bringing the cocoon baby home from a hospital)?

From what i played yesterday i had some opportunities pop up, but i didnt get any for the third space. Has anyone got any for this and if so what were they?    

Even when I had a crappy phone and had to T9 everything, I still used capitalization and punctuation. If you're against this, you're a complete waste of flesh and air.

Next time Im posting on this forum while using a computer, I shall type what I want to say into a word doc and check for errors.

To be honest I find that some hairstyles from sims 3 look like the hair Peggy makes in
Sims 2. As if a rat ate some hair.

*unlurk* please don't eat me :P

Good grief, this game has my graphics card (HD 3850) instantly jumping to 99% load and 70c before the opening intro has finished, nevermind actually playing the thing. I know ATI haven't got the best reputation for good cooling, but I've not got a single app or game that manages that, and it's not an old card.

If I may have a moment of tin-foil hat-ness, is this to be expected of a game of Sims 3 calibur and EA's notoriously inefficient coding, or is something more suspicious going on here, with the arr'ed files? (edit: suspicious .exe aside, since it's been found out and replaced) I'd expect high load for say, the neighborhood view, rendering shadows and reflections and whathaveyou. Not when the game is still loading up, during the menu, or a full system crash when my game is paused.


Back to actual gameplay, I second the major DNW of not being able to switch households. I like to build up my entire household and micromanage every relationship between them. Not having them breeding with random other sims when my back is turned, and losing progress when I want to switch. That just kills it for me, and for most of the Simmers I know.

I do like the moodlets, and the sims seem less moody overall to allow for skilling. The opportunities seem interesting to add to the mix, and while I like having more control over the facial proportions, they still all look far too chubby. I'm all for eliminating size 0s from modelling and the like, but some people that size do actually exist.

I have to say that the game's graphics remind me very much of the "Desperate Housewives" game or Kudo's. As a matter of fact when my nieces got in from school they thought I was playing "DH". It's pretty interesting though. I just can't wait for mods/cheats/cc.

I do have a screenie I wasn't sure if I could post it here.

This is actually not a bad idea. Typing like a moron makes people think you are a moron. Do not do it if you expect help around here.

I tried this and as far as I could tell, nothing major happened to my main family. However, the aging is an all-or-nothing deal, meaning that nobody was aging at all.

Actually, when I tried to play another family, I noticed something strange. One of my sims, Hank Goddard, is woohooing his female partner in law enforcement but didn't have her in his relationship panel at all when I played his family, and in fact had a completely different woman listed as being his partner. However, when I went back to play his partner's family, all the relationships were still intact.  :-\ Not sure what it means, but it doesn't seem to bode well.

ETA: Because I wasn't clear, I thought I should add that I played her family for about 10 sim days with aging and story progression on before I tried this, so she should definitely be in his relationship panel.

The settings are GLOBAL. That means that if you disable aging, you disable all aging. That's not Sims2, that's Sims1. Disabling story progression does a big fat nothing, as already explained. Setting autonomy even to low results in zombie sims. I tried it. They just stood there while they starved.

The wish reset really isn't a big deal unless you're holding on to a high-scorer. As it is, those are few and far between.

I've done one in-house and one in-hospital. Once you get the notice that the sim's water has broken, you can click on them and choose "go to hospital". They will then take a cab along with their spouse (spouse will follow if occupied). A couple hours pass, and the baby is delivered. Mom walks out of the hospital and you name the child. They then go home.

On home births, the mom stands there and makes lots of faces and noises (honestly, sounds more like constipation than labor to me). This proceeds for a couple of hours, during which she cannot interact with anything. Then she has the baby and you name it.

Interestingly, while there is a "Having baby" moodlet, there are no negative effects.

You do that. Also, look up "apostrophe" in the dictionary.

I know there's all this argh and frustration about the horror, but this made me LMAO.

Anyone installed on the mac yet, or I am I going to be #1 guinea pig this evening?

Is it possible the setting is inverted? Still a bug, though.

Mostly, though, the endless spawning sounds horrid, because anytime things start reproducing, you're going to see an exponential curve.

Since the university and I disagree on "appropriate use of university resources", it looks as though you get to be the guinea pig for now.  Hopefully I'll be able to join in a little later this week.

Edited to fix quote.

Kaylynn Langerak just effing died. By getting struck by lightning 37 times at some lightning rod tournament, apparently. How did I find out about this? By having Cornelia Goth read the paper.

Part of me wants to break something. The other part of me thinks it serves her right for having fallen in love with an ugly Sim the last time I checked on the household.

Having Sims who aren't even old randomly die when you aren't playing their household really sucks.   :-\

I've always been told I'm funny when I'm pissy. Every time I see that unrequested demon spawn across the street, I start cussing, in full-on WV accent.

I got a phone call telling me that Gunther Goth didn't have long to live and that I might want to say my final goodbyes. No one in the family knows Gunther Goth. Oh, there's a little Kaylynn Langerak, as well as the adult one. Perhaps she's supposed to be the maid.

Maybe. Might as well try it.

So even the sims in the household you are playing don't age? Gah...that does suck. 

Well, that sounds cool :D

Feel free to throw rocks, but I'm all for unplayed sims living their lives, spawning, getting killed randomly... I've been trying to accomplish the very same in TS2, with randomizers and stuff, but this is just more natural. This could be a godsend. I just hope there's some kind of limit, and the towns people won't spawn when that limit is reached. Chances are there's no such limit, knowing EA :(

See, that's waht I'm scared of. I don't want to return to my favorite household and see my kiddies are phantoms.

This game reminds me way too much of the PS2 version of The Sims2 (cheesy).I'm still going too hold off buying it for now.I sure hope the modders can get in thier code and fix this garbage.Looks very buggy too me,then again it's EA what else did I expect lol.

Cons: I slightly exceed graphical system requirements, yet the game threw me into all low settings the first time I tried to play. I'm getting it to look decent after some fumbling, but I'm surprised at how horrible TS3 on medium settings looks vs. TS2 on medium settings.

UI is less intuitive than TS2. Messy, even the tutorial is just... messy.


Pros - I'm surprised no one has mentioned this yet, but I'm really excited (providing it works) - windowed mode without editing a shortcut!
Adjustable lifespans - only downside is that I assume it is global vs. per household. I still like that you can shorten or lengthen the lifespan without cheats/mods.

Build - Gotta love recycling! I'm getting a bit sick of the same windows/doors/walls/etc being recycled through now three incarnations of the game. The idea of no new meshes makes me want to weep. I have a TS2 addiction to new windows. I am surprisingly delighted by some of the small things in build - the auto roof feature, the dragging of walls, the auto quarter tile placement and 45 degree rotation.


I'll add to this as I discover more about it.

Apparently buying sets of objects from the Sims 3 store will cost between $5.75 and $20 according to this site: http://simmersnews.blogspot.com/2009/05/sims-3-store-set-prices.html I hope they'll be easy to share like the TS2 Store items because everyone who buys the game gets $10 worth of Sim Points free. I'd be willing to share what I buy if it's possible to do so. The only bad thing is I heard that the EADM has SecuROM and I don't want it on my computer.

Well, it works, but the performance is much, much, MUCH better in full screen mode. For me, it's practically unplayable in WM. It even says so in the readme file.

It seems that a lot of those sets feature Sims 2 items. ???

The reloaded iso is the digital download version, as can be seen in the EULA that everybody clicks past without reading:

"ELECTRONIC ARTS
END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT
FOR THE SIMS 3 GAME
(DISTRIBUTED BY DIGITAL DOWNLOAD)"

also

"B.  Technical Protection Measures. When you purchase the Software online via digital download (the “Digital Download Version”), you receive a Digital Download Version of the Software that uses SecuROM digital rights management technology provided by Sony DADC Austria AG.  The SecuROM technology is integrated into the Digital Download Version of the Software and is not a separate installation. For more information about SecuROM, visit www.securom.com and http:/faq.securom.com/.  By installing the Software, you acknowledge and agree to the Software’s use of SecuROM.  An internet connection is required to authenticate the Software and verify your license (“Online Authentication”)."

So that would explain the phoning home, no idea why it's on an iso though.

LAAAME!

I always play TS2 in windowed mode.

This makes me sad in my pants.

It runs great for me in windowed mode. I can't see any difference between that and full screen.

I've just been playing the game for a few hours. So here are my thoughts:

The Good

Personally I don't think the clothes are that fugly for Eaxis.  WIth the Sims2 base game the jeans were all awkward and all the tops seemed to show belly or fitted awkwardly.  Overall I loved CAS. Although I do prefer cartoony sims, my skin for the sims 2 is the maxis match one from gos, the whole thing was far superior to the Sims 2 CAS.  The create a style is brilliant. My sim was geared up in leopard print clothes throughout, and her formal wear was a bondagey leather thing.  What's not to love?

The game is addictive.  I meant to go out for a run tonight, then i saw it was dark, well dark. As in half ten at night dark. I started playing the game at 3. So despite what I complain about (a lot) you don't get bored.

There are a few wee things that made me happy:

If you're shagging the boss you can get a promotion.  I had my woman, Joanne Boyle, at the same level as the Wollfe guy (she ruined his marriage). Then when  I went to play him it turned out she had been promoted (despite just having a baby).  Then the Wollfe guy was able to ask for a promotion from Joanne. :D

Careers are hard.  I guess that's a good thing, more realistic.  

there is the relationship 'ex husband' and 'ex wife'.  

The Bad

I like to play on a rota. I play 8 days one family, and 8 days another.  Like was said at the begining of this thread- that doesn't look possible here.  

Babies keep on popping up the houses of single guys.  The amount of time I was playing meant for them to be toddlers then someone would have to have given birth in the time i'd played the game... but the guys were on their own.  

romantic relationships build slowly.  Fair enough they want to be realistic. But what about the realistic side that you get drunk and sleep with a stranger? Well actually, they sort of have that to.  Before you can kiss, before you can even massage people, you are able to woohoo and make babies.  You can kiss on the bed though. Bug perhaps?

Worst part of this was I was having my guy pure woo this woman, then I turn round and she's become an elder. Before he even got to shag her.  I was llike :/

I have problems with my speed. Not the sims 2 storage kind where everything seems to lag.  This is just not a very fast speed. I'm wondering if it's my computer (or the lack of space on my computer) or the game wants us to watch our sims sleep.  

Also, complete bullshit about needs being easy now.  my sims are constantly tired. Moodlets are useful- but without them getting your sims to work is a nightmare.  

I just think if they'd  tacked the open ended neighborhood onto the sims 2 that this would be an amazing game.

I really don't get why I truly dislike the game, but managed to play for about 7 hours straight.  

Me too, because I had to, but I got so used to it :( Also, alt-tabbing is horrible. And I get a little 'Memory Recovery' window? Not sure if it's a windows thing or one of my long forgotten attempts to improve performance (2GB RAM here).

WM runs fine for me - there was a slight hang up loading the town that I didn't have in fullscreen, but this is comparable to TS2.

Wait wait, these people saying they have random toddlers popping up in their houses:

Could your people be autonomously ADOPTING while you're playing other people? If this is possible, I call EXTREME WTF and stupidity on EA's part and DNW O.o

okay. Long time lurker first time poster.

Spent the entire day (and most of the night) yesterday playing TS3.

Honestly...since I'm not a extreme micromanager...I guess some of the complaints others have aren't the same as I would. I.E. Not being able to jump into multiple households on the fly.

TBH I usually play one household at a time and that's it. From everything I've seen so far, it's not as polished as TS2 + EP's. But then again, it's the base game.

I like how the sims are 'smarter' about their needs. I walked away from the comp at one point and forgot to pause the game. Went and made dinner. Came back 20 mins later and my guy had not only taken perfect care of himself...he'd gotten a promotion at work and pumped up his cooking skill. Had I left my sim alone that long in TS2...he'd be passed out in a pool of his own piss cause he forgot to go to the damn bathroom or go to sleep, and most likely lost his job. I say this is a step forward.

Honestly, I haven't found much to complain about. Well no, that's not entirely true. The pudgyness of all the sims faces is something of a WTF. Regardless of how thin a sim is...their faces are still really pudgy. Also, I don't quite like the way you can't just go for a jog like you could in TS2. You have to manually select where they go. :(

Way ahead of ya. Thankfully, Sims 3 actually plays very decently on the Mac, unlike the crapfest that was TS2. Unfortunately, it looks like shadows are permanently set to low. Installed on both Mac Pro and Macbook Pro, one with ATI card, the other with Nvidia. Well, no shadows on either. Interested to know your results. Other than that, it plays great, but it's so bland and Sims-2ish without working shadows that I'll be playing via Boot Camp for the time being instead.

Have to jump in here with my two cents after having played for several hours over the last 2 days.

A short list of things I dislike:

Again with the faces. 3 hours in CAS and I can almost get rid of the round, play-dough jaw, almost.

Pathing/Action cue (I am not entirely sure which this would fall under). I had a female sim visit her male neighbour who already had a friend over. The friend and the neighbour were in his kitchen, 30 steps away I told the woman to go talk to the neighbour. All 3 sims proceeded to stand around looking stupid for the next 2 sim hours with the neighbour standing in the kitchen doorway facing out, the friend standing directly behind him and the female sim waiting in the hallway facing the neighbour while she waited to go talk to her neighbour. Once I cancelled the "chat" action they all lept into action where the neighbour took two steps forward and one to the left and let his friend go past him out of the kitchen. Presumably the standing around looking stupid was due to the neighbour having to move out of the friends way but was unable to because he had to go chat with the female sim ? (confused!)

The neighbourhood. I feel like I have been transported back into TS1. You can not place empty lots. You can move pre-made lots (to empty lots that are appropriately sized) and you can build on the existing empty lots, but you can not add more lots (unless I missed it in the mess that is the UI, someone please tell me I missed it)

Unfulfillable wants and lack of notification/mystical, magical knowledge of happenings in the rest of the 'hood. Female sim is pregnant by male from another household. Switch over to male's household, play for a few days during which female presumably gives birth with NO NOTIFICATION to the father. Mysteriously he is suddenly aware he has a child (shows up in the relationship panel as his "son" despite having never met the child or even seen the mother once since the conception) and "wants" to hold his son. Send him to go visit the mother's household. Find the baby laying forgotten on the floor screaming and father is completely unable to interact with the baby. Two sim days later, again after zero interaction between the households and father now happily engaged to another woman, he rolls the want to teach his (now toddler) son to talk. Another visit to the mothers household and he is still unable to interact with the child. I have not tested if he could interact with the child were he to invite them to his house, of course I haven't figured out how to get the mother to bring the child with her either.

There are many more things that irk me, most have already been covered in other posts. Suffice it to say while I was reading every other post with complaints I was nodding in agreement.

Likes:

Some of the redundancy has been removed from actions. For example, a sim can be relaxing/reading on the bed and you tell them to go to sleep and they will simply slide under the covers and go to sleep rather than get up and go through the whole process of getting out of bed just to get right back in.

The ability to simply slide a wall over to adjust the size of a room rather than have to rebuild the whole room - when it works properly!

C.A.S.T. though the novelty does wear off very quickly and I find myself wanting more/better texture options.

Overall I think the game has potential. Unfortunately, I don't think that potential will ever be realized and TS2 with or without mods is still a much more polished game offering more playability over the long term.

Of course, that is just my opinion :)

Edited because punctuation is not my friend.

Thanks, Pes.  This just confirms how much of a DNW TS3 is for me.  If I can't make a story, or at the very least, have to base it on THEIR story, then what's the point?

I'll stick with my Vetinaris.  All the lovely hacks get rid of the annoyances, and I can be happy in the knowledge that the Sims I don't like spend eternity alone and unloved instead of finding ways to make themselves happy.

Heh, well, that EULA does confirm it then.

As for why it's on an iso--simple, it's the standard way to package releases. Remember, even most DVD games are not direct rips--they have to add a crack directory to the disc and then re-iso it.

Not if I have anything to say about it. I already have ideas for challenges just based on the broad concepts we've heard thus far, some Legacy related, some completely different. I'll make a toy of it yet! Frammit!


*edited to fix quote*

That looks like generic boilerplate. Digital downloads DON'T HAVE ISOs. I know what a Reloaded rip of a digital download looks like. See Empire: Total War. It ain't an ISO.

This is true. To counter this, if your version behaves this way, you need to mount the ISO, copy all to HD not autorun it, and unRAR the executable archive and extract the "Real" setup and run that.

Pescado: That's because ETW was distributed on Steam and contained no setup program--it was downloaded as the installed application. That's how Steam works.

Different digital distributors operate differently, and some of them require you to download the setup files first and install them yourself.

Can some schlub who has experienced EAxis digital downloading in the past verify this statement?

I did have to install Splotch after downloading it from EA.

And was it arranged in a directory someplace in a manner exactly like mentioned above?

I have a deja vu of Pets, when you had your playables autonomously buy critters in community lots, so when you go play their households again you find them buried in cat hair and dog poo.

FIRST hack to convert from TS2: Babby BBQ.

A search of my computer revealed the "C:\ProgramData\Electronic Arts\EADM\cache\{ 2267420097 }\spore_dd" folder with what appears to be setup files.

(http://i40.tinypic.com/6s89wi.jpg)

So...

Why exactly is this single-household-forced gameplay (apart from sims living on their own when uncontrolled, I don't mind, see below)? I've seen only promises vanish when going back to household #1 from household #2. Everything else remained as it was (skills, relations, that lifetime points thing, job level...) Of course, I might have missed something huge. Also, I only spent like a 1,5 day at household #2, so sim from household #1 didn't have quite enough time to spawn or die.

I think I can live with my speshul families falling appart while I'm busy elsewhere. It might be a good thing after all (if it's not absolutely horribly done, I still have no idea how it's done), it will certainly break us out of our routines.

I actually like that, but anyway...

No. Demon child is definitely the genetic daughter of Ms. Schmoe. She has the same hair color, down to the subtle blue streaks. She also is extremely ugly.
(http://i40.tinypic.com/1zvvgqd.jpg)

Well, I've played for about 4 hours.  It actually is not as bad as I started to fear it was from listening to some folks' opinions.  I've only played one family, so I can't comment on what happens with multiple family play.  The Sims look different than what I'm used to, but I'm adjusting.  I'm still having navigation issues, but I'm adjusting, especially since I found the edge scrolling box to check.  I think the buildings and landscaping and everything are really, really nice to look at.  

I guess at this point I'm still just a little overwhelmed by the differences from TS2.  I was much the same when I started playing TS2.  And I also tend to proceed very slowly and cautiously with a new game.  Chosing locations on the map is stressful.  I wish I could choose from a list, like when calling the taxi in TS2.

I kind of like the way buy mode is organized.

I'm not sure what else to say at this point.  However, I'm thinking it may be hard to go back to TS2 after seeing TS3.  I may be wrong, though.  Guess I'll find out.

Ahh, the use of the word "haters".  So revealing.  A word that didn't exist when I was a 12, and a word that tends to be used by fanboys & fangirls when anyone dares to criticise their favourite whatever <insert "Leave Britney EA alone" macro here>.

As I already pointed out, we know the good stuff - that's what EA's marketing department has been telling us for ages.  We want to hear the rest of it, the stuff EA tried to gloss over or sweep under the carpet.

Ttech, you'll have noticed that there are quite a few player reviews in this thread (including generally positive ones, like the one phyllis just posted immediately above this post) and you'll also have noticed that YOU are the only person copping flak for their review.  Why?  Because the other reviews in this thread - even the positive ones - don't try to hide the fact that there are flaws in the game.

Take off your rose-coloured glasses and step into the real world.  No game is perfect, no game can be perfect.  Stop trying to convince us that the game is virtually flawless, because nobody here is naive enough to believe that.

@ Zazazu, did you see the father? Just wondered where those cheeks come from. Maybe she will grow to a descent teen? Hopefully.

The cheeks don't scare me near as much as the jawline of doom. That is one very unattractive kiddo.

Holy crap. Those eyebrows. D:

Maaaan. Now I kind of want to try it, but there's no way I'm dropping what little money I have on it, and I'm too scared to get caught to ARR.

I'd only agree on the "coolness" if the screen flashed immediately from the sim you're playing to Langerak as she was being struck.



Odd part is her face approximates a rectangle....with ears.

Well at least Ugly Legacies (or however the hell they spell them) wont die out as more and more players switch games - I'd say that little girl would be an ideal founder. It'll be interesting to see how different the genetics play out - it seems like there are far fewer face templates/archetypes to start out with, and I haven't personally noticed whether or not the game tweeks them on the pre-existing sims.

...I sort of want Zazazu's demon spawn for my Uglacy.  I was gonna marry the next-gen spawnlet to an Ottomas-clone, but that kid has little piggy eyes and a square face and a mammoth jaw and a teeny little mouth...  And this is somehow supposed to be a step UP from TS2?  I mean, DAMN, I got alien kids in my game who look better than that, and they're seventh-generation Uglacy!

News is released about the first Sims 3 paysite (Sorry, Sims Store)

http://simmersnews.blogspot.com/2009/05/sims-3-store-set-prices.html

Some comments on there hint that perhaps the reason there is little content in the game people are seeing is because EAxis cut it back to enable them to sell it via the Store.  People are pissed.  Not exactly a surprise to cynics here but perhaps an indication that the copy of the game we're seeing is the final copy.

As far as household switching goes... it's frustrating to lose wishes, yes. However, on the bright side, neighborhood saves are very small (25mb as compared to 500-1500mb in TS2, depending on buggy savegame bloating) and so it's very easy to start completely fresh and play new households. It's a simple matter of copy pasting a save, which you couldn't do previously.

So it doesn't really make up for it, but it might mitigate it a little... and since it seems losing wishes is a feature rather than a bug (they do tell you about it, after all) I think they could easily change that in the future. Who knows, maybe we can too? It does seem kind of a pointless "feature," I agree.

I understand the pessimism, but I have to say I am rather pleasantly surprised. I find it enjoyable and after the initial shock (I hate how rotating with the mouse is so bloody slow) I think there's more to like than to dislike. That doesn't dismiss valid concerns, of course, but I am wondering if the disappointment is a bit inflated.

Cuddling in bed might also cause a freeze glitch. So far that's two I've found (the other being teaching toddlers to talk)

Oh, it's daddy's jawline. He's been around and is a coworker of the guy in the family I'm mostly playing. She and Nathan Finkle, my first intentional spawn, are best friends, so I get to see her all the time. She seems to also have the evil trait.

The need for way too much sleep really comes into play with babies and toddlers. About halfway through the night, they get dangerously low on social, so you have to wake everyone up to cuddle the dumb baby. Also, game likes to set them to sleep until well rested. I noticed sleep need maxxed out at 6:30, but status was still "sleep until 8:00AM". Watching them is necessary, because it seems that if they had it the way they wanted, they'd sleep half the day away, all while the kiddies scream from loneliness in their cribs and work goes on without them.

I miss macro-clean.

Good discovery: you can get new applicable skills at new skill levels. At around level 3-4 mechanically, you can repair sinks, toilets, and showers to be self-cleaning. Then you can supe up stereos. Then can make ovens self-cleaning, and at 5(?) can make items unbreakable. With gardening, when you meet certain criteria, you get perks. At level 10, you can plant something called the omni plant. After 650 plants are harvested, your plants need less water. Information about unlockable skills is under the skills tab, in this button on the right called the skill journal. You can only see it once you've gotten a point in a skill.

EDIT: Update on unrequested spawning: Keeping story mode enabled gives the same result. I went to check on that couple I'd made to figure out if I was having a bug regarding the romantic relationship trigger. They now have a toddler, and she's pregnant again. They hadn't even gotten busy when I left them.

I bet most of you haven't played around with community lots yet, but here's a small discovery I made today. All the rabbit hole buildings in town are available to build on community lots, meaning that you can totally customize the town. You can probably remove/move city hall and build a house where it used to be. Too bad you can't recolor anything yet. Still, this gives some interesting possibilities if we can eventually make our own rabbit hole/career buildings.

Unfortunately that makes sense, at least when you look at how money-grubbing EA is. I know it's just a base game, but even so there's only a handful of actual meshes for each section... it's pretty weak, especially when you've gotten used to having tons of CC choices in TS2.

Do we know if its the Beta or Final yet?

Nope.  And as much as we can hypothesize, we won't know for sure until June 2, when dumbasses like me buy the thing and compare versions, etc.  Or, you know, if EAxis tells us...not that we can trust them, of course.

Hello stupidity. Meet an answer several hours old already.

Anonymouse at Snooty has confirmed its the Beta version:

http://www.snootysims.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=34&t=29110

Rest easy, folks.

Snooty Sims is a pile of wank maybe? And your link fails you balls for brains, be more intelligent.

Here is a working link

http://www.snootysims.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=34&t=29046&start=440

Anoynmouses most is closer to the bottom end of the page. 3 cheers for anoymouse and his detective work!

It's Snooty. They would remove it pronto. Snooty can be very BBS-esque.
And who is Anonymouse? SBlade under another name? I trust nothing without credentials. .Exe date is in April, approximately 2 months before release date. Considering time for burning, packaging, and shipping, having a two month span between close and release is perfectly within parameters.

<reading updated link now, but I'm holding to my opinion so far>

Just a bunch of wank from an anonymous source, most likely a shill or bootlicker trying to obfuscate the matter.

Aww we're all d-nozzles and Anonymouse is their god. Be more easily lead, sheep.

2 months is that all? If game puplishing is anything like book publishing I'm surprisied it's not much longer than that. In fact I take the evidence of 2 months as PROOF it's the real copy. Any shorter and I would be more wary of the file.

Printing 1 DVD doesn't take long, printing many thousands and installing them in cases, then distributing them? Now that takes time.

Nobody knows for sure one way or the other until the official release - except in the extremely unlikely event that whoever cracked it steps forward to tell us where this was leaked from.

All we have until then is speculation, and all Anonymouse is doing is speculating.  Reading other posts by the same poster in that thread, it's clear that there is an element of wishful thinking in their speculation.  They've expressed disappointment several times in that thread and they clearly want this to be the beta version instead of the final release, so they went looking for evidence to support the "beta version" theory but didn't look too hard for evidence to support the "full release" theory.

Quoting for posterity, my opinions in bold:
So...anyone who actually knows shit here have an opinion? The dev code stuff has me stumped.

I want to believe, but I am out of Blind Belief tokens for today. :(

I want to believe too, but not even my extreme F-liness can stretch that far.  Logic keeps getting in the way.

3 x INFPs posting in a row, and none of us F-ly enough to believe it.

The guy doesn't even understand the different between a rar'ed file and an untouched one:
Yeah...

A new level of disgust for me.  This is flat outrageous.

The only argument I have that the leaked version is a beta is that the Finnish translation isn't fully complete, although this being EA it doesn't necessarily mean anything. I just found it weird that Sunset Valley is Sunset Valley even in Finnish even though in Sims 2 all the neighborhood names were translated. Also some of the street names are in Finnish while others are in English. Also all the townies and pre-made families have "foreign" names while in Sims 2 they were all... err... "Finnished". But as I said this doesn't necessarily mean anything.

Not the first time EA have done this.  It happened with the baby items that were initially going to be part of FT.  There were pre-release screenshots of the objects in-game and Maxoid promises of "new objects for babies" in pre-release videos.  But they were pulled from FT, and are now available in the Sims store.

Here is why the game sucks donkey balls as far as I am concerned, based on my massive play time of 2 hours-ish.

Most of the action in the game takes place only in the sim's head, aka the control panel with the wants and the moodlets. For instance, my sim got in a bad mood because she had a cold shower. The indication that this happened was that it popped up in her moodlets. Looking at her sim with the GIANT BLUR in the shower, I had no idea this happened.

Later, she was talking to someone and was "humiliated". How do I know? The control panel told me. Her squishy cupcake of a face changed not one whit during the experience.

Useless. Useless and boring. What am I supposed to do for 6 hours when she is at work? I tell you what I did, I knitted. Also, I figured out that "motherlode" works, so then we could fuck the job thing and go get humiliated by some more random townies.

You can... Look in CAS.


Lol, you make me laugh. Google 'The Sims 3 Store' and get a clue.


Sure, on the uTorrent support forums.


Surely EA isn't that stupid to leave a bug that major in the game... oh wait.


This is caused by trying to run the installer with winRAR, stop that! Extract it.


I have found if, after you've extracted Sims3Setup.exe and you can't get it to open with winRAR, it is safe... it should give the error above. If it opens and you see the codec.exe in it, then you have the virus one. Another way to tell is the real Sims3Setup.exe is 389KB and has a file date of 4/23/2009 4:00AM

Anyway, why does everyone recommend DAEMON Tools and mounting and all that? I leave mounting for the bedroom and open ISO's with winRAR. It works perfectly fine.

I played for several hours last night and these are my impressions so far:

Good:
It loaded really fast, I expected to be waiting for years with a neighborhood like that.
You can use stuff in your inventory by clicking on it now rather than having to drag it into the world first.
Male bulges are bigger. (yeah yeah, I'm not lusting after computer people, I promise)
Traits are pretty awesome but I feel like there could be more.
Switching between fullscreen and windowed mode in game options is total win.
The needs seem to still matter as much as they did in Sims 2 (so they lied) which I was worried about. I know it may get tedious after awhile but this is what the sims is about for me... they do seem to take care of them better now which is good.
Males have underarm hair! I'm so used to them being ken dolls.
The neighborhood is great, the rabbit holes look good, it's all decorated nicely and looks good.
I like the way build/buy mode is layed out.
No loading screens is awesome! I also love the way the town feels alive and sims are everywhere.
New grave designs are win.
Moodlets are win.
What they did do with CAS was a step in the right direction but I don't think they stepped far enough.


Bad:
The tutorial was really really messy and unorganized. Your sim wants to buy a couch! Well la de da! He already has a couch dumbass!
What's with only 4 premade houses that aren't being lived in? I couldn't find anymore...
They said you could make ANYONE (look! another lie!). I spent 2 hours trying to make myself, studying a picture and all, and didn't come THAT close even after messing around with all the sliders. A few of the sliders even seem pointless as the change they make is very subtle.
Where the hell are male nipples? They are very very ill defined.
When I make a sim chubby, their thighs are 10x bigger than their lower leg which looks so odd.
People with a good sense of humor don't go around 'making silly face' 10 times a day EA.
The global aging and story progression settings are fail. They should be lot specific. The switching households and losing wishes isn't a big deal to me.
I agree with people, it's hard to kill the redundant round face shape.
Why can't I place lots empty lots where I want? Step backwards.
I don't like how they pop in and out of cars, what's wrong with opening the door?
I saw two cars drive right through each other, fail!
There needs to be more clothing and definitely hairstyles, and not in TS3 Store either.
I still have the extreme urge to kill townies. One rang my door bell and I invited her in. What did she do next? Throw away the unprepared dinner I was working on that I stopped to let her in. Kill!
Thumbnails of sims don't really look like the sim to me. They look even more clayish and silly in them.
Why can't I have a simple list of destinations? I don't want to jump to map view and back to send them somewhere. And there's too many damn icons, It takes me forever to find what I want.
Buildings don't get their model and render till you let go of the mouse. I understand this was done to prevent lag while scrolling but if you're making a story, it could be suckage as a house suddenly goes from a low quality blurry building to clear as you're moving the camera through town.

Overall I think it has a lot of potential but the question remains if EA will send it in the right direction. I love the neighborhood moves on and is alive (but the clock on city hall doesn't move!) and everything feels much more detailed. I want a setting to stop some sims from aging and going on about their life while I'm not looking but if I don't get it, I may get use to it. The way it's made now, they seem to have cut story tellers out a lot.

I think custom content ability has been extremely cut down. It looks like they locked up the game so you can only use stuff from the exchange / sims 3 store... I can't even find a option to package my sim to a file. This one might turn out not be as modable as sims 2 is and that's going to piss a lot of people off, me included. You even have to install that EADM to install patches it said. DNW!

I predict a lot won't give up Sims 2, me included. This seems really fun but really restricted which is going to hurt the replay value of it a lot.

I want to play this trainwreck for myself- you guys have piqued my interest- but I foresee myself going back to Sims 2. The amount of bugginess described is just ridiculous.

Holy shit! Ms. Schmoe appears to have been raped by Diesel 10 from Thomas the Tank Engine!

Its quite apparent this is the final version. If it wasn't EA would be telling people that to save their ass. People are complaining about this version and if it wasn't the real version, they'd be telling people that so that people don't form a judgment. If they lied they'd be called on it.
So the fact that they haven't said anything means its the final version.

Actually, no. Read my next post. But I appreciate your "can-do" attitude.

This is something I've been worrying about during the whole pre-release propaganda stage. All the talk of rabbit holes and texty "missions" at work made it sound like they're moving further away from visible "watch it unfold" gameplay.

They've been going in this direction for a while now - the lamecore tours you don't get to watch in BV, etc. If something happens in my game I want to see it. Or imagine it. I don't want to be notified by a pop-up or read a description. Otherwise I might as well be playing a text-based RPG.

Also, I doubt TS3 will hold my attention for more than a few months if modding is severely restricted. Hacks are the only thing that made TS2 playable. Curse you, EA!

Developers leave turds in game files all the time. TS2 itself is full of such turds dating back to TS1. At least half of the crap in TS2 is either vestigial or nonfunctional redundant crap. This is mostly related to the fact that they simply decide it is not worth budgeting time and money to removing detritus from files, because it's not their hard drive space that's limited, anyway.

That's gotta be the most disgusting looking sim I've ever seen. I'll take the ugly baby syndrome from TS2 then these silly putty lookin' mawfuckaz anyday. The more I see screen shots of this game the more I wanna gouge my eyes out with a rusty screwdriver. I've played Nintendo 64 games that had better looking game models then this.

To be fair...the female doesn't look too bad.

And most of the models in game I've seen haven't been too fugly.

It's the damn kids that are just eye bleachingly horrid.

Well, finally got a chance to witness the horror, I was quite mortified they gotten rid of the hot tub. Oh well, at least we can wait for the countless expansions we have to pay for to iron out the kinks and add more borkings. Though I wonder what level I got to be to eat dim sum

Okay all, just found my screenshots folder...cause I'm special in the head like that. Anyhow, I only took one picture so far apparently. <.<

It's of the family I created Kyson (the dude in the medical uniform) and Shinari Moonrider. This was taken when I had left them alone one night. He apparently wanted to watch TV and she decided she wanted to read a book. I thought they looked interesting together and took the shot. Enjoy.

(http://i31.photobucket.com/albums/c397/Vanni127/th_Screenshot-4.jpg) (http://s31.photobucket.com/albums/c397/Vanni127/?action=view&current=Screenshot-4.jpg)

Edit: It is a clickable thumbnail. Didn't want to take up your entire screens.

In action, it's actually more involved than TS2 careers. In TS2, they go off but you don't see where they are. In TS3, you do see where they go (big whoop), but can determine how they spend their day. As they move up the career set, more proficiencies are needed. In the beginning, you just need a good mood. Then, a good mood and relationships with your boss/coworker. Then skill proficiency. At about halfway through, Abraham had to choose whether he would follow the rock star fork or the symphony fork in the music career. Since his LTW required symphony, that's what I chose, but he then had a whole new set of coworkers to befriend.

You'll get opportunities that pop up from careers that you can choose to do or ignore. Doing them almost guarantees a promotion. Sometimes it's as simple as "take this report here". Sometimes you have to read a book before work, or learn a song, or do some sort of activity like playing in the park for tips. The same goes with part-time jobs, though they only seem to have the standard three levels. You can get higher wages by completing opportunities.

For skill opportunities, I've only seen mechanical and gardening ones. Those seem to always be given over the phone, so you have to make sure to always answer cell phones. Rewards are usually monetary (which you need, money does not flow freely in TS3), though one I couldn't complete due to my current lay of crops would have given a new type of seed.

The career and opportunity set-up is fantastic and is half of what I knew I would like, along with the traits. So far, those are two for two. Unfortunately, everything I thought I wouldn't like is also living up to expectations.

Two pics. I'll post more to a Photobucket album tomorrow so as to give updates to those who want it, but it's really late here:
(http://i39.tinypic.com/2ppyb00.jpg)
Demon child as teen. She looks permanently pissed off. I really like her personality, though. Evil rocks.

(http://i39.tinypic.com/2dt16ol.jpg)
The two Finkle kids, who are much more normal looking. Note the odd hair on the boy: doi! CAS setup for the mom transferred to offspring. Genes seem to be equally weighted, which does make sense when you are picking eye color from a color wheel. 

I LOVE that the weird hair colors are genetic. That is orsum.

I may have to get the fiance to arrquire this for me (he is much more adept at arring than I).  Seeing screenshots is one thing, but I suddenly have the desire to experience THE HORROR for myself.

In one respect, it might work nicely if I feel the need to play Legacy style.  Let those sims kill themselves off!  Oh, that reminds me: do townies respawn to replace those who have kicked the bucket?  I remember reading in one of the plethora of L&P that they would, and this idea made me sad.

Then again the fiance arrquired Splotch for me months ago and I still haven't gotten around to testing it out.

or maybe you shouldn't use a pc ? purchase a ps2 and play with tic-ta-toe it's more easy than interact with ppls :p

what i say is that "The Creation Date Of the .EXE FILE is About  APRIL"
so, if the game will be released in June that date is too far !

or ... maybe you aren't so smart to undrestand the EAxis marketing tactics :P

- this is, for sure, a far version from the gold version.
- gamecopyworld haven't actualy a noDvd solution for that game, and this can be another confirms about the ambiguity of this version
- i know a guy that build cure for GCW and what he says about this version is that is a bit too far from the release date to be the gold one, and a site like GCW patch only the released games.

so that's why I THINK, this isn't the final release.

BTW i wonder WHO THE FUCK U R to spit your crap on me
Fly low and connect the brain to the finger before post. thnx :P

Anyone who thinks this version isn't the release version can keep dreaming IT IS.  The file date doesn't mean crap.  If you finish work on file x long before the release date and it doesn't need changing why would you touch it any further?  And naturally they need about 1-2 months before the release date to package it together, send it off and get it mass produced.

I've found some bugs but overall i gotta say the games pretty stable and quite enjoyable.

You don't have to answer your phone for opportunties i NEVER answer the phone and the popups come up anyway as soon as it stops ringing.  Some of them are pretty easy and good paying.  I had one to upgrade a shower and got paid 1,250 simoleans for it.

If you really want money though you should go with the criminal career.  My girl is constantly swiping stuff while at work usually nets around 1k each time.  I had one lucky time that she stole some statue worth 12k as well as a smaller one worth 1k.  While working there's also the option to do a side job you can rake in a couple hundred bucks from that as well.

I still haven't worked out the kleptomanic trait it seems odd to say the least.  The option to swipe stuff seems to pop up randomly and only ever in the middle of town.  You can't pick what they swipe either.  I should mention that the criminal career gets you the sneak interaction although it seems pointless as you can't steal stuff.

I haven't seen any fugly npcs so far they've all been pretty good looking as well as their spawn.    I did find it odd that the kid i booted to the neighbourhood had a kid without giving me notification.  I would have thought it would mention such a close relative having a kid.

Oh the save before having a kid doesn't seem to work anymore.  Tried it like 8 times and got a boy everytime.  First two pregnancies were both boys.  Next generation on i got a girl as i wanted but ended up with twins.  I think they might be identical but it's hard to tell since their only toddlers alot can change.

Well, I played the game too, and surprisingly I like it very much. Still, there are some huge things that bug me.

The biggest one so far, is that sim can go from fat to thin and from week to strong in one workout. But even more, they return to their genetic weight in half a day.
I read about returning to your genetic weight and created chubby sim, so there will be a need to workout. I send him to workout on day 1. Next day he eats one, ONE pancake, and here he goes chubby again  :( I just hope that this wil be fixed somehow by patch. Or this will be my number one want hack.

Another thing that really bugs me is planning hairstyle. In Sims 2 you could go to the mirror and plan hairstyle to every clothe style right away. In Sims 3 you can have separate hairstyle with every clothe SET (which you can have 3 per style), but you have to be wearing that set when you use the mirror to change hairstyle for it. I want to preplan. And I want to do it the easy way, damn it.

Of course there are also little annoyances, like I can't expand catalog to see twice amount of objects like I did in Sims 2. And apparently you can't move paintings up/down the wall. Please tell me I missed this option.

And as a little treat, so you won't think it's that bad:

My own little FortNox:

(http://i26.photobucket.com/albums/c126/Blackcat007/Screenshot-7-1.jpg)

Apparently butterfly cages are stackable, hurray:

(http://i26.photobucket.com/albums/c126/Blackcat007/Screenshot-5-1.jpg)

Photo made by my sim of his first not burned food, and his goldfish Alvin:

(http://i26.photobucket.com/albums/c126/Blackcat007/Screenshot-8-1.jpg)

Great pics. The food looks nice. Sorry no moving windows, oops pictures up and down, said it in the creator camps blogs.  I know I will be looking for it out of habit.


EDIT: I have been up too long. Going to sleep now.

Heh, I suspect this was made to have sims that stay looking the way we made them look, rather than undergoing gross physical changes and then never reverting back, because, frankly, there's no such thing as "genetic weight". There is a genetic baseline fuel consumption, but none of this provides WEIGHT. Nobody can become fat when there is no food. Those who are fuel-efficient are more predisposed to becoming fat when fed the same amount as normal people, but fuel efficiency is not the same as genetic fatness.

I found a lovely bug didn't notice it earlier.  On sims that are born the last trait you pick does not show up in the sim panel or more to the point i don't think it saves it.  Not sure if it affects all sims or its just a random occurance.

Edit: Alright i think i know the cause and a way to fix it.  Cause as far as i can tell is having the simology panel open when you pick traits.  The way to fix it is to NOT have that panel open when you pick traits.

Well, I can live with this whole process of reverting back, just don't want it to happen THAT fast. I t would be alright if say my sim will workout three day in a row, finally become fit, then won't workout three days and become chubby again, similar to sims 2. Right now all this happens in a matter of hours, literally eliminating the need to workout, cause what's the point, if sim will be fat again tomorrow. And with the rate sims get tired in this game it’s almost impossible to workout everyday and still have time for something else.

Where?!? There's a bunch of eyebrow options (under the Eyes I think), but no thickness.

Also, sims can't buy new clothing/plan outfit now, can they?

ETA - Also, everything we make gets sent to the evil Launcher (sims, clothes, screenshots...). Screenshots are easily accessible, but what about those other things? If I run the launcher, it'll give me securom, huh?

(Also, I unplug my internets just in case. It's not like anything at all could run while TS3 is running.

That seems to be for community lot-based opportunities.  I was in the beach while a chess tournament was going on, and the Opportunity to play in the tournament went into the third slot.

I've only played the game for about 1-2 hours, but I have a few annoyances.  I miss finding out information about my sim - like how fat are they on the fat scale?  Also, I have no clue how long pregnancies last or how to tell if mine is almost done.  Maybe there are icons or buttons that I'm missing somewhere (God knows there are enough of them), but it just seems like there is less info overall.  Also, babies need a lot more attention and stay babies for 3 days and toddlers for 6 - ick.

Too bad there isn't a prima guide that was also leaked.

The option literally doesn't exist, as far as I can tell. It is possible to pick differently-shaped eyebrows that might be thinner, but BEWARE! The eyebrows between male and female sims are neither compatible nor analogous, so what you get on a male sim will continue to look like a man's eyebrows when passed onto a female sim, either by flipping the knob, or by genetic inheritance. I mean, granted, no one really wants wussy, girly eyebrows, but at the same time, you don't REALLY want to get women with HUGE EYEBROWS, either.

I have a weird question. Would it be at all possible, some time in the future, to extract meshes from TS3 for use in TS2? Of course they won't behave the way they do in TS3, and I can imagine there would be fixing of code required, but would it for example be possible to make those pretty tree- and shrub meshes work in TS2 as original objects?

There is no technical reason why they can't be, although you may have to rescale and remangle them.

If you go under Hair and choose Eyelashes and Eybrows, they have a bunch of different thicknesses of eyebrows.  Then you can go under Eyes, choose the Advanced option, and click on the eyebrow to adjust the height, curve, and ... something else, I forget. Not thickness.  So you should start with an eyebrow of the thickness you desire, then modify it for shape and placement.

I don't think the trees and shrubs will look nice in sims 2. Basically, they are a set of polygons, that always turn their face towards you as you move the camera. By this they actually make up the lack of  detalisation. In sims 2 they can't do this, and so will look strange and poor.

You can use any mesh in any Sims game, it just has to exported and imported the right way.

Ah, yes. Good thing there is a roundabout way, but it would be nice if they included that simple, little option. Thanks!

So, what about getting sims a new set of clothing, is it possible?

And the launcher? We shouldn't run it, right?

(I could further investigate the clothing thing myself, but I'm in a lazy/busy mode to actually start the game. If someone already knows a simple answer it would be nice to hear it.)

It's not so elegant, though. The eyebrows themselves define the SHAPE of the eyebrow. The male and female analogues have entirely different versions that do not appear similar. As a result, you get some WEIRD, FUCKED UP SURPRISES when you breed them or flip them. The effect is much like Buttolino nose syndrome, only it happens for ALL bodyparts. Before you commit a sim, particularly a male sim, I suggest you flip it over to female just to check what the "analogue" face is. This is where the fug comes from.

Long time lurker here, I haven't arr'g the game, don't intend to for personal career reasons, but have a few questions for those of you who have;

1. does it look possible to replace all ea made sims with ones I make myself?

2. is the merge option in this version? I had read earlier reports that we should be able to merge the saved games into one another. I thought this would give us the ability to make our game more like ts2's saving lots.

3. advertising? any signs that the game we buy will be overwhelming with billborads etc.?

4. testingcheatsenabled - is the option for "set to birthday" there? if so, if aging is off, can you age up the sims you are playing?

thanks

cyn

No. EAxis will make more.

There's no such thing as a "merge saved games", but it appears the game MAY be more tolerant of attempting to export sims between neighborhoods. All friends will be lost, but without memories, there may be less detritus following you around.

I have not seen any attempts to phone home on my firewall, so if there's any advertising, I'm not seeing it.

Yes. In fact, that's the ONLY OTHER OPTION THERE. Testingcheats is really a misnomer now, it doesn't enable anything testy, it's purely woolprop.

OK, I sort of suspected it might be a "trick".

After 9 long years (since Sims 1) Sims can FINALLY watch tv from any angle.  :o  This has always been one thing that irritated me .

(http://img42.imageshack.us/img42/2328/screenshotr.th.jpg) (http://img42.imageshack.us/my.php?image=screenshotr.jpg)

Actually Pes, Shift-Click the mail box... More options.

Shift-Click the ground you can teleport.

A few random thoughts:

Hats separated from hairstyles in CAS - FINALLY.  But since when do simple braids or a ponytail constitute a hat?  Also, I thought the advent of create-a-style would mean the end of having to scroll through thirty-seven screens of the same damn hairstyle, the only difference being the color of the barrette.  Ditto for outfits; I want ONE of each model displayed, and I can take care of my own colors and patterns, 'kay thanks.  Of course if they did that it would be even more obvious that we only got fifteen actual outfits with the game.

Add some more hate for the round faces.  I like to make sharp-faced, pixielike Sims; the best I could do here was vaguely heart-shaped.  So not impressed.

Some of the buildings on the map don't seem to have flags.  My test Sim had rolled a few wishes to take Handiness classes and gain skill.  It took me forever to discover the unmarked army base in the lower left corner of the map that housed the classes.

One thing that initially amused me but is getting old:  the test Sim has the Evil trait, and whenever I click on an object, I get "Take Evil Shower", "Fiendishly Eat Quick Meal", "Evil Dance", etc.  As far as I can tell, the actions aren't done any differently than the regular kind, so why the distinction?  It just seems silly.

Overall, I'm enjoying myself, though I'm not sure how entertaining it will be once the shiny rubs off, especially if mods are out of the question.  I guess we'll see.


Oh -- one thing that made me laugh.  I had a burglar show up on the lot and just as he was getting ready to walk in, my neighbor raced over from her house, beat the piss out of him, and drove him off.  Awesome.

ETA:  That was metaphorical piss.  No actual pee was involved.  It occurred to me that, being a Sims game, I should clarify.

YAYYYYYYYYYY!!!!!  Bene! :D

An update on the random death of Kaylynn:

I cannot find her gravestone, not in her house, nor in the cemetery, and I slowly scrolled around Sunset Valley trying to find that dratted gravestone, but to no avail. I even looked in the inventories of the other residents of her home and nothing. (Speaking of the household sims, none of them were grieving for her. Heartless bastards.)

So, while it may seem cool for a Sim to get randomly killed off without warning on another lot, you may have a very hard time finding their gravestone, if ever. Not too good if you want to make them a ghost Sim or take them to the cemetery.

I haven't bought any, but "plan outfit" is available with the dresser/wardrobe, so it seems like it should be possible.


Do not run. Ever. I set up my shortcut to go straight to the cracked exe, bypassing launcher.


Lazy ass.  :P  But you've always been helpful to me (to many, actually), so I'm happy to reciprocate.  :)

I think this may actually be the behavior of the game culling an overpopulated hood. There is no actual lightning in the game. Anywhere. It's just making up excuses for why it decided to delete a sim.

Does anyone know where the weddingarch is?  ???

And is throw a party in sims 3 the same as a wedding party/birthday party?

I'm just stupid. When you throw a party you can select everything. :-[

My thoughts on the Horror, after getting hypnotized by the shiny for most of the night and nearly failing to make dinner or go to bed in a timely fashion.  ;D


*I really like the super fast load time. Even base game TS2 didn't load this fast.
*I REALLY miss macrotastics.
*I made a morbidly obese family of four. Dad with a bad temper. Overly emotional mom. Nerdy boy. Toddler clutzy girl. Took a really long time to get the couple to the point where they wanted to woohoo/try for baby, but I finally got her preggers. \:D/ So far, the boy is best friends with Bella (take THAT, Mortimer!)[/li][/list]
*The CAS options were a little bit strange to work with. Where are the face sliders (if any) hidden? I kind of like the pattern swatches, but some of them are hard to tell what they are from the swatches.
*LOVE that shoes are seperate. Also, SOCKS! No more wearing sneakers without socks for my simmies!
*After being used to going places with my sims, I'm finding the rabbit holes kind of strange. Here's hoping they'll open those up in future packs. I even wouldn't mind going to work/school to see what's going on. I do like the fact that you can tell them how to behave at work/school.
*I like that kids can make simple meals for themselves, or have leftovers from the fridge. Spoiled food is kind of annoying, though.
*I like that you can tinker objects to make them do other things, like self-clean, prevent-fire, etc.
*I'm not sure I understand yet what you need to do to get promotions at work.
*Will the toddler NOT drop to sleep on the floor? Stop whining and do this!
*I like giving them different voices, and choosing how long the lifespan will be.
*I REALLY MISS MACROS!
*The kid does his homework on his own. Is that because he has the ambitious trait?
*I don't really care about the only one family at a time thing, because I tend to play a single family til I get sick of them and then make another and neglect the originals. It'd be nice if they went on with their lives. ;)
*Buy mode didn't really take long to get used to. Sure, it looks way different, but it's not un-useful.
*Reading to toddlers is REALLY CUTE :D
*Macro/clean is SORELY MISSED. I kept trying to use it and then remember it's not there!
*Toddlers can leave the home lot. This is nice. I need to explore the hood more to find out what is there for toddlers to do.
*We definitely need to be able to provide/procure new clothing and hair meshes.
*How do you take screenshots? I gotta look around more and figure this out.
*Custom eyes would be nice.
*Can we PLEASE get rid of the mosaic?!
*I also miss my sim wardrobe auto bill payer. I had the repo guy show up because I was too busy to pay bills :P

I might. ;) I might also want bearded ladies and unibrows!

The weekend can't come fast enough for me. There's only so much you can dive into in these short spurts. :P

There's a button for Advanced on each of the appearance screens. It opens the screen with the sliders.  For some, it also has a picture of the face area with circles on it.  Click the circle to get the slider for that individual piece.

Moar points of interest(?)


Newborns are now selectable and you can see their needs.

Toddlers' motives seem to dimnish about the same rate as adults ( no more 2-hour naps every 2 hours ).

Babies/Toddlers got Social need that goes down fast even while they sleep.
 
Toddler's cry is about 137% more annoying then in Sims 2. It also seems to wake up the whole house if the baby is desperate enough ( stop telling me how to live my Sims EA )

Sleeping is HARD! If you let your Sims baby go to motive failure over energy, what does it do when it gets to a crib? Sleep? OH NO! It starts wailing it's little lungs out and all your Teen+ Sims will proceed to swarm it )(&")=#(/=)¤("/¤=)(&=) FUCK.

You can adjust the brightness of the lights ( low - med - high ) per light, per room or all. This is pretty nice.

Walking is HARD. Sims have much more trouble getting around each other like I mentioned before. I hadn't yet noticed just how much 'personal space' they need. They do wait and dodge each other but it takes a lot of time to do so.

Brats generally do their homework on their own and aren't quite as pissed off about it as in Sims2.

I also miss Macrotastic :(

Cheers, Phil. I'll look for this when I finally go back to make myself. :P

I don't know if this has been posted before but what is wrong with this?

(http://i39.tinypic.com/2liyioh.jpg)

Is it my graphic card?

Also, once I bought a bike and then a sim came over and he had a blank icon and when I hovered over the action icon it read "default unallocated come and see action" or something like that. Can't remember the exact wording. Perhaps it's a glitch or maybe it is an earlier build. :P I don't know.

Also try checking the comments on the torrent, if you torrented it. For some reason the one at demonoid had a lot of complaints about the keygen not working properly (although it worked fine for me) so it's possible other people have encountered the same thing.

Has anyone figured out how romantic relationships work? I've been trying like hell for about 20 sim days to get two sims engaged, and although they have the option to "try for baby" I can't find ANY kind of proposal option. Also, I think there must be some kind of a "boyfriend/girlfriend" relationship since both sims are living together but are considered single, but for the life of me can't figure out how to get that one to come up either.

Way to make the simple things bizarrely complicated, EA.

It almost looks to me like it's his reflection on the water, but I can't really tell from the picture. Did you look at it from the front and it looked the same way?

That happens to my sims as well, any time you look at them from behind the sim, out over the water.

No it's fine from the front. It's like it's a problem with the way the game renders the water.

Interesting thread on Snooty: http://www.snootysims.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=21&t=29100

No way of knowing if the OP is making it up though ... pics or it didn't happen!

That Snooty thread is funny.  Now they're saying "This glitch PROVES it's a beta!".

Heh, I have three words for them: original jump bug.

Camera icon on the interface. It's at the bottom of the all the buttons. And unlike TS2, you get nice, large screenshots.


What, you mean you don't like that giant floating eyesore?

Seems it'll be more complicated than a console cheat this time, though.



When the pop up notifications bug you that you only have one day left to pay your bills, there is a "pay bills now" button there--if you click it, your bill will automatically be paid and you don't have to send someone to do it.

There is the answer to your question.  We object to things happening outside our control (where sims are concerned).  They do things when we're not playing them, the bastards.  In TS2, they would stay reasonably static until you went back to them.  We liked that (for the most part, I mean, and not meaning to speak for all MATY at all, nope).  If I create a sim, I don't want him dying on me without my intervention while I'm off playing another house (or getting married, or having babies, or buying a car, or burning down the kitchen yet again, or getting some hopeless job, etc.).

I guess, considering everything, if I play TS3 for any extended period, I will have to get used to it though, or play the enforced legacy style.

When does betting open on how soon a patch is released?

This is the bit that the control-freaks amongst us (myself included) DO NOT WANT.  We DO NOT WANT them to live their own lives while we're away playing other households.  We want them to mark time (a la Sims 1 and Sims 2) until we get back to that household's turn to be played again.  We WANT to lock in some wishes and come back later to fulfil them next time we play their household, not have them go off and take their lives in totally different directions to those we've planned for them.

We want to play them, not watch from a distance as they live their own lives - I already have a TV I could watch if that was what I wanted.

I don't have the game. I have two questions:


1. Townies. I know they come back.  Does anyone see a way to eliminate them or at the very least prevent them from breeding? (Aging them prematurely,Getting rid of males)?  They have homes right? Can their homes be deleted? There must be some way to destroy the townies. Can we kill their offspring at child ages?

2. The awful one family per neighborhood thing.  What happens if you set your family/neighborhood on a long life span/slow time?  Would it be easier to play more than one family this way without having your unplayed family get all fishbowled? 

I am hating the one family bit, but I feel strongly that there might be a cheat that allows families to be paused that we don't know about yet.


Please oh please let this be a beta.

TS3 mostly eliminates the need for it. If your bills are unpaid, a popup will appear. Hit Yes, and they will instantly be paid, no sim will be queuestomped for the action.

Revise: You don't want that unless you are doing it DELIBERATELY.

Pregnancies seem to be the standard three days, with one day before they realize they are pregnant. However, maternity days do not show on the UI and you have absolutely no way to go to work during them as it will tell you that your shift doesn't start until Xdays, Yhours.

Try moving a sim in buy mode while being up close on them. It's freaky. They move their heads.

Look at their career tab. On the right side, you'll see one or more smiley/frowny faces. There's probably one for mood. That one's obvious...go to work in a good mood. There may be others that will have a very short description, like "boss" or "coworkers" or "charismatic". There will be a pop-up when you mouse over to help you know how to fulfill those.

Press C for screenshots. Tab for camera mode. Those controls are all the same.

Another album, about 27 pics. (http://s232.photobucket.com/albums/ee18/ZazazuAbubu/TS3%20previews2/)

I don't think you understand how pressing a CD works or what the term "going gold" means. I don't think you have any idea of what's really going on except you are intent on sucking up to EA. You should note that bootlicking goes over pretty badly here and neither does being a flaming moron. Enjoy your self-delusion, feel free to come back in a month or so when you get your "final" version and we will be glad to P&L at you.

For me, slowing ageing actually made it harder to play more than one family since the ageing slows for the current household only and the rest of the neighbourhood moves on at a "normal" rate.

Other options that seem like they would help the control freaks among us like lowering the autonomy level also seem to be for the current household only. Turning off story progression on the other hand doesn't seem to work at all as expected. For some it seems it doesn't work at all while I am finding it only works sometimes and not others.

AND, as I discovered this morning, you have plenty of time to stuff all of your furniture/wall hangings into family inventory before the repo man actually gets there. This leaves him with nothing to take and unlike in TS2 he doesn't taunt you for being poor.

The aging slider seems to work fine for me. I haven't checked toddlers/babies, but I've been playing my current family for about 20-30 days, and I checked some of the premades. Kaylynn is a teen, but that's because on the 960 days age setting, she has about 20 days left to teen. And Mortimer and Bella are both still children.

If the aging was household only, I'm sure they'd all be older by now. I could be wrong though!

What can you do in terms of changing the way the town looks?

You can't place new lots. Theres no hood deco. Is it only the lots themselves that can be modified then?
Can you extend lot sizes?
What about the trees on the grassland - if they're not hood deco, can they at least be moved?

So Kaylynn Langerak is really a teen? What is she meant to be in TS2 then? A cougar? ⁸⁾ Actually, I can totally see that.

(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v326/Tikkall/Screenshot-2.jpg?t=1242837561)

"No chairs? The toilet is the next most logical place to eat!"

Seriously though, I didn't have a dining room set and she went upstairs to eat on the toilet, WTF?

Oh goody looks like they released a CAS Demo for the Apple stores,but you have too play it in store only.Also S.Africa is getting thier game May26th.Wonderful. ::)

Phoebe I think that is trait based, either inapropriate or insane. Maybe a combination of the two.

Nope she starts off as a child with the base neighborhood. But she's not all that far away from teen, and she is one in my neighborhood currently. And Bella and Mortimer aren't.

Which means according to Sims 3 timeline, Kaylynn is actually older than Mortimer and Bella. O.o Kinda strange.

Hi. Does anyone know where are all the sims from screenshots and marketing?. i cant find them. Maybe in the downloadable neighbourhood?

In general im enjoying the game. i also use to play just one house, so no problem with that. One thing i find strange: all the watches, rings, etc, are just for one hand??

The blur is just untolerable. Some blur for the parts isnt enough??

(http://img198.imageshack.us/img198/4906/screenshot4.th.jpg) (http://img198.imageshack.us/my.php?image=screenshot4.jpg)

I find the CAS powerfull, you can create extreme sims:

(http://img269.imageshack.us/img269/9881/screenshot6i.th.jpg) (http://img269.imageshack.us/my.php?image=screenshot6i.jpg)

With TAB you can go anywhere!

(http://img34.imageshack.us/img34/3252/screenshot9o.th.jpg) (http://img34.imageshack.us/my.php?image=screenshot9o.jpg)

Have a nice day!

Netich that is not an extreme sim. Have you seen some of the mutants you can make in TS2? Fire up body shop and have a look for yourself!

Alternatively, just grow up Tessa Ramirez...

This particular sim has the traits: Genuis, Artistic, Ambitious, Friendly, and Computer Whiz.

In the house all I have is a stove, fridge, bed and bathroom. Maybe someone can see if they can replicate? I don't think it's trait based as the sim doesn't have any bad traits...

I don't think so, at least not those traits. I had the same experience as Phoebe did. I assumed that it was because of a lack of chairs in the house.

When you click on the watch/ring/whatever, does an arrow appear at the bottom-left of the thumbnail?  Try clicking that.

Well the toilet as a chair, must just be the crappy chair coding which the FOJ has explained in more detail.

I bet the Beatniks will love that... all those rabid Sim fans taking up their display computers for the next two weeks.  Because Apple stores aren't busy enough normally.

That's funny :-) 

Honestly, if I didn't have a chair or a couch, I might be inclined to use the toilet as a chair, but I'd put the lid down first.  Doesn't look like she did.  I'd probably be more likely to sit on the bed or the floor, though.  I'd do any of those three before I'd eat standing.

Mr. Evil just sat on the edge of his tub to drink some juice. The toilet/tub sitting is amusing.

Please don´t beat me, if this was answered before.

In my options menu it is not possible to use the life span slider.
Is this a bug or am I just clueless?

Yes it's funny a couple of times, a bit like TS2 "What's this?" was ok a couple of times. But more than that it gets really annoying, especially in this case as you are occupying the toilet so are preventing sims from peeing before you can equip them with singularity kidneys. Most of the new behaviours are ok, but once you play for any length of time they get frustrating and you want to kill your sims... which is hard as they have insane amounts of immunity to most influences. They can climb out of pools with no ladder, it takes 3 days to starve to death etc.

@ fraggle:
Probably a bug.

Hey! thanks for that.

I was thinking in the sims in ads not being in the game. Why do EA create all this characters (Magnus, kim, marcela, the render girl) and doesnt put them in the game? Maybe it is a beta after all...  ???

MJ Chun confirmed that many of the characters in the ads will not be in the game.  Apparently she wasn't too happy about it either.

Interview here: http://sims3nieuws.blogspot.com/2009/05/sims-3-nieuws-exclusive-interview-with.html

Hi all. I couldn't sign-up/register under ooblushy88oo, it wouldn't take for some reason, so I chose this one.  ::)

If you guys would like to see some screenshots I've taken, take a look at my PB account. I took quite a few!

http://s6.photobucket.com/albums/y230/KETCHUPanyone/Sims%203/

I gotta say, the Sims themselves look like clay-models. I took my Sim to the Cinema and Diner and I couldn't go inside.
She goes in and you just hear noises, that's it! You can go inside the gym though...pfft. I thought that was pretty lame, eh?

The objects are indeed very lousy and like it's been said already, very limited.  :-X

I just can't get past how ugly they are.  Aside from that and a few other concerns folks have expressed, it does look like it's at least worth a free trial and I've been chained to the brand since the beginning so resistance is futile.  However, the ugly really is killing my must have it NAO drive normally associated with the Sims.

Please more screen shots.  Maybe the ugly will grow on me.

I can see why you'd be disappointed that ooblushy88oo wouldn't take. It's clearly a highly desirable name.

Yes, most of the community lots are just empty boxes.

 >:( So I'm hearing that there are community lots that you can't edit? You can't buy/build any changes to those lots? (In fact, you can't even lower the walls to see inside?) Examples given to me where a lot named "Little Corsican Bistro". I thought we were supposed to be able to follow our Sims inside stores & restaurants? Can someone who has it up & running confirm this?

So if EAxis has somehow fucked up doors or placement of things on those lots, we can't fix those things. FAIL.

There is debate as to whether this is a beta or the final release. Some people seem to be declaring it to be one or the other with a quasi-religious fervor without offering much in the way of evidence. On this subject I am agnostic. I haven't installed any of the Sims 2 games before at least the second patch was released because EA's original releases are all somewhat boned, however, some of the issues I'm hearing about are pretty dire even for EA. Perhaps if we look at the available evidence calmly and rationally, we may be able to determine the probable status of this release instead of having some sort of Dinesh D'Souza/Christopher Hitchens kerfuffle that will determine nothing.

These things we know:
EA announced that the game had gone "gold" on May 8.

The date for the .exe file on the DVD for Apartment Life is July 26, 2008.
The release date for Apartment Life was nominally August 25, 2008.

NOW...

What is the actual date of the .exe file of this release, and what is the latest date on any of the included files? All I have heard on this is that the date on the .exe is "about April." Although EA's work isn't always tight as a Swiss watch, I can just about guarantee that the file date is not "about April."

Several comm lots you can't see inside, in fact I think it might be all of the speciality comm lots (where you work etc) You arrive, click the door a window pops up, you do whatever then click ok and leave. A large amount of the game is just about text boxes, the actual gameplay feels like its been reduced down to a text based game which so happens to have a graphical interface.

Oh and there is no debate on if this is a beta version, those who think it is are stupid.

I guess so.  ;)


Tessieroo, I don't know about the editing in buy/build mode but so far when I've taken Sims to restaurants and the movie theatre, they went inside
but I couldn't follow them in. They go in and you just hear clatter/noises and you have to cancel the que and then they come out.  >:(

Thanks Aner-Dyfan. What a big pile of shit.  >:(
It really sounds too much like the Stories series they put out. Lost interest in that once I got all the way thru.

Moody made two very nice-looking Sims last night, one with a quite passable resemblance to himself.  (Well -- himself at a distance, anyway).  I'll see if he'll let me post pictures this evening.  Of course, he's an artist, and all his Sims have always looked awesome, from TS1 onward.

But I am holding my breath for the next two pages of posts on this thread, so that we can see the next "there are rumours that this is a beta" post.


MATY will not accept stupid usernames with numbers in them.

I honestly fail to see the point in dredging this topic up again.  In thirteen days, one side will get to do the I-was-right-and-you-were-wrong dance on the basis of irrefutable evidence; there's no point in arguing over rumors and speculation until then.  

I have a little question.

In Sims 2 when you went through CAS or used a mirror you could check, uncheck or scroll through options pretty fast. For example while browsing blushes or hair, you could just click, click, click and preview was available right away. That was not the case with accessories. You had to click, wait while game updates and shows you a sim in glasses, then choose another glasses, wait again and so on; or when you scrolled though pages of glasses. That's why I rarely used them and never downloaded anything for that section.

Now in Sims 3 I see that behavior with everything and especially CAST.

Now the question: Is this behavior depends on how fast computer is, and with strong enough one you won't notice this, or, like with glasses from sims 2, will always take a little bit of time?

As someone who is definitely not gonna play a vanilla sims game, I am throughly enjoying it. Lots to explore and do, makes me ignore the little fugly maggots. I haven't played enough to figure out all my dislikes, tho I do miss macrotastics and ACR, but it's not all bad. Just wish my sim would stop wanting items with a 50% chance of getting the points.  She could use those points.

(http://i29.photobucket.com/albums/c278/mailchaser40/Pictures%201/ScreenShot091.jpg) (http://s29.photobucket.com/albums/c278/mailchaser40/Pictures%201/?action=view&current=ScreenShot091.jpg)

Yes, yes, it is.  I reserved ooblushy88oo years ago, in case my initial account was ever trashcanned, and I needed a sock.  Tough luck; you can't have it.

Im currently toying with a family and have tried the farming route. But there are one thing driving me up a wall, so now I come here begging for help.

I have managed to find most plants, including the omniplant that is mentioned when you level gardening skill to 10nd the flame Fruit bush. But where in sweet heaven have they hidden the money tree? Has anyone found one of those yet?

In advance thank you very much, for any and all assistance rendered.

Here's a strange quirk related to the new way genetics work in Sims 3. Make a girl, preferably toddler, and then give her a twin. Make the twin a boy. Now guess what happens when the boy ages up? Yep, they get girl hair. You can change it, but you won't be able to get it back. I'm sure it works the other way around, too. And I'm sure this will continue to haunt the poor lad through every following age advance. Sigh.

I am a control freak, so I am not enjoying all these pre-mades growing up and dying without me. However, I can confirm that it appears that changing the life span is indeed global. I think this will be the way forward for me since I don't want my sims doing stupid things without enough life left to correct them.

Opinion thus far:

The good:

Like the lack of loading screens, and the fact that the whole 'hood is free for your sims to explore. I rarely sent my sims out in 2, as it was so slow.
The ability to make woods, colors, and patterns match is nice. I wish they did that ages ago.
Like some of the CAS modifications, and that hats have their own category.
Like using objects in your inventory. Very nice. I saw a guy using his laptop at the beach.
Sim to Sim interaction seems a bit more realistic or at least enjoyable to me now.
The ability to have various weights makes everyone a lot less same-y.
No ape-faces on the townies thus far.
The trees, ground, some bushes, and a few other things look great.
Love the traits!

The bad:

The sims all look... off. Even the skinny ones look like one of those aged celebrities who put too much silicon into their faces. Also, playdoh.
The graphics don't seem all that much of a step up from Sims 2. Still some jaggies, and some things look pretty much the same as they did in 2.
Not enough stuff in Buy Mode and CAS. More on this later.
Everything looks kind of dark to me.
Doesn't seem like there is all that much to do, but this might mean I need to spend more time playing it.
Lots of bugs, sounds like. Though I haven't encountered one... yet.
If they are not going to allow custom content/mods/hacks, then that's a deal-breaker.
All those sliders in CAS, and yet still everyone looks the same.
The pathfinding seems just as retarded as ever. Does it really need to take 3 RL minutes for two sims to figure out that, yes, they are going to throw a ball?
Sounds like they broke genetics. Ugh. I DNW ugly babies/kids.

The iffy:

Not sure about the enforced Legacy thing yet. I like townies aging, but DO want to maintain strict control over my families.
Fast Forward seems to only last as long as the action you put it on.
Not used to the control scheme yet.
Hard to get around town.
Moodlets... meh.

Overall:

My experience with this game is being really influenced by how little there is in it, and the knowledge that EA again will attempt to rape us all with EPs, Stuff Packs, and Sim Store Stuff. I've followed this game since Sims 1... and I am tired of giving EA huge sums of money for a few freaking bread-crumbs. There needed to be more things from 1 and 2 in here. A LOT more things. Hobbies, for instance. And weather. Perhaps pets. Those were all great things that need to be a base-game, not an expansion pack. I don't want to buy a 'Nightlife' EP for a third time, or a 'Pets' one, or whatever thing they are going to re-hash.

I guess I'll play the game a bit more, and will await more news. Until then, color me pretty underwhelmed.

I don't remember seeing this pop-up, but I might have been distracted at the time. ;)

The day after release. ;) I got five on it. :P

It would be lulzy if it randomly showed up, though. Like Don Juan Trepie's nose. ;)

Ah, so I know that his second smilyface had to do with his boss, so maybe he should do a little sucking up or something. :) Also, good to know that C is still the snapshot taker. I hadn't tried it yet, but I'm going to tonight. :3

LOL That picture of the sims protesting with the NO BUGS signs really make me chuckle.

Hey, just mentioning this again...
This is in response to Pes' comments about testingcheatsenabled:
While shift-clicking a sim only give two options, grow up and change traits, shift-clicking on the mailbox will give more options, including set career, force visitor, force npc, make friends, know everybody, etc. Also, Shift-Click on the ground and you can teleport anywhere in town. Shift-Clicking on sims from other Families allows you to add them to yours.  Just mentioning this again.
Also, anybody know how to get the UI into screen caps? I can't find the option and the Show UI option under video only does it for video... :( Please help.

I have just thought of something.  Because the hood is all joined up, there will be no such concept as teleporting in neighbors and holding them hostage on your lot by making them selectable until they have helped you play out some scenario - they'll just make a run for it.  No prisons or schools.

One might have to build a fence around them, I suppose, which makes playing out a scenario difficult.  Hmmm.

Print screen button on your keyboard. :P

There is an option, at the same screen as other capture options, to include or not include UI.

Last night, while the Sims 3 was downloading, I played Kudos 2, a game I really enjoy. Then today, I played Sims 3. The similarities are remarkable. In fact, other than the fact that you move your Sim around rather than stare at an avatar on the screen and you reproduce, its almost exactly like Kudos with some enhancements. I wonder of the maker if Kudos received some money for this? Even the avatar smiling when she is happy or frowning when sad is from Kudos. I am waiting for the snowfall and snowball fights...oh, but we don't have seasons yet, do we? :)

The person who said this was like a text game is correct. I like Kudos so will probably be okay with this but it isn't the same game as Sims 1 and Sims 2. It very much feels like a strategy game rather than the toy, as Pescado calls it, that we had with Sims 2.

It's still a sandbox, but it's a sandbox where you only have ONE molding bucket and your brother is dangling all the other toys and not letting you have them.

Here are some random thoughts from a lurker...

I think the lack of objects shouldn't be too big a hindrance. Won't it eventually be possible for the community to put all the TS2 object meshes into the TS3 game? EA has obviously used the TS2 object files and offers us more TS2 objects for the TS3 in the EA Store. Someone who is awesome enough will find a way to add the existing TS2 object meshes (which obviously exists, as noted by the mere fact that the EA Store exists). Finding out how to replace some of the existing textures with ones that we might find more pleasing would, of course, also be awesome.

Rather than play a family for a whole day, might it be possible to rotate play quickly enough from one family to another that the wants are still there when you return and they didn't have time to get in trouble or go astray? My thought is that one could play one family just long enough to queue some actions and then jump to another family to queue actions there, etc. If you return to the original family in a few hours, rather than in day or so, will the want you have promised still be there or resurface; or, will it be gone and not pop back up in a short time? (After running through the hood and setting up everything initially, I'd settle in with whichever family seemed the most interesting at that time and lurk there for a few hours; but I would like to check up on the others occasionally. Basically, I'm wondering if the wants might reroll as they do in Sims2.)

I also wanted to say thanks for all the detailed pictures and impressions of the good, the bad, and the ugly. (Sorry, I couldn't resist.)

The crap that is SimSocial on Facebook IS Kudos. I couldn't believe it. I presume the game developer of Kudos had something to do with that, otherwise...  :o

As soon as you decide to play a new active family, it warns you the wants will be gone from the current one.  There's no constant source of wants either, sometimes you have more than enough, sometimes none.

I didn't mean Sim Social, I mean the actual Sims 3 game. I went to the bookstore, clicked on it, and it asked me if I wanted to shop. I clicked that I did, my sim disappeared inside and a catalog of sorts opened so I could shop. It was just like Kudos 2. I honestly do not see a lot of difference in the basic game play...going to a restaurant, getting traits from friends (I talked to a guy and gained 'friendliness' or something like that. Sims 3 is more about time management and strategy. You even get happiness moodlets, just like doing things raises happiness in Kudos.

I suppose you could ignore all that and just play like in Sims 2, but I have a feeling you would have a miserable Sim and he/she would show you how miserable he/she was. I think we are going to have to pay attention more to what the game tells us our Sim wants.

They're supposedly prompted by a combination of your LTW and the environment.  Thus, a sim who wants to reach the top of the symphony branch of the music career will get a want if he hears someone playing music, but not if he's sitting at home eating dinner with his wife.  A sim who wants to raise 5 kids to teen, however, might get a want at home -- to woohoo, have a baby, etc.  In other words, the seeming lack of wants in some cases and overabundance in others may be another "feature" intended by EAxis.

Has anyone found a way to make roof sections of differing angles? Seems to be all or nothing, but maybe I missed something there. Also, I read that constrainfloorelevation wouldn't be available; it is, although with an unfortunate side effect. The ceiling texture isn't lowered with the wall height, and continues to float above. It's only viewable from below (see mid-construction pic). Stupid EAxis.

(http://i141.photobucket.com/albums/r78/veganelise/th_cfefail.jpg) (http://s141.photobucket.com/albums/r78/veganelise/?action=view&current=cfefail.jpg)

That's not you "gaining" the trait, that's figuring out the traits of the person you're talking to. When you meet people, you have no idea what their traits are at first. And gradually you learn more and more of them the more you talk to someone.

Doubt I'll download it as I'm in my late 50's and I'd like it to finish downloading before I'm too senile to know what it is.

So, can someone answer a question?  Is it possible to wipe the neighborhood clean and start over with a new family\families?  I realize that it will spawn nameless random horrors on its own but I'd just like to know if there's some way to get rid of the original neighborhood.

How the heck do you change the active family without restarting the entire game?

The option is greyed out if you click the "..." on the neighborhood chooser. Enter the neighborhood, then go to options.

It's never too late to reply :D

Thanks! I spent quite a bit of time around all community lots trying to find a place to buy clothing before I popped the stupid question. It never occured to me to check the most logical place - the wardrobe  ::) I like how they did it.


Yeah, me too, but I'm so curious what's in there. I loved Sporepedia, so sad they put the catch-all-content thing in a stupid launcher!  >:(


Click the three dots button, then 'Edit nhood', and the option 'switch active household' will appear.

Thanks Blue Soup. I had read that the wants didn't stick or weren't locked when you left to play another family. I just wondered if they would pop back in again a while after returning or if they were gone for good. If they are influenced by a certain occurance, such as listening to someone play music in the square, then I guess that want wouldn't pop back up again until strolling to the park or maybe listening to music on the radio.

I'm curious about another thing. Do the sims stay in their normal clothing while pregnant? There is no more changing into pregnancy clothes? That is an improvement.

Also, I noticed in one snapshot that a single sim moving in had 16,000. Does a larger family get more money or the same amount as a single sim made in CAS?

Click the three dots button, then 'Edit nhood', and the option 'switch active household' will appear.
[/quote]
They did it a horrible way. I hate it.

My not-really-a-self-sim changed clothes when pregnant, and "plan outfit" wasn't available on the wardrobe anymore. It's annoying, but the 2 pregnancy outfits I saw were more varied and somewhat less fugly than TS2 default maternity wear.

Did anyone else notice an inventory wipe after switching house holds?

I was trying to figure out how to get a "romantic interest" to move in, get married, engaged... anything really besides fuck buddy.  I switched the active family to see if I'd have better luck playing that side, I didn't of course.  But when I switched back to the original family, as expected, the wants were all gone but so was their entire inventory.  I'd think that losing actual possessions (all that collectible crap they're so keen on) would merit a warning too.  

They get more.

Oh no! I think I checked inventory after switching and I think it remained intact. I *think*. Shouldn't collectible crap be kept in a skill panel or some other totally unexpected place?

It happened to you too Honeywell? I thought maybe someone stole it, but yeah all of the stuff in one of my sim's inventory,
including some rare butterflies, a bunch of seeds, expensive books and a guitar, were missing also after I  created a new sim.
I looked every where on the lot and in the family inventory, but nothing was there.

I created an entirely new game and transplanted my family from my other save, and they still had all their inventory when I checked on them. On the other hand, I've heard other people saying they've lost inventory as well. Probably some kind of retarded bug -_-

Same just happened to me, for the first time in about 10 switches. And it only happened to one sim out of a family of 4. But her guitar and song books were gone.

I also keep getting a bizarre and creepy glitch with young adult aged Bella Goth; when she's lying or sitting down, even in the bath, her body keeps almost 'jumping' into a standing up position for a second. Then she goes back to how she was. A few seconds later, she jumps up again. It's creepy and god damn irritating.

I've also noticed this inventory problem. My main sim only had one object in her inventory, but it was gone after I switched back to her household. Damn irritating, too, since it was the most expensive laptop and she has the computer whiz trait.


This takes for bloody EVER. Maybe it had something to do with my Sim's traits or something, I don't know, but my Sim had the option to "try for baby" long before she had the option to "ask to be boyfriend" or whatever the option is. I was beginning to think they'd be elders by the time they got engaged.

Had a bit of trouble starting at first- COMODO would do it usual "I don't recognize this program, is it safe to let it do X Y and Z?" routine, but that would for some reason lock up everything. Once I got it set to let the damn game run (but not connect to the internet!), it started up fine. Anyone else have this issue?

You guys weren't kidding about the load times- the seamless neighborhood is amazing. The interface, however, is a pain in the ass.

Why include a beach if Sims can't swim in the ocean?

Bikes are something that should have been added to The Sims a long time ago.

It needs MOAR furniture badly. More hairstyles would be nice, too. So would more clothes, but the lack of furniture and hair options hurts more.

New CAS would be great if it weren't for the whole Puddingface thing. The sliders don't seem to have a huge effect the way they did in TS2.

There's too many premades taking up the good real estate, and I'd bet deleting them's as much of a Bad Idea as it was in TS2.

If Sunset Valley is Pleasantview in the past, why didn't they name it Pleasantview?

I haven't played much yet so much as I've mucked around in CAS- more observations forthcoming, probably.

If Sims are able to switch jobs and breed behind your back like people are saying they are (I don't doubt, I just haven't tried this yet myself) then it might be reasonable to assume they might dump their inventory somewhere stupid, sell it or bin it and so on. That most certainly is a DNW.

Is it possible that EA will deliberately change or update the May 5th release so that saves and so on made with this release won't work with the actual release, or that "well, it's not the final game that was leaked!" ? Or is it too late for them to do that by now?

Much too late.

The wants not sticking is not a huge deal. Usually you'll get a bunch thrown at you when you reenter the house, and since the wants are mostly stupid crap like "Ask Ann about her day" or "make the bed", they are easy to fulfill. What sucks is losing opportunities, especially if the opportunity happens to be delivering 20 high-quality produce to a store and you're almost to the point where you have the amount. Between that issue and growing up, I've never been able to complete the elementary school opportunity that involves free game tickets.

I've tested with identical trait mixes and had different results. And now I'm suffering from the same thing again...Nathan really wants his first kiss with Haeju (demon spawn), and since his intended is already an adult, I figured I'd let her get a little for now. Yet even though they are best friends, even though I've done every romantic action at least twice, no kiss options have appeared and they are still just best friends.

Curtains are a mess. Many of them cut through windows. All windows.

Oh, and BFFs are back.

Ok, so I guess it's a bug instead of a feature.  Do you think if EA tried really hard they could come up with a bug that would piss off people more?  I was just checking the game out so I wasn't really invested in my progress but if I was playing "for real" and actually paid money for the game I'd be screaming pretty loud about now.  

MJ Chun confirmed that many of the characters in the ads will not be in the game.  Apparently she wasn't too happy about it either.

Interview here: http://sims3nieuws.blogspot.com/2009/05/sims-3-nieuws-exclusive-interview-with.html
[/quote]

I see that the game is set up to do auto-saves during gameplay.  This worries me.  I sometimes get up and walk away from my game for an hour or two.  I almost always pause the game when I do that, but there have been times when I forgot to or was called away too suddenly to do so.  If that happens while playing Sims 3, a great deal of irreparable damage might take place while I'm not in control and the old stand-by option of "quit without saving" won't apply.

BTW, I've been trying to download this for two days now and I have less than a third of it downloaded.  I'm about to just give up.  BitTorrent slows my entire network down to a crawl while it's running.  The kids are starting to complain.  LOL

So, after 40 hours and something minutes I finally finished torrenting the game. Installed without a problem and the game neither crashed nor caused my laptop to explode/catch fire while running it.

The first thing I did was create a family. I'm not nearly as impressed as a lot of people seem to be about the CAS. The sims are butt ugly and no matter what I did I couldn't change the overall appearance of my sims very much. The "advanced" controls were rather pointless. They're more basic and there is very little you can change. I find it's a huge step back from Body Shop. The sims heads are strangely large, as well.

The weight slider was neat, though setting it to the skinniest point  didn't seem very skinny at all. I was expecting some walking skeletons. :/ All the sims seem short and stocky.

The clothing meshes weren't so bad, though I'm not sure how I feel about choosing patterns and colours. It seems like a giant pain in the ass to me. It might be that it was just overwhelming at the time and figuring out how to save specific choices as "custom content" will probably help, but I'm rather disgruntled at the moment.

The traits are neat, I admit. While I haven't played long enough to see how they individually effect a sim, I know by reading that it's mostly superficial and that they don't really change anything in the long run. You're not evil by taking a "wicked shower" or however it went (I know it was mentioned earlier?). I want evil sims to set fire to bushes, trip sims, poison someone's "blended drink". The way things are currently is rather corny and childish (hurr, I know it's a "kids" teen game), but dammit I want some evil-take-over-the-city-sims.

I tried following the tutorial, but got bored rather quickly. "Blah, blah, yes I know how to buy a couch. Jobs, blah, blah, blah." I might going through it again if it has any useful stuff... maybe.

I think the idea of an open neighbourhood is good in concept, but in reality it... really pisses off people like me who need to keep a eye on the entire area so sims aren't doing what I don't want them to do. The buildings and scenery are amazing, I admit. I don't know how I feel about sims disappearing into buildings. Sure, it gives the sims more options (like going to a concert), but I feels more like a game, like Pes said, and not a toy. While I have told my sim to go to a concert, I can't follow them and tell them to throw their bra on stage keep the story I have going in my head. It's like running into a wall.

Speaking of stories, I don't like how we're pretty much forced into playing along with Eaxis "storyline". My neighbourhoods are rarely "normal". In TS2 I have a zombie apocalypse hood (zombie apocalyse in TS3, by the way, would be very exciting), a sort of gloomy, dictatorial vibe, Stepford-Wife-ish background, etc. With townies doing whatever the hell they want I can't give my neighourhood any theme of my choosing.

I do like how the sims have personalities now, from their traits. One sim was walking down the street, shouting and being rather obnoxious while another ditzy teenager with huge earings easily grew bored of listening to my sim squee over her new house. But like I said, it's rather superficial.

Decorating houses is going to become very tedious now, me thinks. I love how we have the option of changing little details, but only to a point. Just like in CAS, it feels like a pain in the ass. I haven't quite figured out how to save a specific design as a whole instead of just a certain pattern combination, but once I do, hopefully I'll feel differently.

I've noticed that a lot of furniture seems to have been taken directly from TS2 and recycled, but what else is new? This displeased me. I also noticed, as I was poking through the usual assortment of ugly window coverings, that windows actually bleed through.

(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v255/LadyDea/Screenshot.jpg)

I tried a bunch of different window coverings, but the same thing happened to all of them. I didn't try different windows, but I can only assume, this is Eaxis afterall, that it's the same for all of them.

Soon after the window covering incident I saved and exited.

N00b here.... Although I have been following this topic religiously for the past few days.  :P

I just wanted to contribute my seemingly normal-near enough good looking sim for you to see :

(http://i56.photobucket.com/albums/g179/FlirtatiousTara/Sims%203/sims3.jpg)

Also I dont know if this actually means anything but for some unknown reason I was nosing around in the Sims 3 files and I found something that said DevTest. [Prepares to be made into N00b pie] I wondered if that meant this was the developers version or not. I have no knowledge of anything too technical but thought I'd air my findings.

In addition to the "bug/feature" fishing out of swimming pools, I managed to run into this interesting act of EAxis stupidity:

(http://i85.photobucket.com/albums/k67/mshackerssuck/Other%20stuff/Screenshot.jpg)

YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG!

Now that's classic and hilarious.

Well, i've enjoyed the game a lot. My main complaint is sleeping takes a LOT of time, and it doesn't speed up much when going into Speed 3. Anyone having the same issue?

That's probably why they put the enforced sleeps into SimSocial, to get us used to the idea.

I wonder if I've discovered another bug, this time of the cheaty variety:

(http://bluesoupistan.com/bluesoup/pictures/Misc/writingskill.jpg)

I canceled the action of writing his novel at the same moment he was to move up a skill level, and it went up two levels instead.

Along those lines, I'm also hearing that the needs aren't that easily met in order to leave you free to do other stuff. (skills, friends, etc) Didn't EAxis say we wouldn't have to concentrate so much on basic needs this time around? So another FAIL.  >:(

I'm thinking that's why they made the No-bladder and No-hygiene things as rewards, possibly to ease off the needs pressure. The fact that there's no Need rejuvenator thingy like in TS2 doesn't help either.

 :D

I can't stand the uglyness. I've spent two hours in CAST to create a decent looking sim and I failed hard.
The so-called advanced sliders are fail especially in the eyes and lips departments. TS2 Bodyshop is way better. :)
I couldn't give almond shaped eyes and full lips to my sim.

I played for a few hours but TS3 didn't impress too much.
Sims are ugly and it's difficult for me to play if I can't stand the sims of the neighborhood.

The REALLY bad one is energy. It seems to go down relatively fast, and take a long time to sleep to get it all back. It's a little better with the best bed, but with money being a lot tighter than normal, it takes at least some time to get one. Also I don't think there's a lifetime reward that touches energy, of course.

On the other hand, hunger is SPEEDY. Basically one decent meal fills you from empty to full, and they eat it fast. This could be offset by the fact that cooking takes a loooong time sometimes, though.

If you want to play the game without those pesky little "motives" do this:
1. ctrl-shift-c
2. testingcheatsenabled true
3. Enter
4. Shift-click on mailbox
5. Make All Happy
6a. Repeat 4-5 as needed, or;
6b. Shift-click on mailbox
7. Make Needs Static

Done, no more pesky "motives" to hinder you. Have fun.

Alternatively, you can click and drag on the needs bars when above cheat is enabled, just like TS2. I find it more convenient if, say, I don't want my sim to pass out from exhaustion yet, but don't want to keep refreshing all of the motives for everyone.

Edited because I can't type.

My preferred way is to go directly to the cracked exe, and right click drag it to my desktop and choose short cut.  Then I move it to my tool bar.

So many people watching this thread! But not enough? I do hope word of mouth wins vs the L&P that EA has/will continue placing out over the tubes. It seems like TS3 ads have panned all over the websites I visit in the last week or so. Regardless, unless I can convince my beau I can has torrent....
"5GB! And then you have to move your downloads over too?"
"What downloads?! There is no custom content ....yet."
"LIES!" *fingers in ears*

*sigh*
Don't think I'll be trying it soon. Needs more coaxing. :D I just can't be that cruel to send my iMac to it's grave yet, at least not until a proper backup is made. Did Rohina get it to work on mac?
Also judging from the chair bug, I guess no one will be making custom chairs. lol

Ha, my sim who was following the 'evil' path of the criminal career track just got arrested. There are even options for how you should spend your time in jail, as if you were at work. Made me lol.

Newspaper headlines:
(http://i41.tinypic.com/315odpv.jpg)

A good way to check who is spawning whom. Births are listed first, then deaths, then (I guess) moves, then random drivel.

Well, one Sim mine met was all excited to tell her about his "plot"... which apparently involved nukes, from the speech bubbles.


Also, is it just me or do skills build more slowly now?

Mmm, i tried this without luck. clicking in the thumbnail just delete it. Was it an idea or does it work for you?

That little arrow is the undo button.  No idea how you might switch hands.

I am enjoying the game muchly right now, but will probably get bored as the fun and interesting bits start repeating.  One thing I do like is the little drag-able bar on queued actions that lets you make them more worthwhile, like changing "clean up dishes in room" to "clean up dishes on lot".

That happens in Kudos too. You see ??? instead of traits until you get to know the person.

Moving a sim out of a house and trying to merge them with another household does not bloody work. They get placed in the 'clipboard' area; after attempting to merge this sim into another household numerous times, I gave up and clicked 'Return To Game'. The sim I was trying to move in has effectively been deleted from the game now; none of my sims have any relationships with him any more and he is nowhere to be found. Yippee.

Does anyone know where I can see more Screenshots from players? :)
Perhaps a photobucket album or a livejournal?
I'd really like to see more. :)

Loving all the information! Thanks guys!

Not sure if you've already checked this one out, Zazazu posted it a few pages back.

This post is going to be about the tiered method of socialization with other sims and how the interactions show up accordingly. If you know about this already, feel free to skip the post.

If however you have been wondering why you can't propose steady relationship/woohoo/ask someone to move in at certain times, this MAY help. Or if you already know how this works and still can't find the stuff, then something is probably bugged/implemented crappily. Go EA!

Basically, each method of chatting seems to have different tiers, with more interactions available with each successive tier. In the upper left it says what the person is currently thinking of the conversation. Friendly chatting starts with them "thinking [sim name] is okay." Next after that is thinking you are sociable and thinking you are friendly (can't remember which comes first).

Flirting starts with "[sim name] is flirty", then followed by "is very alluring", and finally, "is extremely irresistible". From what I've seen, going steady only shows up with that very last stage, and I'm assuming marriage is the same. And you get to the next stage by doing the interactions in that grouping till it gets up there. Yes this means you usually can't just walk up to someone and do the woohoo interaction for example (unless you have specific traits blah blah blah).

Hopefully this helps some people, and if stuff still isn't appearing when you think it should be, then I have no clue yet. I still haven't tried to get people married yet, so I don't exactly know where that is. I know I've seen "ask to move in" in the friendly section, and it is probably at one of the higher tiers of friendly chat.

Edit: The interactions not appearing till higher tiers seems to apply at ALL times. Even if you have a sim as a romantic interest and with a very high relationship, it doesn't look like you can walk right up to them and make out/woohoo out of the blue. You have to go through each tier yada yada until you get to the right one and the interactions show up.

I remember something from one of the lessons that any sim/household that is still on the clipboard will be discarded if you don't put them into a house. Which is kind of sucky, IMO. It sounds like that happened with your sim.

But with a marriage-related move, I was quite surprised at how well it worked. I wanted my test sim to move into her husband's house, which was larger and better furnished. After they did the little private ceremony, there was a dialog box. I moved both sims to his side of the panel, then renamed the household to her name. I also got to decide if I wanted to pack her belongings, or sell them. There was no loss of wishes or opportunities - the sims walked together over to his house, and she had a little negative 'moving day' moodlet for a few hours.

I do find three more fun to play - with sims 1, I didn't -play- until Makin' Magic.  Sims 2, I played for brief spurts when I tried challenges, but mostly I just made things [well, make, since I'm not giving it up yet], and I've played the console stuff.  I'm working up an unbiased review for a friend's new unbiased game review blog.

I like most of the play aspects - gardening ticks me off, and I'll never do another gardening task, unless I'm missing something.  Gathering rocks, you know what you have [unlike the real world] but you can't tell what a seed will grow?  Big freaking difference between lime and watermelon seeds iRL.  I like the gathering and the like, but not being able to buy basic seeds like tomato, onion, garlic, and the like is...maddening.

I think this is actually closer to what Simsville might have been.  The graphics are not innovative, but the play stuff is.  I just think the devs ignored the 2 thirds who like sandbox/modding for the movie and story makers.  I personally like only needing to control one household, but others don't want to lose that control.  And as a mesher who can see the potential with the new system, the possibility that I won't be able to make new meshes annoys me something fierce - that and potentially not have my game-fix hacks.

But it is more fun, for now, to play.

You can actually just go to the supermarket and plant the fruits/vegetables that you can buy there, they don't need to be in seed form. You can also plant whatever you manage to harvest, this is pretty much how you get higher and higher quality harvests.

So, one thing that would be nice is the opportunity to see all "opportunities" being offered to either select families, such as ones you have already played, or all families. For example, if you are playing the Bakers, a pop-up could ask, "Should Charlie Chesterfield bring work home with him?" or "Should Clara Klepo swip a statue from the musuem?" With the option to turn off messages, or better yet, filter which messages are received, one could feel more in control without being overwhelmed with messages all the time.

I think EA should have at least left us the ability to lock in one wish though. It is after all what we have been led to expect.

On a positive note, I shall be learning how to give up some control and go with the flow a bit more. I shall have to learn to be happy controlling just one family rather than a whole town, at least until someone figures out how to play it the TS2 way.

Some wanted more realistic game play, and in that aspect, controlling only one family at a time is more realistic.

Has anyone figured out a way to get a lot of groceries into the fridge quickly?

I am in the middle of looking closer at a few things that have been driving me nuts and took a few video's that I thought I would share.

Video 1 http://www.box.net/shared/f5bk2u52d2

A test family with the woman in labour for an at home birth. The father/husband is helpfully providing scene setting music for her! (Immediately after freaking out that she was in labour, he pulled out his guitar)

Video 2 http://www.box.net/shared/d4uixavmma

Directly across the street is the second test family currently being ignored to see what they do. As you will see the woman from the first test family went over to chat and ended up being present for the birth of the neighbours baby (her own only 3 hours old across the street) this time in hospital.

Video 3 http://www.box.net/shared/x9yoa6grod

The trip to the hospital and a rabbit hole building in action. What you see is what you get.

Video 4 http://www.box.net/shared/i89s71kuvf

Out of the rabbit hole and back home. The random male sim leaving the hospital behind the two women in this video is the father of the newborn who was supposed to be at work not at the hospital to witness the birth.

The "only one household" thing is pretty much the main nuisance. Turning off story progression does not appear to actually do what it says on the box and halt the crapflood of random sims infesting the neighborhood or prevent the other sims from endlessly spawning.

Ooooh!  Okay - right now I'm trying a somewhat asian looking girl with jade green eyes, I'll see what happens with her, though she's going for rock star.

YO NOOBS! This is MATY read the fucking manual, and stop posting completely pointless THANKS THIS IS GREAT! replies. You are not adding anything you are making it harder for others to get to the information they want.

@ Gelina
I don't think there is a way. But you don't need to buy any, if you don't have the correct food stuffs for a meal you just pay the cost of them when you make the meal instead of buying them in bulk then using at a later date. The cost is the same unless you have supermarket offers.

Am I blind or is there no gardening section? I can't find it for some odd reason.

Pes, Inge, everyone - now that you have had a chance to look at the game a bit, what is your take on our being able to get a SimPe equivalent for this game eventually?

Oh yay! Follow this exact line of actions, every time. Exactly what we, the players, don't want. My problem is still getting the relationship status to change from best friend to romantic interest. If they aren't best friends first, I get it right away after a couple of complements, a flirt, and a hand hold. If they are best friends, it takes several repeats.

One opportunity reward also lets you know that you can plant eggs for eggplants and cheese for cheeseplants. Because you can totally do that and cheeseplants exist. I find the unknown seeds to be annoying...once a sim has planted and unknown seed and seen it grow, they should be able to identify that seed. That way they don't end up with 50 million lime trees blocking view.

(http://i40.tinypic.com/35b8nci.jpg)
This is a remodel of the little trailer-like home with the "Indian burial ground" in the back (my poor ancestors). My family is finally solvent. Annoyingly, that nasty colored edge that you get on a flat roof or foundation is still present. Also, fences can't be recolored. Columns can. Driveways don't have a default paving, so those can be customized as you want.

Am I the only one wondering why, if we got such fine-tuned texture controls for objects, hair, and clothing, we didn't get the same for Build mode?

That and why all driveways, even in the garage have a speedbump at the end of them ... a speedbump was the best they could come up with?

Also amoung my wondering is why others seem to get the lifespan slider to work globally yet it wasn't for me. So I went back in and tested a couple of the mentioned scenarios where the slider is/is not global.

After several test families and much abuse of the Goth family I have changed my thinking on the lifespan slider from "it is household specific" to "It's just broken"

Scenario 1:

Brand new hood with lifespan slider set to "normal" and story progression on. Loaded the Bachelor family to check on Bella's age. Loaded the Goth family checked that Mortimer and Bella did appear to be exactly the same age in all levels of the lifespan slider. Set lifespan slider to "epic" and the speed to fast forward and left them to their own devices for a week (Bella was 7 days from teen on "normal" life span).

I have to say I was impressed with how well they will look after themselves. You almost can ignore them and they won't die ... almost. Not so happy with the ghosts. The ghost are like annoying uninvited guests that take naps in your bed, strike up conversations (and sometimes dances) with your sims and pull a very real, completely not ghost like at all, laptop out of no where and take up your kitchen table in the middle of dinner. I would have preferred they be more .. ghosty?

At the end of the week, I confirmed that Mortimer had aged 7 days on "epic" life span and was now 60 days from teen.

I switched back over to the Bachelor family to see if Bella had aged to teen as I had expected her to. She hadn't, she was still a child, however, she had only aged 3 days according to all of the life span settings on the slider. 7 days for Mort, was only 3 for Bella. Very odd.

Scenario 2:

Two couples, both married, one the Test family the other the Subject family (not very original I know). Move the Tests in, immediately try for baby successfully. Switch to Subject family, move in, try for baby, also successful on the first try.

Switch back the the Test family (who acquired a guitar in the short time I was gone!), set the lifespan slider to epic and play through birth of child (see video in my previous post) 3 sim hours later a Test is present for the birth of the Subject baby (also in videos). From this point on the Subjects were ignored for the next three sim days. I checked back in on the Subject family after 3 days and their child, 3 sim hours younger than the Test child is already a toddler.

Obviously the lifespan slider does not work intuitively as you would expect. If it is working I can't even begin to guess as there doesn't seem to be any logic behind what happens.

I will continue ignoring the Subject family and letting the Tests fend for themselves to see what happens as far as the children ageing goes.

Possible very annoying glitch ahoy.

Bought the tabs book for level 5 guitar, teenager practiced it, then ated the guitar. Okay, messed up enough. So I buy him a new one and tell him to perform the song. Well, he performs it, but the animation is seriously borked. Started playing an invisible guitar with the real one spinning a thousand miles per hour in his hand. Would really like someone else to confirm this one. If it just afflicts one performable song, okay, no big deal. If you can't perform a single song without this WTFage going on, then  :-\

Just a few more things before I start playing again. I realized that sims actually have tongues now. Yay because the lack of a tongue used to really creep me out. IDK why but it did. Another thing I could even get my married couple to make out after the first day. Lastly I have Vista 32-bit and it has been working fine ( knock on wood) even though I have an "unsupportable" video card according to EA and the game specs. It tends to use over 1 GB of memory but I have been playing all day going through the neighhood, CAS and the like several times.

I can confirm part of this after struggling with the Goths. You can't just hop the married couple in bed and expect to try for baby even though the actions are in the menu. Woe betide you if you try. I knocked quite a bit off their relationship and had to work them back up to simply kissing. If we have to go through this rigamarole every time we want kids, it's a big do not want for me.

I've not played extensively, but I can say that there is something about the game's graphics that make me think of Fisher Price. Spore gave me the same feeling - kids would probably like it.

I really love how the landscaping looks. The scenery is pretty and I love that the sims' eyes have a wet look to them along with a reflective shine (for lack of a better word) that keeps its position when your sim moves his/her eyes around. I'll admit that the open neighborhood is niftier than I thought, but I don't know if 3 will last for me beyond the new game novelty.

I'm already wanting more patterned swatches for CaST because a lot of what's included aren't to my taste and I want hair that doesn't look like it's either vinyl or matted animal fur. Creating a truly unique sim is somewhat challenging and getting away from pudgy faces is proving damn near impossible. I thought I had one until I got my sim in game and looked at her from a distance. Overall I suppose I'm enjoying it, but as I said before it has the novelty factor going for it.

Oh, and has anyone noticed that choosing what to paint for a 'still life' is counterintuitive? Whichever direction I move my mouse, the 'frame' goes the opposite way. Combine it with hypersensitive scrolling and I got a good five minutes of frustration fun. I had Agnes Crumplebottom go to start a still life at 7am, and couldn't get the picture I wanted by the time her carpool arrived an hour later.

The no hygiene thing isn't really no-hygiene, it's more analagous to the FT reducer perks. The no bladder thing, however, really is. Your sim will never, EVER, need pee again. For ANY reason. The bladder motive simply ceases to be once you buy it...and it's far cheaper than the others. Rather overpowered, really.

I think I saw a video that showed something like this happening, for what it's worth.

I think this is officially the worst discovered non-Sim-freezing glitch discovered thus far then. Obviously, it's going to affect every song. Maybe some hope for non-teenagers performing? Doubt it.

(http://i458.photobucket.com/albums/qq307/DigiGekko/Screenshot-74.jpg)

wtf

That reminds me of the old frozen arm glitch you got when you canceled a chess-playing sim's action mid-move.

Perhaps they meant to put in animations for playing air guitar (something perfectly sensible for a teenager to do) and the animation confused it with playing the real one? Just...ick!

I have a question. How do you get a couple to leave the house together? My sim about to go to the hospital to have the baby, but I don't know how to get the husband to go with her. I would like for both of them to leave together to go shopping, eat out, or to the park. They don't have the funds for a car yet, is that the only way to get them out together?

Okay, I tried this out on an adult, works as it should, which means young adults should be error-free as well. Summary: Teenagers can't perform with the guitar, at least not without severe borkiness. Lame.

Found a bug in the opportunities.  It looks like if you have accepted two opportunities at the same location, the first is unfulfillable, and the second is also possibly borked.  Or, maybe, it is just these specific opportunities.  I first signed on for the culinary career "Bad Apples" opportunity, which required growing 10 bad apples, then for the gardening skill "Limes are Key" opportunity, which requires growing 4 very nice limes and returning them to the same restaurant.  After accepting the second opportunity, the tag menu for the first just repeated the second (even though the title was correct), so that the "give apples" (or whatever) option was "give limes" in both menus.  When I took the apples to work with me, they were removed from my inventory, but the opportunity came up as failed at the deadline.  So, BORKED, for sure.  Furthermore, the lime tree I planted for the second opportunity will not go any higher than "growing" (no "mature", etc.), even though it's been a week and I've tended to it as required.  No idea if that's part of the same borkage or not.  Great fun.

Going to the hospital with the mother happens automatically unless you cancel it. As for shopping, I am not sure though I recall seeing "go with ..." on some of the buildings.

Nevermind

I don't think theres much need for custom eyes now that you can use the color wheel to set them to any color you please.


I figured this out last night. In Edit Town mode, you click a sim in the 'Library' or a house and click the 'Share' button. It *says* it's exported to the launcher, but you can get around that. Look in My Documents --> Electronic Arts --> The Sims 3 --> Exports. There's your custom content file with the exported content. Launcher = DNW or need.


Actually, yes. There may be another reason the error occurs but it definitely does if you try to open it with winrar.


Are you certain you didn't have the window facing the wrong direction? The ledge is on the inside and I don't think that's quite right.


I managed both. Try harder.

I had the guitar disappear bug as well, on an adult male immediately after learning level 5 skill. I'm going to try to get him to level 6/have him learn a new song and see if that helps at all. Too bad, as I really enjoyed the guitar aspect of the game.

Odd. This glitch needs more testing if it might happen to an adult, as well. This might also mean some teenagers are "immune". I might try a few more teenagers/adults when I have time.

Abraham has learned 12 different songs. All proceeded smoothly, and he never lost his guitar. He was either a YA or adult, though. I'm about to start up another test to focus on the story progression option and will be doing (hopefully) a single teen living on the street. He'll be living off leavings in the park and tips from playing guitar/maybe painting. So we'll see.

That house is a pre-built, and the one I've been playing. That's how it is set up. You may have a point, though...it's possible EAxis screwed the pooch.

EWWW THE TEXTURES.

Seriously. Is anyone else getting really gross, low quality texturing on Sims' clothing and hair with all graphics settings on high? And faces, too, now that I think about it.

It seriously looks like TS2 graphics on the lowest setting. Everything is fuzzy and EW DNW.

Sims 3 bites. It looks like it was meant to be Sims 2 and Sims 2 was meant to be 3. It is way too easy. It has good stuff but they compromised on quality  way too much.

Cool idea. I've always wanted a homeless Sim and didn't realise you could do that now. Are you just going to be initially putting him in a vacant lot and not building him a house?

Awesome, it's Adam Lambert!

Yeah, you can totally make a homeless sim now that just has a vacant lot for a home. Eat from picnic baskets, sleep on park benches, sell crap you find on the ground, and play guitar (without glitching) for cash.

More on guitar glitch: first of all, my sim was a young adult, rather than an adult. To clear it I used moveobjects to detach and delete the "invisible"/stuck guitar from him, and he is now able to play again as normal. I would suggest that anyone experiencing this glitch take the sim in question to a community lot and see if a stuck, non-interactive guitar suddenly appears stuck to them. This seems to be nothing we haven't seen in TS2, but without shift-click capabilities the method for doing away with it appears to be more of a pain in the ass than we are previously used to.

Also, the reward for fertility when present in both partners resulted in first pregnancy non-identical twins. Has anyone had triplets?

Long story short: This game annoys me.

I spent an hour or so fooling around the options panel, because it set me up on low, and it looked pretty awful. Then I got to a happy medium and figured that, no, there's just no way to make their little caveman faces look good. The TS2 sims look way more realistic in their cartoony way, because these new sims tried to cross the uncanny valley and failed. HARD. Let their little digital skeletons serve as a warning to others.

Do I always have click 'new game' for each family? Maybe I'm doing it wrong, but if I'm doing to right, this isn't what I expected at all. I've only loaded two families -one created, one pre-installed- but they seem to be living in parallel universes. Family one doesn't show anywhere in family two's neighborhood, and likewise in reverse. Are they LITERALLY two games? And each family represents a 'new game'? God, I hope I'm wrong about this. I really expected the old 'one neighborhood, many families approach', because how else are they going to interact?

Also: CAS sucks. Textures are nice, but there's no way around the caveman features. Clothes aren't all that either. Caveman issues aside, I like how the sims stand while idling. Looks realistic.

As for gameplay, the traits are great, I'll give you that. Somebody already mentioned there seems to be a strategy/tactic vibe going on, and that's exactly right. On my Wii, I have 'My life as a king' from Wiiware, and this reminded me a lot about it. In MLAK, I send my little people on errands, never see the inside of their houses, and all of the quests happen off-screen, so I have to read a report to know what because of them. It was a fun game, but it had a short shelf-life. After completing the game, there was nothing else to do.

I foresee the same thing happening to Sims 3. Yeah, it's shiny now, but the potential for boredom is greater than TS2. I'll have fun with TS3, but I'll come back crawling to TS2 eventually.

Evil charismatic lucky romantic family sim FTW, though. She wants to be an empress of evil someday. The gods have smiled upon her, and I expect great things from her evil brood.

(I miss the alien abuctions already, though.)

Yeah they are new games entirely. To switch families, you go to "Edit Town" and on the bottom left of your screen there's an icon to switch active family.

Yes, that is useful! You can take advantage of more seating options now.

It is a total and complete failure of an idea. TS3 enforces curfew on teens and kids, and if they are off the home lot for more than a couple of minutes, the cops grab them and dump them back on the home lot. Also, you can only nap to about 1/5 of energy on park benches. It's possible to invite yourself into a house and use their bed, but do two inappropriate things and you are forcefully kicked out. Also, they will not pass out to sleep until they've been at zero energy for hours, then only sleep on the ground for a half hour. After a day and a half, energy became such a problem that I couldn't get anything else done. I didn't want him to have anything accessible at all on his home lot. I didn't want him befriending and sleeping over at other homes properly. I gave him the worst possible personality...mean, easy to anger, kleptomaniac, insane. Klepto does not work as the items stolen don't get deposited to inventory.

With an adult, it's more possible, but you'd still have a really hard time getting ahead since they can't even sleep in school. Teen might be okay if you allow them to start with a guitar and eventually buy things for their home lot. At a $0 start, no.

Thanks, saw that after I let it play... wish they went together. Now to figure out how to get them to ride bikes to the park together...

I have noticed books disappearing after learning a new recipe. I figured that it should go in the bookcase for others to learn. What is up with costing 1000 simoleons for a book learning that cake, I forgot the name. Too high.

At first I thought Sims 3 was awesome being able to seamlessly go around the neighborhood,but then I came to the diner- yep go in and eat but the sim can, I can't see inside there, isnt anything there when I zoom in? whats with that? hmm ok try the beach a dip in the sea
oops no swim option just fishing...well least there are cars, oops they skipped the get in and reverse then drive now they teleport to the road WTF!

The more I played the more it became a poor 3d upgrade of Sims 2
we waited 6 years for this???cmmon EA your kidding?
oh no there not,that's how they to get you to buy more -except this has had years in the making?

heck even making a home if you can find the options for creating bare blocks and homes and trying to put a family in (that can afford an empty small house is a pain!)not that there is much content to furnish it with, but hey the sims 3 items look just as basic as the original sims 2 stuff so maybe wei can mport other object packages? ,that remains to be seen..
gee thought having pets and weather could have been included and another town?
or the option to make a fresh one (not the same) over and over.
They have done a spore on Sims3 aaaghhhh! THE HORROR!

I guess they decided to make those things one-time use to function as money sinks, given how much more difficult money is to comeby. But realistically, the idea of recipes disappearing like that is just plain stupid.

And did anyone figure out how the fuck the Food Replicator works, let alone if it does anything? From my observations of it so far, it's not like the ones at Paladin's Place for TS1 and TS2 in terms of making food appear by itself, and it doesn't serve as a stove/fridge replacement either.

Yeah i got a food replicator and it works great.  You make a meal then you store it on the food replicator and depending on the quality you get an amount of charges.  For nice quality its 10 for very nice its 20.  The best idea is to store group meals.   You can overwrite any one whenever you want providing you got a food dish to do so.

Once you got meals stored simply activate the food replicator and get it to replicate a meal.  I've had my sims going on just the food replicator for ages and never needing to cook.  You can also upgrade it to hold more slots.  When it's upgraded it can hold 3 foods.

Ok I now understand what is going on.

EA leaked a "pirated" copy of the game, knowing that the type of people who would be attracted to gaining the game in this dastardly way are precisely the type of people most likely to track down bugs and tell Pescado about them.   This way, Pescado can come up with solutions in time for EA to use his fixes in a patch very soon after the game comes out officially.   It's all good, folks.

Inge, I think you've got the wrong brand of tinfoil under that tea cosy of yours - you went for the cheap no-name supermarket brand, didn't you?  The major flaw in your idea is that you think EA care about releasing an early bug-fixing patch.

Here's the real reason.

EA leaked the game to the pirates so that when sales go pear-shaped, they can blame it on the early release of the pirated copy.  With much wailing and wringing of hands, they can tell their shareholders that the game would have been far more successful if only those nasty pirates hadn't had a 2 week head start.  Then nobody at EA will have to take the blame for deciding to remove the aspects of the game that made TS1 and TS2 so successful, or for deciding to include secuROM.

I haven't seen anybody report this yet:

> Also, I deleted all the premade families, and after playing 30
> minutes, they're all moving back in... DESPITE BEING DELETED! The
> Goths, Landgraabs, Alto family, all of them!

That's from someone on the newsnet sims group who is trying out the game.

Inge, that logic is full of flaws.

[21:00] <Lorelei> If they really wanted him to mod it and de-crapify it, they would have sent him a copy before now via a download link
[21:00] <Lorelei> the "it's not the real game" and other theories are lulzy

Edit: (Forgotten this bit, thanks Lorelei)

Pescado: "It's not the real game" is an irrelevant argument.
Pescado: The problems that exist in the game are deeply rooted design decisions that would not be overturned even within several months.
Lorelei: these [conspiracy] theorists are probably just bitter [that other] people got it before they did AND said it is 90% crappy

Oh how cute.  Giggy's attempting to give a serious response to Inge's joke theory.  And it's not even Giggy's own opinion.