More Awesome Than You!

Having been invited, oh so politely, to fuck off and die on N99 for not joining in the cheering section for Sims 3, someone give me some reasons to not think it's a total waste of hard drive space.

I have gathered from this forum that:

You're stuck with balloon faced Sims.  And second generation Sims are even worse.
You're stuck with nasty dead-looking eyes.  (About 80% of my reason for thinking I'm going to hate this.  All I can think of when I look at them is a Victorian porcelain doll in a horror movie.  You know the one that tries to strangle the hero the minute s/he falls asleep.)
The Story Progression Toggle is either borked, not borked, or works for a while and then stops.
You can only run one family at any given time because the game will randomly delete them if you run any other family.  This problem is either fixed or not fixed by aforesaid SPT depending on whether it's borked on purpose or not.
Most of the game consists of chasing all over the open concept neighborhood collecting stuff which has no use in the game other than display.
Relationships are either too easy to make or too hard.  Or both at once.
All public areas are rabbitholes.
EA has given TSR some sort of perk which has allowed them to make their own content creator. (Which accounts for a good chunk of the remaining 19.56% of the reason I'm avoiding this turd.)

So. Anyone want to address the .44% that still thinks I might buy Sims 3 once the price drops to $1.98 US.

While I suspect this thread will be nuked, I'm curious exactly why you think the above is true.

I am on N99 and I am definitely not a cheerleader...yet no one has told me to leave. They do have a rosy view there but my guess is things will be different after they play the final game. Some people just want to believe it will all be okay...or maybe they have different expectations. I must admit, I actually feel a bit sorry for some of them. When their Sims spawn random babies, or they can't find an acceptable female for their Sim son, or all their hard earned inventory items disappear because they switched households, or their other family moves away, they will be ranting as well, begging modders to fix the problems. Disappointment can be very difficult and I fear some of them are going to feel pretty bad in a couple of weeks.

waste of HDD space? seriously?

go arr it and all youll be loosing is bandwidth...which could be used for some porn i guess but still.

From this: "Welcome to The Sims 3 Workshop

"The Sims 3 Workshop" is a Custom Content Tool developed by The Sims Resource for use with The Sims 3. Our goal is to give artists the same level of freedom to create new content for Sims 3 as they could for Sims 2, including new objects, clothing, hair etc.

Development of the tool started as soon as we returned from our week at EA in January for the Creator Camp. Since then we have made good progress with the tool, especially in the areas of importing and editing in a 3D environment, and splitting creations into channels to allow for items to be fully compatible with "Create a Style" in the game.

Our development will be quite public, inviting support and input not only from our staff artists but from the entire community. We plan to provide a plug-in compatible environment and encourage others to help make the Workshop a useful and productive tool for both artists and players alike.

"The Sims 3 Workshop" is being developed professionally and as such will have an EULA which will be flexible enough to protect artists work while allowing creations to be distributed via any means, be it free, donation or subscriber/pay.

For the latest development info check out the News & Updates page, to join in with technical or process discussions, visit our Workshop Forums."

On here: http://www.thesimsresource.com/workshop

Although they do not say anything about EAxis helping them, the rumor is that EAxis is assisting them somehow.

Well, I admit that posting this topic is partly a way to cut through about 9 million contradictory posts on this and other sites--especially those made during the 3 days I couldn't access this site at all--and get some actual answers, I got this impression from the announcement by TSR as quoted somewhere or other and the commentary in the topic on this forum.  If it's wrong, I guess that's one positive note.

Not all public lots are rabbitholes.  There are a few places to socialize visibly - any of the parks, one of the restaurants (with the "Eat Outside" option), library, gym, pool, etc.  Workplaces are rabbitholes, which is no different than TS2, really, where they just disappear offlot for a while.  I take advantage of that time to spy on other Sims just to see how they act on their own.

The scavenger minigame is really optional.  Jobs don't require it, skill level isn't dependent on it.  It is necessary for some of the "skill journal" achievements, but it's entirely possible and feasible to completely ignore the collection of seeds, fish, ores, bugs, etc.

Relationships - pain in the ass, because there is sort of this enforced foreplay thing going on, where you have to get a Sim, regardless of relationship level, into a receptive frame of mind before certain interactions are available.  You can't woohoo your girlfriend and then immediately ask her to move in, because "Move in" is a friendly interaction.  You have to work your way up these trees of interactions until the Sim reflects the proper "perception" of your Sim.  Hate that aspect but once you understand how it works, it's really not difficult.  To its benefit, it does prevent random romances from a single flirt - you have to really intentionally set the stage for the "romantic interest" flag to get set.

Most of other stuff is strictly a matter of opinion and taste.  With some patience, I've been able to create some mostly puddingless Sims, and their eyes are (IMO) quite natural.  I've never gotten the Victorian doll vibe from them.  And while there are certainly some fugly Sims around, they're fugly in a much more believable way - fugly like people you'd run into at the mall, instead of at a house of mirrors.  I may demand perfection from my Sims, but I enjoy the realism of fairly diverse looking Sims running around.

Merle, I've seen that and the forum posts, but I think the "EA assistance" is rumor, one that TSR is encouraging. That's why I asked for details--I've seen people rumbling about it but no one explaining *why* they're rumbling. If TSR and EA *actually* had a deal, wouldn't TSR be shouting this from the rooftops rather than coyly alluding to their 'time at EA Redwood' (as though they were the only ones there, on a special intimate date)?

From what I understand--and this is also hearsay--EA is trying to lock down all custom content anyway, via Store/Exchange. Or are we assuming they will make an exception for just one third-party site and expect it not to cause the biggest shitstorm the game has ever seen?

I feel like I must still be missing crucial pieces of this whole thing, so maybe no one really knows for sure.

Honestly, I mostly like the new gameplay mechanics.  Of course, I only ever play one family at a time anyway.  I like that the neighborhood ages with me now.

As far as relationships...yeah, they're absurdly easy, but no more so than macro/socialize.  TBH, I don't find it that different from TS2 relationships.  The lack of a lifetime relationship meter is kinda meh, but since that meter was redundant anyway, it's not that big a deal.

Now, that's not saying that the game is great.  It's not.  But I do prefer the gameplay of this one over the TS2 gameplay for the most part.  I just wish it wasn't so...limited.  It's missing too many features and obviously so for EA to regurgitate expansions.  And that seriously grates on my nerves.

So I guess what I'm saying is "It's not bad. It's not great.  It's also not TS2."  Overall, I think it has potential.  Unfortunately a finished game that only has potential isn't really a finished game, IMO.  But considering the state of the majority of the gaming industry and how unfinished products are becoming a norm...I haven't encountered any major bugs in TS3, but it's blatantly obvious that things like genetics are either "not as intended" or "we didn't care enough to do it right".

[edit] Ugh at the grammatical errors..that'll teach me to type when I'm weak from stupidly skipping meals to read a book. :P  I think I got them all.

People keep saying that, but in your game did no family every have more than one child that grew up.  I take it you just moved out surplus kids and deleted them?  No one got divorced or broke up?  If they did, again, the Sim who left was just bit-garbage?  I'm sorry, but I can't imagine deciding to play only two Sims for the life of the game.  It would get so fucking boring.....

I think the reason many people believe EA has something to do with it is because the game hasn't officially released yet. I have seen people claiming that either EA gave them access to the code, or that someone at TSR pirated it as well. Though what they have exactly I am not really sure. It looks like something alright but as for being the lifesaving CC tool, I can't really say from anything I have heard of it.

I am getting the game - but then I am a glutton for punishment. I try to be optimistic, I feel personally that the game has potential but not in it's raw state.

I was very leery of the game, but am glad I took it for a test drive, because I find I really like it.  That's not to say it'll be to everyone's taste, of course, and it's no skin off my nose if someone doesn't like it, or doesn't like the things I like.  Anyway, I was saying that to preface addressing a couple of the things you mentioned, since you asked for feedback.


While a lot of the townies have round faces, there are other facial types.  The three children of my founding Sims found non-round-face Sims to marry, and that wasn't even one of the criteria I was using in looking for mates for them.  They've now had children for themselves, and while a couple of the girls have squarish jaws, I think they will age up well enough.


In actual gameplay, I don't think they have as scary an effect as in CAS.


I've found that the key to keeping families around is to stay friends with them.  So far no one my Sims cared anything about have moved away.  Granted, I haven't tried switching families -- I'm quite content with the one -- but I would think that if you switch to a family that is friends with someone in your current family, they won't go anywhere.


None of my 10 Sims have been collectors.  They've gotten the odd wish to get a rock or a butterfly, and sometimes I let them get it, but I've been quite happy just focusing on job and family.  If you ignore/delete collection wishes, they quit popping up (unless you have a trait that favors collecting, I'm sure).


Not all.  The art museum can be entered and enjoyed.  The Sims can eat outside at the Bistro, if they choose, though getting them to sit at the same table reminds me of TS1 -- it rarely happens.  They still interact, though.  Let's see, what else .... You can go into the library and read books, work on the computer, or visit with friends.  There may be other places not coming to mind at the moment.  And there are lots of outdoor public areas for fun, like the park, several beach spots, several fishing holes, and the cemetery.

I guess that's about it.  The game has its problems, but I like it. My intention isn't to convince you to get the game.  I just wanted to give you input on the points you asked about.

ETA:  I did marry off and move out two of the founder's three kids.  They maintain relationships with the main family, and recognize each other as brother-in-law, uncle, nephew, cousin, etc.  It's nice.  I have to work to keep the ties between families active, though.

I followed the generations.  So, for instance, when the child grew up and went to college, I followed.  When they came back, I moved them to a new lot and kept playing them...so eventually, six generations of a family were all "adults" and no one ever aged past it because it was too much of a pain to switch to another house just to age them to elders or have them die or whatever.  And if there was more than one child, I just picked my favorite and followed them.  So I'd end up with teenage great uncles/aunts.

I don't know, on the original "OMG TSR haz a tool" thread it didn't sound like anyone was too convinced by TSR's insider info so far, which was why I was wondering if there was *new* information that brought this up again.

Sorry for any redundancy, it's almost sleepy-time for me. Basically, I think people suspect EAxis has helped TSR in the creation of the tool because they are able to program this WITHOUT actually having the game. If you think about that a moment, it is... a tad odd. However, I think they simply gathered information at the Creator's Camp to get themselves started in the right direction, and perhaps some Maxoids encouraged it by answering a few questions.

I have to say that I utterly hate TS3. There is a lot about it that makes it like a crappier copy of Harvest Moon or Animal Crossing, and if I want to play those, I will play them. I hate the way it looks, for the most part, I find it clunky and horrible to play, especially the mechanics of getting a sim promoted. What do you do while the sim is in the rabbit hole for all that time, when speed 3 crawls by? How fun is a game if I need another activity to keep me amused while it enforces complete lack of activity for long periods of time? If I didn't cheat energy up, my sim would spend 60% of each day in activities (sleep, work) I can only observe.

On consideration, the timing of TSR's announcement is what bothers me.  They say it's been in the works since about the time of the Creators' Camp.  So, how do they know what the file formatting and stuff is?  I don't see how they could have started developing a tool without having a copy of the game available.  And they seem to imply that they're working on it even now.

Either they're blowing hot air out their arses--very likely--and have no idea what they're doing.  Or they've got pirated copies--also likely and really funny considering.  Or they've got inside access--which I suspect is what they want us to believe.

But that isn't really what I wanted this topic to be about.

I've had families where kids grew up and moved out.  I checked in on them from time to time and they had gotten themselves jobs, and established romances.  I do play the game on Epic lifespan, so I think things tend to move a bit more slowly.  

My gameplay style for TS3 really isn't all that different from how I played TS2.  I create a Sim, get him a job in line with his personal goals, find him a suitable mate from the pool of Townies (it's a fairly small pool, I have to admit, most are already attached, and my Sim guy doesn't go for baggage carriers), work them towards success, and spawn.  Once the original Sim and his wife have achieved their lifetime goals and are fairly well established, I move the Sim kid out, and start playing his story.  If I get bored, I just abandon the family to the mercies of Story ReProgression and start with a brand new Sim.  

It works for me.  There is plenty to dislike about the game (such as Story Progression not actually working ATM) but I have to say most of my free time has been spent playing the game.  

Oh - and CASt, for me, is *huge*.  When I first read about it, I thought it would just lead to tacky rooms plastered in identical textures, but not so much.  You can, for instance, take a texture you like and use it as a bedspread, then pick accent colors out of the texture and use it as wall paint, turn that shade a few shades darker for trimwork, etc.  I've never been much of a Sims decorator, but I have created some rooms that I am quite pleased with - coordinated, yet not ZOMGeverythingmatches!!

Well, the work thing doesn't bother me because both TS1 and TS2 had your sim disappear for work and now you can actually accomplish stuff at some jobs (extra cash, skilling, etc).  Plus, I love the fact that once you top the career, you can keep getting raises.

But I have noticed that needs are huge pain in the ass and some activities take way, way, waaaaaay, too long. Working out for 10 hours?  Really??  And even with the highest bed, my sim gets tired after 6-8 hours of being awake.

Gee, and I thought one of the selling points of Sims 3 was that meeting needs was boring and the Sims would spend less time on them.   ::)

Well, they got rid of comfort and environment and turned those into moodlets (which moodlets are fantastic)...so that's two gone...then you can get happiness rewards that make you only need to shower once every three days or so and one that makes you only need to eat once every two days...and then the super-overpowered one (which is also the cheapest of the need-altering rewards) that completely removes the bladder need.

only if you want it to. i haven't collected a damn thing and don't plan to.

Here is my abbreviated review of the game.

Gameplay - I find it a lot more fun than sims 1 or sims 2, at least until Makin' Magic and Superstar came out for the former, and Seasons and Apartment Life came out for the latter.  I normally only play one sim at a time anyway, so limitations to one family, for practical purposes, is fine with me - if you prefer complete control, than this might not be the game for you.

Building - Honestly, while the addition of being able to pull and push walls around is nice, most of build mode sucks.  Building stairs is cumbersome and still lacks the ability for diagonal stairs and recolouring.  Roofing can not be individually adjusted which means putting a pointy tower roof with a normally pitched roof is impossible - I learned this while trying to build the house from Coraline.  Its still a neat house, but it really doesn't look quite right.  You can not nestle a column onto a fence, even with moveobjects on.  I can go on and on about the limitations.

CAS - Create a style is actually well done - it is better than homecrafter or bodyshop, unless you make your own textures or meshes, which a lot of folks don't.  I've had no problems making gorgeous clothing [even with the crap meshes to work with], gorgeous walls and gorgeous furnishings.  A colour wheel, a palette and a number tool give you a whole ton of tools for finding just the right colour and using it over and over again - in fact, the only problem I've found is that the tools for hair and eye colour are not as good as the tools for everything else.

Sims - Making decent sims is not that hard, and while the EA made ones are doughy, they are -not- as homely as the ones in Sims 2 - which is a plus.  On the downside, most all the male young adult and adult sims are taken, which means aging up some poor sim - or starting off with a couple.  I don't like that aspect, but its something that I can deal with.

EA - I am offended that they basically left out -half- the game's objects and fashion stuff and are turning around and charging far more than the game itself is costing.  While its oh so kind of them to give us 10 shiny whole dollars to spend, I've seen estimates from $80 on up to get all the objects.  With the economy the way it is, it is offensive to me that they are doing this, especially since I've played since Sims 1 and remember the weekly Thursday downloads of -good- stuff.  Also, everything I've heard indicates that while the game itself does not ship with securom, that their download manager has securom, and thus to get the free extra neighborhood and any of the store stuff means getting securom as well.

Personally, as games go its fun, but the strings attached make it something I'm less likely to -spend- money on getting.

The create-a-style thing is the best feature of the game, in my view.  It is one of the primary reasons I will give this another go when I upgrade my rig a bit.  I am willing to entertain the notion that I am simply not familiar enough with gameplay options to really enjoy the game yet, but I still worry that the overall look of the game is more TS1 than TS2 or better.  Perhaps new video card will solve this.

The "can't get stuff unless you pay and get stuff-u-ROM" thing is the real bother.  I'm stuck with 5 hairstyles and 12 suits?  Forever?  'cos I'm not registering this and I'm not paying.

@Lerf:  you seem to have some difficulty making a decision.  Recommendation: for reasons already stated, you do not like this game.  Suggest you uninstall immediately and go back to TS2.  Should you take this advice, my fee is 3 internetz, deliverable within 30 days.  Standard contract rules apply.

I was like Phyllis_p at the beginning, I was thinking this game was going to be the worst game of the series. However, I too found it fun, at least in the beginning. It was fun to explore the neighborhood and try new things. After everything started to settle down though, I found it to be somewhat boring. Collecting was fun in the beginning, but now is tedious. Jobs were fresh and exciting, but now feels dull and drab. Even the "new neighborhood smell" has lost its appeal already.

 I find myself playing in a rut with nothing to look forward to. Part of that reason is I play with only one sim, because I don't want to start a new one and lose him forever. Another reason is I feel like I did everything already and there isn't anything left for me to do, like the feeling I have beaten a game and now there isn't any reason to start over.

The game is pretty fun when you first start it up, and there is a lot of innovations for it to be enjoyable for a while. The Create a style is probably hands down the best feature, and the neighborhood looks pretty and stuff. I just don't know how long I can play it without it becoming so boring I revert back to TS2.

If you are unsure, you can always just download it and test it out yourself, and if you don't like it, you can always delete it.

Who didn't expect TSR and EA to be in bed together on Sims 3?

I think the EPs will definitely be a help. I mean, Sims 2 base game alone is sort of boring, too, unless you do a lot of challenges.

Jorganza, That is because it plays like a game and all games get boring after playing them over and over. I can see myself eventually getting this, playing for a while, and then putting it away until the next expansion pack, playing for a while, putting it away....rinse and repeat.  As someone said somewhere, its more like Harvest Moon or Animal Crossing than a toolbox/dollhouse/sandbox.

Of course, I keep thinking with enough mods and the ability to ignore some of the things you don't like, the game could be more similar to Sims 2. But that probably won't happen until all the expansion packs are out..maybe another 8 years?

I don't know, I'm still perplexed. Perhaps it's my gaming background that pushes me on, but I usually tend to look at games having in mind Richard Bartle's essay on MUD players(it's old and somewhat outdated, but still awesome and valid, according to me), which can be easily applied to any kind of game, as a matter of fact.

Bartle essentially said that MUD players can be categorized in 4 basic types: Achievers, Killers, Socializers and Explorers. A well-balanced and long-living game should somehow satisfy all of them. Make your own adaptations of player types (creators, modders, powerplayers à la Pescado, storytellers, etc.) and you'll se that TS2 is clearly a game of this kind: any tipe of player can enjoy it at full: there is no emphasis in specific areas to the detriment of another.
Somehow, TS3 smells to me of a rather unbalanced game. Maybe it's just me, and I haven't fully explored the game, but I have the feeling TS3 can be a great game for some players and crap for others: a strong dichotomy which would have never been happened in TS2.

I'm still playing TS2 for now, and sitting on the fence; I'll give TS3 another go some day, but the gameplay so far has only bored me to death, just like Spore. :/

I can honestly say that I'm glad I arred this before buying it because, in my opinion, it's worse than I imagined. I've been playing it for a week and keep waiting for the fun to start. I know I'm repeating what a lot of others have said, but anyway...  

Stuff I like:
I like the idea of the work rabbit holes and the option to direct your Sim to act a certain way at their job. I like the moodlets. I like the traits, I have a Sim running around like a spaz "woo - ing" at everyone (excitable or party animal or some such thing) and it's funny for now. CAS is finally what it should've been this whole time.  

Everything else:
Like someone else pointed out, this game is very similar to a clunky version of Harvest Moon/Animal Crossing. I hate the game interface, the Sims are painfully ugly, the only social place to watch your Sim is outside at a park or a gym, story progression is broken and I hand washed a load of dirty dishes last night while my sim was at work with the time moving along at a painful speed 2. Oh & I keep finding Sims that seem to have immaculately conceived children.

I remember that study and I agree.  Sims 3 as it stands is horribly unbalanced.  Its designed for people who wish a game -or- want to make stories.  It is horribly designed for people who like to build, like myself.  Its like building in Sims 2 before we got stages and with half the tricks from 2 disabled.  But when I want to play with a sim, instead of build, then 3 is great.

I think it basically boils down to what game style you prefer.
I personally like collecting things, so the scavenging appeals to me a great deal. I also like the concept of the open neighborhood - but I am not sure if I like exactly how it was implemented. But as a lot of my initial issues with it are being taken care of by modders as we speak, I am not really counting that yet. The look of the sims has grown on me since I have seen sims the community made. EA's sims seem rushed and have little to no facial personality, while the sims I have seen made by the community look better. I also hate watching my sims do shit without being able to interact with them if I want them to complete a task. But as of yet this has been in all the Sims games, and if the fast forward isn't working, I have no counter to that.

My biggest complaints about the game from an observer's standpoint (I get my game Tues. as a gift) are the Store and the broken Story progression mode. I am really disappointed just looking at it, but it has cheered me up a bit to see that the few things I actually want will be covered by my free points, and that the items in the Store are pretty Fail. But that is not to say I excuse the Store, because I find it exorbitant to say the least, and the fact I only see about 1/3 of it is new non-recycled objects rubs me the wrong way. As for the SP mode, Pescado is fixing EA's mess ups, and I really feel the game will become very enjoyable once the community fleshes out what EA did not.

I don't have the game yet and this is my question.

Is it the broken Story Progression that is the main cause of the Sims3 feeling like a game to beat instead of a toy to play? It seems to me that this may be the case.  Everything else seems akin to the Sims2 base game play with enhancements.  I mean what is there to do in the base Sims2 game? Build a house, get a job, socialize with other sims, have a family and skill, basically what you do in the Sims3 with collections added for those who like those.  After reading most of the comments in this section, I think that just fixing the SP (either with an EA patch or with an awesome fix) is the key, right? Or am I missing something.  Also a lot of people seem to be forgetting or ignoring that a lot of the improvements to the Sims2 either came with third party modding or EPs.  

I can only speak for myself, but yes. I'm at a point right now with a family I really like. The two teen boys both have mates picked out. The parents have met (or almost met) their LTW. They are swimming in money. Now it's time to focus on the boys, but with Story Progression always active no matter which way you toggle it, that's not an option. Either I expand the household to epic proportions and go to China rules on kids due to the 8-sim limit, or one of them lives his life in an unapproved manner. Or I split both off and only hear about the parents dying through a late-night phone call.

There are few things in life you can control. I'm absolutely fine with that. But the things I can control, I'd better be able to.

It's not that bad. That's what I thought at first but it's starting to grow on me, slowly but surely. On a positive note does anyone have any idea how to move in a sim from another household? Im getting irritated now because I CAN'T DO IT. They've woohooed, they can try for a baby yet there is no option for move in. How? Enlighten me please.

I'm sorry, that's bullshit.  When I look at purchasing Photoshop CS4, I don't ask myself how similar it is to CS3.  I don't have to play the TS2 basegame.  I can play TS2 with all EPs/SPs +CC right now.  TS3 has to compete for my time with the current state of TS2, just as it has to compete with other games, movies, music, etc.  It logically follows that how much you like TS3 is influenced by how bored you are of TS2.

I keep launching TS3 after reading about this or that cool thing, to find I'm not as enthralled as I thought I would be.  It's really not a bad game concept, but I simply have not become attached to any of the sims I've made.  Their traits do not make them any deeper, or more complex than their TS2 counterparts.  The game still requires the engagement of my imagination to make them live, but the wall of text spam repeatedly slams me out of immersion.  When I've gone back to TS2 in the interim, I haven't missed TS3 at all, even though I've played that family into 3 generations.  To be honest, I shouldn't have to keep hammering away in order to let the game grow on me.  That's work, not play.

I like TS3 a little better than I liked Spore, but it's the less-favoured child and will probably get uninstalled.  Like marhis, I leave myself open to the possibility of looking at it again in a few months if/when hacks, and CC can expand the gameplay.

That's the thing that bugged me with sims 1 to sims 2 - there are so many -new- things they could do with expansions that making us wait for seasons, apartments, university, pets, magic, etc. is lame, especially making us wait again.

In addition, they removed pianos.  Why in the hell did they remove pianos.  Why did they make it a guitar skill and not a music skill?

I LOVE Bartle and I think maybe you have something here. Sims 2 appealed to a variety of people on the hierarchy, maybe killers a little less than the others. Sims 3 appeals to the achievers most of all I think, maybe a bit to the explorers although once you have collected umteen rocks and seeds, it gets a bit boring. I have taken the quiz in the past and am a socializer, which is probably why I enjoyed Nightlife the best and the lightbolt attractions. The chat nests are very nice but again, its all the same thing. Building a romance is so easy and so predictable compared to Nightlife.

Or maybe my expectations were just too high. I had hoped the AI with the townies would be better and its disappointing. Genetics are screwy, romance is dull, keeping friends is really hard and no nightclubs to hang out in! I used to love having a bar/nightclub business and just watching the sims interact. Something is missing..and I can't quite put my finger on it. Some say Sims 3 seems more alive..but to me, it doesn't. It seems less interesting somehow...could it simply be the missing expansion packs?

Agreed, though I think males look okay for the most part, females are fugly.  You can make your own good looking sims, but I managed to hit slider limits (i.e. face width) before getting the look I wanted.
You should, however, be able to make acceptable looking sims.


You're the first (other than me) that I've seen mention that.  Most people think the new eyes look more realistic, but I completely agree with you.  They look creepy in game, especially when facing away from the lighting.  I got used to it though.  It was one of the first things that disturbed me about their appearance.  Don't forget also that even the lightest blush makeup on a female sim comes out looking gray/black, making what may have been an ugly sim look even uglier.  The sims always look soooo much better in CAS and the pie menu than they do in game for some reason.  I think they really need to tweak the lighting.


I can't really add anything that hasn't already been said, but how long have you spent with the game?  For me, it's still real enjoyable, but then I might play my game a bit differently.  I like making corrupt families and corrupting towns.  The sims I'm playing are a dysfunctional couple who cheat on each other, but don't know about the other's sexcapades.  The woman has babies that don't belong to her husband.  The man goes out and knocks up just whoever, and then doesn't care to visit his illegitimate love children.  He'll hook up with and impregnate mothers and daughters in the same household.  I've got a Jerry Springer-like story going on in my town, and it's been quite amusing so far.  Sims being able to impregnate townies was something I thought would be fun, but couldn't be done in Sims 2.

Maybe they thought it would smart to do that as they can later put it up for sale at The Sims 3 store, since they seem to be more concerned as to how take money off us. Maybe not though, just a guess.

I actually agree with this.  What I was trying to say is that as more and more mods, CC, and EPs come out for the Sims3 more and more people will switch over to it (especially when a tool to make our own neighborhoods comes out).

I'm definitely regretting my decision to let my husband go ahead and order the collector's edition for me . . .  But I am a Sims whore so I gotta have it all—but that doesn't mean I won't arr when necessary.  This is the first time I've ever arr'd a complete game in the Sims franchise but it's because my gut wasn't too happy when the first pics came out and I discovered the fugly Sims.  I'm usually pretty good about buying a game to give the company their due.  I'm seriously only looking forward to the thumb drive and fucking over the store; I was pissed when it came around for TS2 and now even more so considering their lack of objects in this base game. 

In the meantime I keep pounding away at TS2 hoping it will eventually go back to the way it was.  Yes, I'm still working on it for those of you who remembered my rambling plea . . .  Hell, fixing TS2 is more fun than I've had playing TS3 so far.  Hell, waiting 2 hours for TS2 to load is more fun than I've had playing TS3!  It's fun for like five minutes before your Sim has to head off to 7 hours of work or goes to sleep then forget it.  I was warming up to it and then got promptly bored again when I got sick of waiting for my Sims to come home from work, etc. Simday after Simday.  I'd rather spend the $250 or so to get another ATI Radeon 9800 which ran my game a lot better than my current card than to spend $60 for TS3.  So I'm taking it as a collector's item and not much else. I'll probably play it once in a blue moon but get annoyed by something in it and stop for ages unless some good hacks/mods come out.  So far that's how it's been.  So until it becomes more playable thanks to you guys and other modders, it'll probably just sit on my hard drive collecting dust.

The Creepy Doll Eyes problem has been discussed quite a bit in various threads.

One pet peeve of mine is the larval babies.

Ha! Be lucky it only looks like larvae to you. The first thing that popped into my mind when I saw the babies was the creepy Tarako babies from a Japanese spaghetti commercial. Watch and be freaked out like I was, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cN8zAQbUB38&feature=related

I try to stay away from making babies in game because how creepy they look

Or just pop out a cake and age the baby up real quick, either way.

Feh. Creepy doll eyes? Why is no one else creeped out by the fact that their heads keep moving when you pause? Video evidence (http://tinypic.com/r/ipt8nl/5). The move at the very end might send you screaming from the room.

Very, very creepy. They're puppets suddenly going still, but having that tiny moment at the last minute where they move. Or something. But yes, very creepy.

I've been wrong before. But I honestly can't see that happening in my case.

When I played TS2 after playing TS1 with all the EP's, it was a complete "Wow," factor. Everything was a new experience and I never got bored. I did, however, get quite upset when I ran into the jump bug because of my excessive playing.

TS3 simply doesn't hold my attention or interest for very long. I'll play it for a couple of hours, get extremely bored, and think about TS2. Then I find myself closing it down and going back to TS2. Even thinking about playing TS3 is a chore for me.

I know not everyone is going to agree with me. But so far, the game is too slow, and hunting for rocks and plants gets too old too soon. Simply waiting for text prompts and having the neighbourhood age in weird spurts also irks me (they don't seem to age with the same type of time-span, it appears erratic, and the game moves too many of them away too soon).

Bottom line is that there's just not enough balance in the game to keep my short attention span happy for very long.

Not only that, a good game does not need CC or additions to make it a good game; A good game should only be enhanced by the aforementioned - Something is very wrong and naive about thinking otherwise.

"But so far, the game is too slow, and hunting for rocks and plants gets too old too soon."

That is completely true. It takes forever to get through a night, I find myself going downstairs and snacking in between. This game is going to make me fat. Yet I still don't feel the urge to play Sims 2. I don't know why, maybe it's because I'm bored of it or just figured the whole concept of it so there's nothing for me to discover. Either way I think the games are different and TS3 appears to be MUCH shitter than TS2.

"Bottom line is that there’s just not enough balance in the game to keep my short attention span happy for very long."

I don't really agree with this because there seems to be enough balance in my game. I have sims neighbours die of old age, his son getting married, my Sims parents moved out, aged well and got rich. I don't know what else the game needs for it to be balanced.

"Not only that, a good game does not need CC or additions to make it a good game; A good game should only be enhanced by the aforementioned - Something is very wrong and naive about thinking otherwise."

True say that.

The first time I paused the game to queue up a bunch of conversation interactions, my Sim had the most annoyed look on her face, then I paused and she looked up at me while her head was still moving. I swear to Jeebus I wanted to turn the game off, it was so fucking creepy!

I still haven't made up my mind about this game. It's enticing enough to make me want to keep trying to like it but, I just can't help but try and understand why EA spent all this time developing this piece of shit game. It's as if they had a very specific Focus Group of players who knew/know nothing about the Sim community and just focused on creating some new gameplay for the people who have never played any previous version.

I think I'm mostly let down by the fact that I was expecting it to begin where TS2 left off. I knew they'd scale it back a bit to leave room for EP's but, to completely ignore Genetics is just lazy. Okay EA, if it's FORCED LEGACY play for TS3, then Genetics would have to be theeee most important aspect behind the game. Not...collecting stupid rocks and shit.

I was really looking forward to buying this game when it came out. I've arrrred all of TS2  and dr whatever idiot reason have immense guilt but, not anymore. I'm interested enough to keep trying to like but if the genius Modders are not able to make strides in a mesh tool or pretty extreme level hacks, then like many, I won't continue playing.

I keep changing the way I play and I'm a major builder. I'm also in the middle of a huge TS2 project which I doubt I'll be dropping any time soon, and I can't see any way I could replicate my latest project, or even carry it on in TS3 - this makes TS3 useless to me since I'm not a legacy player. It is also the reason TS2 has kept my interest for so long.


I guess I'm just hard to please. Though, the game does seem to offer far less choices on how to play. Maybe that's what I meant. Either way, something feels incredibly off, or it could simply be that TS3 is a game that never would have caught my attention in the first place because it's not my kind of game - I really don't know what it is.

I'm basically at a point to where I don't even think mods could make this game interesting enough for a player like myself due to the harebrained limitations EA implemented.

On the other hand, my daughter seems to be enjoying it (She also likes games like Harvest Moon). So, take my opinion with a grain of salt.

Hard drive space is trivial; if this is really your concern, you probably ought to upgrade your hard drive.

That said, in my experience it's probably not worth the hassle. TS3 is essentially a stripped-down TS2 given an aesthetic makeover, but with extra bugs, and a small handful of marked improvements and shinies that you will find yourself really missing when you inevitably go back to TS2 (be it from aesthetic disgust, shitty SPT behavior, lack of hacks/non-rabbithole community lots, [X] feature, whatever). CAST is shiny, the rabbithole options/career branches/opportunities for jobs (and only jobs) are shiny, Traits are shiny, some of the new Inventory functionality is shiny, the skill challenges are shiny, unless you are a bedamned 12 the ability to have Sims with different body types is shiny... but it's all rhinestones sprinkled over a steaming pile of EAxian stupid shit. Unless you're sure that none of the shinies will have any allure for you, all that will happen is you'll find yourself playing TS2 and feeling a sense of relief, but kind of wistfully wishing you could give your 53rd Knowledge Sim with the Nature OTH some Traits, and trying in vain to find the CAST button when confronted with a Maxis item that would go perfectly in your living room, if only it was in the right color/style.

I played Sims 2 since it came out..wasn't that 2001? So for 8 years!  I was also awed by the difference between Sims 2 and Sims 1 and the bugs didn't bother me because it was such a cool game!  When things were a bit boring, I could add new custom careers and make a medieval hood or a Victorian hood...or a hood in the desert or in the mountains. I could make Northern Exposure into a hood!  With Sims 3, we are stuck with the same rabbit holes and without them, I don't think you would have the careers at all. You could live off the land and off writing novels or fishing I suppose, but half the game, the careers and career opportunities would be gone.

This game is a nice casual game, but I find myself logging out every once in a while due to boredom already. With Sims 2, I would play and play and suddenly realize 4 hours had passed and the sun was coming up! I don't think I will be playing this for 8 years unless they give us more content and don't expect us to get it from the Sims Store for astronomical prices.

TS2 came out in '04. I think TS1 came out in '00?

I've been trying to figure out some sort of justification why, although a LOT annoys me about this game, I don't uninstall it and go back to Sims 2 permanently. I think it's because with Sims 2, I refuse to play it without a) most or all the expansion packs and b) a vast array of mods. The Sims 2 base game is horribly boring and the Sims 3 base game falls on the same level - not in being boring, but in being frustrating - but I (perhaps naively) have hope that once we have mods galore and expansion packs to play with, we may very well be singing a different tune.

But hey, I'm probably going to be wrong and when that day comes, I'll be eating crow.

Ha ha, that's exactly how I'm playing one of my saved games. I have a pro athlete who knocks up women all over town. His favorite conquest so far has been Judy Bunch, an overweight, family-oriented wife and mother. He really had to work at bringing her over to the dark side.

Oh, don't listen to those morons at N99. I was banned there years ago for calling Barb a fucking bitch. Most of those people over there are a bunch of sheep anyway. I have tried getting back in there a couple times, just to see whats going on, and maybe point and laugh at that group of sad sacks. But I'm still banned. But I could care less.

Anyway, if people don't like the game, that's their business. No reason for people to get their panties in a bunch just because you don't agree with them. I'm surprised N99 is still around. May they all fry in hell. I hate them even more than T$R, and that's saying something.

Sorry to derail this thread, but I see N99, and I just have to say something. :lol:

Agreed. And I have not been banned at N99. But the place is full of brainless stepford wives - morons is a kind epithet for some of the N99ers. If someone called Pescado an asshole, he'd be flattered I expect.

Anyway, I can understand your desire to open discussion about this, but in the end, if you hate the game I don't think lots of mods, CC and a $1.98 price tag would sway you too much. I agree with so much of what you said, especially the creepy eyes. To me the Sims look doughy and demented.

P.S.: In the years I have watched things over there, I can assure you that Barb IS a bitch. Quite nasty under the happy, happy exterior.

I actually like the game. More than I thought I would. For a long time, I was determined that I was not going to try it. I hated the look of the Sims for the most part. Then I did start playing, I thought it would be just to check it out and see what it was like. I ended up playing ALL DAY yesterday. lol. I love it now. True, there are a few things I don't like. I still think the Sims look pretty creepy. And as usual, the townies are fugly. But I chalk it up to EAxis usual ineptness when it comes to creating Sims. It looks like they so it in their sleep, stoned. I have some good looking Sims in my game, but those are made by me. I am not the greatest when it comes to making Sims, but they look better than the Maxis ones.

As for Barb, I used to be a big supporter of N99. There was a huge fight across several Sim sites, and I finally saw her true colors. Ah well, I wont get into what went on, this was years ago when Sims 1 was still in its prime. But, I'm sure she remembers me. lol.

Oh, I wasn't banned on N99, and I'm still posting and hanging around the Sims 2 board, but basically I wasn't saying that Sims 3 looked like the greatest thing in the world and snarked at for it.  Barb had absolutely nothing to do with it.    The reallly funny part was when someone asked a serious question about modding I was one of the only two people on the board who knew the answer.  At this point, though,  I wouldn't go back on the Sims 3 board over there if it were the only source on the game on the internet.  However, I wouldn't miss NoCommente's postings in the Sims 2 Pictures and Videos section for anything.

I'm trying to convince my husband that it's safe to Arrr! Sims 3, but he has veto power because he's the one who will have to clean up any messes.  And I don't want him to have to deal with that because his regular job is doing computer stuff at a large university.  He doesn't, thank Ghu, have to deal with students, but staff and faculty are capable of sufficient stupidity to bring him home grumpy.  (My favorite is still the faculty member who, upon sitting down at her shiny new computer for the first time decided to free up HD space by getting rid of all the expendable files.  You know, the ones ending in .exe.  I leave the aftermath to your fertile imagination.)  And on weekends he works on the computers at his Dad's business.  It's a motorcycle dealership and repair shop.  Envision  biker employees with internet access using the computers with the inventory information, and a father who 1. keeps putting AOL back on his system though it's not necessary (AOL is a virus) and 2. will click on any popup even if it says "Get your hard drive wiping virus here in only one click!".    Now do you see why I don't want him to have to take some virus off my system when he could be out having fun planting bamboo in the backyard?

That is probably not that far from the truth. I mean, you're a developer. You don't have any actual stake in these sims. You mash the random button a few times and call it a day.

Well I am not a sheep, but I find myself enjoying the Sims 3.  I have always been a player, with a side of builder.  I have never created any custom content but I have over 4 gigs of DLs for Sims 2  :-[

I certainly agree with a lot of the things people dislike.  I am also really pissed that half the game content is for sale at the Sims Store.  I refuse to buy any of it and will gladly donate my 10 sim bucks to a worthy cause  ;)

It's strange because I like a lot of the things people are disliking.  I like the random quests, and the collecting.  I love the entire neighborhood aging and dying.  I love the seamless neighborhood.

I miss everything that is in Sims 2; seasons, apartments, OFB, pets etc.  I dislike the random clones/births.  I  hope some of the rabbit holes one day turn into usable places.  I think they put the lighting in the game on improperly.  The lighting is so harsh and unflattering outside of CAS.

I guess it comes down to a lot of the Sims 2 is missing from the Sims 3.  Like it was created by people who have never even touched Sims 2.  I will play it...but like everything, if it gets old, move on to something else.

Give it to me and I'll invest the effort in figuring out how the Store works. :P

The random quests and collecting are optional, so no complaints there. Entire neighborhood aging and dying...mixed bag, and also optional. Seamless neighborhood...eh, it's not bad. Has its flaws, but they're not unsolveable.

Now the game messing with my sims so that I can only play one fambly? Not cool!

Yes.

I've noticed several of us bitching about the incredibly slow "ultra" speed setting, and the fact that if you only play one or two Sims at once, you spend 75% of the game  watching a Sim do something incredibly boring, such as reading, writing on a computer, gardening, sleeping, or working inside a rabbit hole work location.

Fishing and painting are slightly less boring because the image or the fish may vary slightly, but once you have seen all the game's fish and painting images, they are about as exciting as watching water boil. Fishing is the only game activity that has a "do it until I tell you to stop or until it is done" aspect; gardening comes close, though Sims will stop Doing That before they finish tending / harvesting / watering / weeding the WHOLE GARDEN. I said DO IT. That doesn't mean do HALF of it. There is also no "fertilize many" option, which is a pain in the ass.

Let's say you get ambitious and decide to play with more than 1-2 Sims in a household. Juggling their needs is more frustrating than challenging. Getting two Sims to sit at the same table, sleep in the same bed, sit on the same sofa, etc., is an exercise in frustration. More than likely Sim A will sit in the diningroom, 25 tiles away from Sim B, who made and served a meal, who is sitting at a counter. Sims can spam up wants / wishes to Woohoo and be offering menu options to allow it, but the "you're in my way" bed dance often cancels the action out of queue. Fine. I don't want any more useless pink- or blue-cocooned larval sproglets anyway, especially if their genetics are going to be a major horror and disappointment in the end, so screw you stupid Sims and your wish to reproduce MOAR if you can't get down to it. Sometimes they will accidentally wind up on the same couch, but it has not happened by design very often.

Non-controllable Sims in your Sims' domicile will be asshats and not particularly amusing asshats. Visiting other Sims is a GREAT idea, as is the wanderable neighborhood. Don't get me wrong. I like that aspect. I like being able to swoop back and forth across the 'hood without loading screens. Visiting other Sims is also broken, at least from my perspective, as you can't take care of most of your needs while visiting.

I miss being able to buy clothes at a store, or sit in a restaurant, or go to a club / pub, or work out at a gym, or shop inside a supermarket, or....etc. Honestly, I was not aware you could go inside the library, as I got so tired of running up against  empty buildings I couldn't go inside, I stopped even trying to enter most of the others.

There are some amusing details, such as the wandering Magic Gnomes, and egg plants (not eggplants). The ability to match furniture items / design things, the CAS sliders (but not the extremely limited parameters of those sliders),  etc., are nice enough. Some of the pre-made buildings (NOT rabbit holes) aren't too bad.

There are hardly ANY content items included in the game, and it fills me with rage that EA apparently decided beforehand to strip them out and sell them individually to make a bigger buck, thus crippling the already grossly limited hair / clothing / object selections. Why are all accessories only worn on one arm / hand?

One glaring omission, since they decided to add this "collecting" aspect to the game, is a place to PUT all the crap you collect. Unless they are planning to make Simmers PAY for a collector's cabinet (that I see functioning like a fridge) or collector's shelves (big enough to either display all the different cuts or different colours of gems), or a place to put multiple bug / butterfly cages (they stack, but if you collect each one, that's a lot of bugs to stack!), or a safe / vault to put smelted ore bars into, this was a rather stupid thing to neglect. Are they going to make us pay for card tables, or the Charades game, or pianos, or easels you can actually put in your inventory and use other than in your home? (Why can't Sims set up as caricature artists in the park and make some bucks like that, if they allow buskers?) Are they going to make us pay for female outfits that aren't trampy or dowdy or both, and male outfits that have an ounce of style? Why are most of the game / entertainment toys sports-related? Foosball, football / baseball are all well and good, but there are a lot of different group activities that they could have opted to include instead. Not everyone enjoys being out IN THE SUN getting sweaty IRL, and not all Sims, esp. Couch Potatoes, are going to dig that, either. It would be nice to have the option to put mobile phone pix in an album, and if they weren't so DARK all the time. Better yet, why not a "real" camera? (To really fantasize, it would be neat if your Sims could "video" things and then "play" those videos on a DVD / VCR machine onto the TV. Home movie night! When using one video button, it could go where videos go now, for you, the player, to use. When using a Simcam, they could go in another folder, and be limited in length, and be replayable / sharable.

Another fantasy would be an auction house to get rid of the surplus of rocks, gems, paintings, etc. Sims struggling with poverty could sell off household goods, perhaps. You stand a chance of earning more or less than the default selling price or catalogue price if you auction your goods, or of the goods not selling because of a glut on the market of a particular item.

Why can't Sims sell fruits / veg / fish at home in a stand? Where did the kid lemonade stands go? Why aren't there any lemon trees? I suppose some of the things I miss will be added in an EP.)

How is the second 'hood supposed to work? Will it be a destination tacked onto the current 'hood, so you don't have to ditch your playables to explore it, since they were asshats and practically force us to play The One Fambly, or will it be a matter of "play THIS 'hood OR THAT 'hood, you can't play both with your One Fambly Sims"?

Camera / nav controls are horrible. If you try to move an object or Sim, you may find yourself zooming halfway across the 'hood without much effort.

Whereas it may not be entirely fair to compare a fully-expanded TS2 to a base game TS3, some of the choices made are illogical or maddening. On the plus side, the game is fairly stable. I stress-tested it and it ran in the background / foreground well for four days, at which point I was too bored to keep going.  Again, 75% of that was spent with the game forcing me to sit and do nothing while Sims skilled, slept, or worked, which, frankly, is BORING. Since you can't switch to a different household and deal with different family issues without risking your One Fambly going off and doing something stupid / dying / losing their jobs / spawning / moving random idiots into the household / cloning themselves / moving out of town, the boredom sets in QUICKLY.

I dunno, it seems fair to me. After all, TS2 was made first. TS3 is supposed to be BETTER, meaning it rightfully SHOULD have everything the PREVIOUS game did and MOAR. Selling something as "new and improved" without actually being new or improved is kind of a sham.

I agree in principle and disagree in practice because while it is true that a game with bad game play and mechanics is technically speaking a waste in every sense, at the end of the day, I hate games (mind you I talk about my own opinions here purely out of a desire for self aggrandizement and not to offer an alternative example). I could not put it better than to borrow from J. M. Pescado's comment in another post about games and toys. If it is not a toy, it is not for me. If it sucks as a game but makes a great toy, I will jump on it any day.

I am the kind of gamer who doesn't even bother trying to play a game as is out of the box. The first thing I do after installing is use the cheats. The second thing I do is look for the modding tools, and the third thing I do is look for the mods. I approach any computer "game" like I used to approach Legos (back when they only had a few block shapes, for any of you youngsters here). Considering the number of main stream RPG and FPS games that come with unlimited modding tools included (some even come out with APIs and SDKs!), I think the smart (non EAxis mentality) developers understand the validity of this "play style", and many is the game that still enjoys a strong fan base due to its moddability (that's not even in the dictionary....) but was unanimously panned by critics and players alike for its out of box limitations.

I only started playing TS2 last year after the last expansion had come out when, after having grown tired of trying to brighten up and depthafy (I made that word up) a recent top rated next gen RPG (with a great modding tool), I discovered accidently and to my utter surprise and shock just how aesthetically pleasing and potentially interesting TS2 had become with all the CC and mods. I had completely written the franchise off in 2000 after taking one look at a screen shot and hardly even noticed the second installation's arrival on the scene. I almost soiled myself when I saw some of the almost photo-realistic CC sim textures and, um, er, well, some of the mods, shall we say. I became suitably addicted right away, had amassed upwards of 16,000 package files within a month, and the only reason I didn't dive into scripting myself is because of the general weirdness of the proprietary language and the fact that almost everything I needed had already been made by those such as the aforementioned personage, and finally because TS3 was coming out and that would certainly be a major leap forward wouldn't it of course. Oh yes certainly..........

er....

I have to admit I have become briefly addicted to TS3 already, and I think that that one black haired pony tailed towny girl from the theatre is actually kinda cute (the one in the poster on the outside wall, she is your band mate if you do the musician career, at least for me), so the dough-boy look doesn't bother me. I actually managed to get my very first two sims, a self and a custom designed partner, to give birth to offspring, happened to be female, that has become in the end more attractive than Mom, on whom I thought I'd done a pretty good job all things considered, admittedly after a toddler and child period marked by some serious soul searching. So unless the fundamentals of the new look completely turn you off, there is hope. And limited as they are, the few cheats currently available are enough for my budding needs, currently limited to sleep deprivation and age-transition-murder (though I find less homicide required in TS3 vs TS2 because as someone else mentioned above, at least the TS3 sims are believably ugly and dressed compared to the overall escaped-from-the-asylum look in TS2).

But everyone's comments about becoming bored after the first positive impressions started wearing off also apply to me. I think this will be temporarily mitigated by "letting go" of families that have become maximized and starting a few new families on completely different tracks. The key disappointment for the time being is that you really are forced to start with a family or group of roommates and have them work different schedules otherwise you end up with the problem mentioned by others vis a vis drooling on your keyboard at speed 3 (4) while waiting for work to end.

Now, if, as I read somewhere, it is in fact impossible to script TS3 because of the encryption, then that is basically a show stopper. I will purge the abomination from my hard drive and probably defecate on the CPU heat sink of the brand new machine I BUILT only so I would have the fastest possible rig before the game came out (I will do this with the power on, of course). However, if on the other hand, it turns out that the "encryption scare" was just that and in fact the scripting paradigm has magically become object-oriented and you only have to override a class or do some inheriting to turn Pleasantview into Nightmare on Elm Street or what have you (not my taste, just an example), then I will likely have to be physically restrained, my computer locked away, and force fed from an IV drip to avoid death by starvation and lack of sleep, if I am not first evicted from my home or stabbed by relatives.

Just my two cents anyway.

Has anyone tried using Numerators BaseGame Program for TS2, and just seeing how bad the difference between the two vanilla games is? All these years with expansions installed has my memory skewed.

I'm not falling for this obvious attempt to hold back content. I bought only four EPs from TS2 ( the good ones ), and saw straight through the bullshit when it came to the Stuff packs. This is shameless swindling, but you can't expect less from EA these days. I could have arr'd all of it, but something in me still wants to hold EAxis with some respect.

I don't really think the Bartle typology really applies to the Sims as a single player game, necessarily. I mean, I'm a Killer. This probably comes as no surprise. However, the Sims is simply not where I choose to explore my Killer nature. It's single player. There's no one to kill!

Hee hee, the Bartle study is not to be taken literally. For example, your Killer type fits perfectly with your "master puppetteer" kind of gameplay.

Why bother? EAxis is a corporation of soulless, blood-sucking money leeches.
They don't respect us-only our money.
 

I build in Base Game environment all the time, and I have a bunch of families specifically for testing. Honestly, base game to base game, TS3 is markedly superior, if you look at gameplay features it has to begin with, that were added to TS2 in later EPs - ie, what you get for "free" with each barebones game:

- Lifetime Wants/Wishes
- Inventory
- Car/Vehicles (not that it really makes a difference in 3 per se),
- Walking to lots (again, ditto, and it's annoying you really can't choose)
- Cellphones
- Gardening
- Fishing
- Collectioneering (which also serves a useful function like BV beach combing, where your broke-ass CAS Sims can get money essentially "for free")
- Custom novels
- Community lot weddings
- Various superpowers/perks from assorted grinding (aspiration and hobby perks in TS2, the skill challenges and some of the trait superpowers in TS3)

The community lots in TS2 base game are amazingly shitty, too: you can't plonk the vast majority of even base game items that would be useful, there's no restaurants ala NL, the only really worthwhile thing you can do on them is gain Body from swimming (epically slowly, although a bit better if you use hacked collection to plonk some of the career rewards), Cooking from grilling shit, get free food from the aforementioned grilling, and public Woohoo for Romance sims. Oh, and free hygeine. Pretty pointless if you're playing anything other than the Ghetto Superstar challenge, or something that forbids you Aspiration Rewards, such that folding time becomes necessary. Now, it's true, the TS3 community lots suck an ass compared to the NL level of functionality, and are nothing compared to the awesomeness of OFB owned businesses, but in a lot of ways even the rabbithole buildings are way better than base game TS2 community lots. They just... really fucking sucked.

TS3 Base Game completely falls down in the area of items/hairstyles/clothing: TS2 just had more. Much, much, much more, and honestly, for all people bitch about Maxis fug, a lot of it wasn't all that bad, especially the furniture. The people accursing EA of intentionally holding shit back are almost certainly correct. Also, for what it's worth, although most of the "advanced" CC came from the modding community and various poking around, the TS2 base game had a lot more provision for CC when it came out - the ability to make wallpaper, terrain paints, floors, and crappy MSPaint recolors of existing Maxis body shop meshes were provided with HomeCrafter, Body Shop, etc. CAST makes up for it in a lot of ways, but a lot less so for Body Shop stuff compared to anything else.

Everything else you'd be comparing, like the awful genetics in TS3 or b0rked Story Progression Toggle, the Rabbitholes, the ability to create and import your own neighborhood terrains, etc, is pretty much a matter of innate game design/engine coding and not liable to change much with further EPs. Although hopefully someone, somewhere, somehow, will be able to fix SPT.

This, exactly. I don't think the game works at all for storyteller types. Ok, I can't do 20s or Wild West or something because there's no custom content yet. That's no big deal. But I also can't do a modern character without the game messing up the personalities (and yeah, taking an "extreme" shower doesn't make someone a daredevil and I'm sick of "extreme" games of chess <eyeroll> after about 2 seconds.) No matter how 'base' the base TS2 game was, I could still make MY characters. I can't do that in TS3. I can only make game pieces who want to learn to cook because they happened to make dinner or pick up shiny things because there's one laying around. I admit I've never been big on the "humor" element anyway. Any of the jokes tend to get old really quickly. But I'm even disappointed with the gardening. It feels unrealistic and I don't want to grow cheese and eggs. :p Bah. I don't think modding can make this game into something I enjoy. It's broke at the base of it. Pescado can probably mod it so his characters have the right wishes, but like TS2, I bet he can't give that to rest of us. For TS2 the non-immersion parts were ignorable so I could have that anyway. For TS3, not so much.

How the hell is that any different than TS2, though? In both games, the Want trees are pretty much completely deterministic, and adding "life" or individual personality to a Sim pretty much comes 100% from player imagination and creativity. What the text says when you click on a shower to play that animation really doesn't say anything in terms of storytelling or whatever. Whether you come up with a cool personality and plotline for any given Sim is mostly going to come from you, because in both games there's not all that much going on that's not going to be the same across every single Sim you have.

Now, TS3 currently sucks for storytelling and sandbox play because Story Progression Toggle is borked; but if that gets fixed, honestly, it's probably going to be a slightly better game for storytellers, because if you're the type who likes to make up the story of your Sims as it happens through random stuff in play, the space for random crap is a bit bigger in TS3, because of Traits and the random missions at jobs, having actual bosses/coworkers - but that's really just a matter of slightly more inspiration fodder, really; unimaginative people will still probably fail it up and write crappy stories; creative people will come up with amazing ones no matter how barebones the game is. Have you ever read a Legacy? 99.9999999% of them are boring as shit and basically the same thing, because the lives Sims are pretty invariant (skill up for career, get promoted, acquire mate, breed, raise spawnlings, die, repeat with next generation) and most "Storytellers" don't bother to make up enough of a personality for their Sims. More random shit occuring = more stuff to get inspired by, or directions to take the plot, although in the end I think the quality of most TS3 stories will probably be as bad as those in TS2.

If you're talking about just using the in-game engine to make dolls of your pre-existing characters and act out the storylines you want through animations, that's machinima, and whether TS2 or TS3 is better for it comes down to the aesthetics of the Sims + animations + CC, not any of the ways the game handles personalities or Wants or any of that shit. Your complaint about the gameplay itself makes, like, no sense, because for machinima people, the gameplay aspects pretty much just get in the way, which is why there are poseboxes, animation mods, etc etc, and really SRS BSNS storytellers are always cloning their Sims willy-nilly and constructing enormous sets that they don't actually play.

There's a lot that pisses me off about TS3, but in terms of the storytelling sandbox specifically, the "it is game, not toy!!111eleventy!1" argument makes no freaking sense. Lack of CC, SPT, potential unmoddability, yeah, sure, but I really don't get where "zomg it forces you to do grindypantsery!!!" comes from. Not much more than TS2, really.

Fight Club
Zombie Apocalypse

There's some bleed through of that thar killar nature.  :P

Yep! Plus, pretty much all my RL friends who play the game at all are basically all about using it as a torture/humiliation simulator. Locking Sims in rooms with no doors and starving them, burninating them, and of course the infamous pool ladder trick - Maxis put in a joke about that in TS2, FFS!

One of the guys where I work actually made Sims of all our interns and took great glee in making them pee themselves, etc. >:D It was hilarious.

They removed the pool ladder trick! That was my favorite way of eliminating butt fugly sims that I didn't want. :(

I agree with this wholeheartedly.  I don't really understand why some people have such high expectations of what a game is able to do.  I've been "testing" it out and other than my game suddenly dissappearing from the screen right in the middle of gameplay (which I surely hope is fixed with the final released version and/or patch), I am enjoying the game just as I enjoyed TS2.  I think they've done wonders with the abilities to decorate and match everything to your own desire.  Sure, the base meshes are limited, but with the thousands of color/text combinations you can use to change the base game items, it seems to me your choices are limitless. 

And it's just a base game, so I don't expect it to be "all encompassing".  I know I'll have to put out some bucks later to get expansions, but I'm okay with that.  I'm not okay with the Sims Store, but then I never did like that with Sims 2 either.  I just wont use it, but I'm not going to gripe about it - some people actually like it and that is their preference.

As for the collections part, that is a fun side thing to do, but yeah, you don't have to if you don't want to.  You can also make money at it if you find certain rare items and they're fun to look at too.  Oh, and I love being able to catch a fish and then place it in a fish bowl if I want to.

All in all, I am enjoying the game play as it is and that is my opinion.  The OP should just go ahead and downlad it for now and try it out for themself.  If they like the game, the buy it, if they don't, then just don't buy it.

I have seen some creative ways to kill off townies and unwanted Sims. Also, in a way, you kill off the bugs of this game and torture EA and paysites constantly. ;) I think that goes quite well with your killer instinct.

After playing for an extended time last night, I think I finally figured out what is missing from this game for me. When I play Sims 2, I play each family for a specific amount of time. So I play family A for 4 days, then B, etc., until I have played all the families. While playing each family, I interact with all of the other families in some way. I have parties, socialize, bring kids home from school, visit them on community or business lots and develop relationships with them plus move my own storyline forward.  It takes months and sometimes years of real life time to get through one generation. I have one hood that I have played for a long time and the second generation is just finishing college. I become very attached to my Sims and even though the personalities are lacking, I build them in my head. I even become attached to the regular townies, which I created in an empty template.

I had hoped that Sims 3 would improve the personalities and that the randomness of having families in the background moving on without us would aid in the storytelling, as someone mentioned above. However, after several hours of game play, my second generation now has children of their own. It happened so fast, that I am not attached to my sims like I am in Sims 2. I barely know the neighbors because I don't play them. While my sims can socialize with them, I don't have any connection to them other than one is ugly or one is chubby or one is cute. The 'legacy' part of the game moves to fast for me because we are focusing on just one family and then on one branch of the family rather than alternating between a group of interacting families.

This isn't necessarily a bad thing, its just different and I must learn to adjust my thinking. Rather than attach to the individual sims, I need to attach to the entire legacy, the family generations. I need to force myself to do more with the townies, get to know them, spend more time with them, because their lives will go quickly as well. I also changed to a longer life span hoping that will help.

The other issue I have is that in Sims 3 there are some things you just can't do until you do something else first, such as make a certain recipe or plant a certain item. This bugs me as its simply not realistic. I should be able to plant everything..but maybe I won't be able to make a good quality until I get to a certain skill level. It also bugs me that if you some things can't be moved from the inventories so are lost if you change families. I have lost valuable things that are stuck in my inventory when I change families. However, these are minor things and once I learn the game, they will simply be inconveniences.

They'll only stop tending the garden to take care of a red need and then continue with the gardening. You haz a bug. Your first memory leak is here though: Sims 2 didn't have a macro/tend garden, you had to add to the queue water/tend/harvest, which they do automatically now. But yes a macro/fertilizing is needed.

I currently have a house of four and it's actually easier than in Sims 2. They take care of their needs themselves. Example: kid is tired, kid goes automatically to his assigned bed. Btw no one seemed to notice that finally beds are really assignables. In Sims 2, kid would have fainted on the floor, or if you're lucky would have gone to sleep in his parents/bros/sisters bed because the wrong bed comes closer than his one. No need to lock doors or put in a lot of mods to avoid that now. Sims A is hungry. He'll automotically go grab a leftover in the fridge, thing they never did in Sims 2 unless you had a mod. Btw, leftovers only came with Seasons.

Yet another memory leak you haz. We had the same problem in Sims 2, otherwise why would you think Inge made the table and counter controller? Why do you think i have her handy controller in every room of every lot? About the beds see my previous answer. No more problems with that.

Why do you even bother using that option, use the old way: couple relax on bed, couple woohoo. Because yes the relations drops damn fast and non-bed woohoo menu seems to always be unavailable. However their 'go to bed to woohoo' never dropped for me even when the 'oh, you're in my way' happened.

Agree, they seem to have broken the seat choice, in Sims 2 they valued comfort, now it seems totally random. I'm sure El Presidente will correct that. On the other hand in Sims 2 you did often ended up with sims going for the higher confort, even if that meant a porch couch in the middle of the night when it's raining.

Just like in RL when visiting, you're not supposed to be a mooch. That is logical and realistic. But indeed the 'Stay the night' is borked, you or the visitor should be able to take a shower.

And you also seem not aware that you can enter the gym, it's not a rabbit hole. And there'll always be sims working out with you in that fully equipped gym, ain't that cool? You can choose to sit outside at the restaurant to see your sim. Just like in Sims 2 he'll be automated to seat/eat/speak with the other customers. I do want a real opened movie theatre though, it's the only rabbit hole that indeed annoys me to hell.

Ditto for the lack of items and the store. And i still can't understand the left-arm-only accessories. Fail.

Yes, shelves are badly needed. But do you remember that the first Sims 2 usable shelves only came with BV and the more handy ones came with Apartments? It's not optimistic at all to forsee the shelves being shipped with an EP.

I hope not but anyway don't care since any store item will be shared after being corrected by awesome modders.

That would have been nice. The problem is that making a painting takes more or less three days as in Sims 2. So you'ld have two dead sims when the portrait is finished. ::) But yes a mere fast drawing caricature has always been needed, even in Sims 2.

Oooow i totally love that idea. But that would ask too much work from EA's monkeys. Think about the monkeys damnit!

If no OFB like EP is made, you can be sure that it's a sign of close apocalypse ;D EA will redo all the previous sims EPs *sigh*
I didn't even notice the missing lemon tree. Too bad.

I guess the second hood will work like the Sims 2 different neighbourhoods: different universe bubbles. Pescado said he's working on the borked story progression. For the time being only play one family or do different saves if you want the second family to appear in your hood. Put family #1, go to Edit Hood option, add family #2 to a lot, return to family #1, save your game using the family #1 name, go to Edit hood and change the active family, select family #2, save the game using their own family name. You now have 2 saves with 2 different families that are neighbours and can socialize and whatever. It'll only be artificial: each family/save will bear its own different bublle universe. But it works and you can in fact put in this way as much families as you want. Each one will have its own save you'll select by going back to the main menu. *short of breath*

Not so much memory leaks as those are Awesomeware-stomped annoyances for the most part. More like a failure to recall that I pre-emptively trusted The FOJ to make the game work properly / better and did not put up with default EA game options for long.  :P

Yup, in the interest of full disclosure, I took a lengthy break from the TS1 nonsense online after I got bored by Makin' Magic and wandered off to pursue other interests. Since I played TS1 from day one, I already knew there'd be hax / fug replacements for TS2 and promptly sought out and d/l'ed Awesomeware and default replacements before buying TS2 + all EPs / SPs (up to Seasons, and I added Seasons in weeks after it was released, to wait for Awesomeware to catch up). So some new annoyances for me are annoyances that were stomped by Awesomeware, and, frankly, I'd almost forgotten this.

So, yes, I did have a memory lapse and forgot that I prepared for and fixed some of the default Simsly stupidity waaaay in advance; but also  no,  I can't have a memory leak / forget about annoyances I never suffered through first-hand. I probably played an unmodded TS2 for less than 6 hours total, and some of that time was spent building a no-CC-allowed Awesomespec House. ;D

* They aren't stopping gardening due to red needs. I cheated them up while stress testing the game. They are stopping because the macro is not set to "do it until it is done or I say stop." (I also noticed occasional wishes staying in the "promised wish items" 4-item queue even after requests were fulfilled. No lifetime points earned, ugh.)

* I did enter the gym to meet with Gobias Funke. It's not a gym I can design / build myself. Still, awkward phrasing, as I implied that it was a rabbit hole in TS3. Sitting outside a rabbithole cafe' is vastly different from being able to design / build your own cafe' and send your Sims inside it. Also, speaking of clothing stores, it looks like you can only store three or fewer options for clothing items per category. Not much point in shopping for new clothes if you can't add to the pile you have, is there, though? (Also, a "closet" mod that acts like a fridge / wardrobe inventory item would also be cool.)

* Sims in my household are not faithful to any one bed so far. Nor to any chairs. They ignored a top-of-the-line bed for one just as far away but of lesser cost / etc.

* I don't recall if I had Inge's table / counter controllers, though I did have a lot of great Ingemods.

* No one said anything about mooching, just noting here that "stay the night" should not = "stay until 2 or 3 am, after which you will be awakened and tossed out onto the stoop".

* Why bother using the game-dictated woohoo menu options? Stress testing. Why should I have to go through the lame "relax at same time" intermediate step each time?

* As for shelves, I spent more time describing a fridge-variant object that would hold collections inside than pining specifically for shelves, but in both scenarios the question still remains: why have Sims collect piles of crap if there's no storage / display surface / container for them?

* Re: caricatures: just as 'photos' are instant, and as paintings often have an underlying sketch step, it wouldn't be hard to 'take a glance' at target Sim(s) and then do a super-abbreviated "painting-type" action. Amateur Sim painters' paintings have obvious Photoshop-esque filters added, and Photoshop has filters that emulate sketching / pastel drawing.

* Yes, 2nd hood 99.9% confirmed by Pes to be likely to function as separate bubbleverse, not subhood.

* Yes, I obviously grok the saved games concept, as I stopped what I was doing with The One Fambly long enough to save their game and to create Fambly Two and make a quick TS3 movie. Then I went back to The One Fambly, still in Limbo from their last saved game.

Painting is still amusing me. Well, amusing and annoying. I was really into doing portraits and texture still lifes in TS2, so wanted to do the same in TS3. However, camera controls on still lifes and portraits are near non-existent. The camera moves too violently, and you have no control over the Y-axis. You can control tilt, but it will randomly reset itself. Then you have the stylization that sims do for still life:
(http://img200.imageshack.us/img200/5339/79511715.jpg) (http://img200.imageshack.us/my.php?image=79511715.jpg)


Portraits seem to be without the stylization, but are even more impossible to control the camera on. Now, it does seem like they get a little clearer as painting skill increases. The first from the left was at level 6, then level 7, then level 8.

Best post in this thread. I too am a Storyteller, having created a very in depth hood in TS2. The game mechanics do not determine story, the Storyteller's imagination determines story. The Sim taking the extreme shower? Well, you are the only one who sees that and once you adapt, i.e. block it out, you won't see it either.

I still do not like the look of the Sims, but the world itself, the potential integration of the characters into a living breathing town, is a delicious enticement - after I get my hands on a neighborhood creation tool, that is.


Being able to "get into" your Sims does take time. Everytime I read about Story Progression being broken, I think about how build mode was disabled/broken in the first Reloaded Sims 2 release. I think once the folks start getting the store version into their hands we will see Story Progression working as intended (not that that means much with EA).

But I really feel that once we can turn off aging AND Story Progression, the immersive and connected feelings some of us desire will grow. In fact, I have a Sim that I am already becoming attached to. Sadly, I am afraid to switch houses because he might move outta town!

They don't get much clearer than that. They look bad at lvl 10.

Same here. I am so afraid my Sim's grown sons will move away or spawn children without a partner that I find myself needed to check on their houses all the time. This is supposed to be fun, not add stress! I have real kids I have to worry about all the time...sighs.

The still life paintings don't necessarily bother me because unless you're taking a photograph (which would be awesome) or creating via computer-generation (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ec/Glasses_800_edit.png), the quality of the work isn't going to be 100% photo-realistic. In the eye of the beholder, though.

On the note of having a camera, I would welcome that feature with open arms. You could open up your own photo gallery! What's that Stewie line? "Every hot girl who can aim a camera thinks she's a photographer. Oooooooh, you took a black-and-white picture of a lawn chair and its shadow and developed it at Save-On. You must be so brooding and deep."

The difference is that sims2 doesn't get in my way (much) while I do that and sims3 does.

It's obvious, though, that I didn't make myself clear in the previous post. I'm talking about telling myself stories and using the sandbox/toy for myself. I'm not talking about blogging and I'm not talking about machinima. In both of those, all that would count was what I was showing the audience as it's the audience's suspension of disbelief that counts. So what the game says/does matters not a bit if you're using it as a stage. I'm talking about becoming attached to the characters, giving/finding their personalities and playing a game that I play for myself, and what counts there is my *own* response. I've been playing for a couple of weeks now and have run the sims through the first generation and well into the 2nd. At this point in sims2, I was hooked on my sims. Not for me for this game.

Actually it does. It's part of the "wall of text" mentioned in the post I quoted and drags on the concept. The daredevil trait is very poorly done. If I imagine that I'm going to make a sim/character that likes danger - jumps out of airplanes, rides on motorcycles and takes chances in life - it not only adds nothing to the characterization to have almost every single thing he touches be listed as "extreme," it actually pulls away from imaging a serious character of that nature (breaks the wall, makes it difficult to suspend disbelief) and takes him into the absurd. The occasional extreme game of chess might be reasonable, but not for (almost) every item (extreme sleep, extreme shower, etc.) and every single time you do that action.

As a contrast, the neurotic trait is a lot of fun and adds to that characterization. Randomly a neurotic sim comes up with desires to "wash his hands 3 times" or "check the sink" etc. It's easy to put your own interpretation into those. He has his first kiss and wants to brush his teeth 3 times. Maybe he's afraid of germs, any germs, and can only really have a relationship with a girl that doesn't cause that reaction, or maybe he's paranoid about how well he kisses and scared to death the girl doesn't like him. He wants to brush his teeth and try again. Or maybe he washes his hands all the time because Lady Macbeth's blood has appeared. It's random, different enough to offer lots of options and not so absurd that it's hard to explain in some reasonable (for being neurotic) fashion. The only "advantage" to extreme is that it happens often enough that you'd probably get used to seeing it and tune it out at some point. That's not much of an advantage.

Story Progression isn't the only issue. All the stuff you're talking about - traits and missions at jobs and bosses/coworkers are *game play* things. It's a good part of how the game convinces you to move along its pre-destined line to "finish" the game. It imposes upon you little missions and opportunities *whether they make any sense within your story or not.* The problem isn't that the game is too barebones - it's that it's not barebones *enough*. The gameplay parts get boring really quickly, for me. Honestly, I've seen almost all of them in sims2. A lot of it is just recycled with another name/description. (I was quite disappointed to find that a fascinating sounding LTW was really nothing more than level 9 in the science career.) But it imposes the game's story upon me, rather than offering me a spot to make my own.

(Skips all the stuff about Legacies and machinima.)

Well, I guess we play very differently. (The 'toy' analogy is Pescado's and I'd accuse him of many things but not leet/12ness ;) I don't know if you don't characterize your sims, don't mind if the game changes your characterizations, find it easier than I do to suspend disbelief and to characterize within the game's limitations, prefer gameplay (or building or something else) or what, but I'm talking about MY experience of the game, and what makes no sense to me is that you seem to be claiming that can't be my experience.

I tend to play about the same way I used to play table-top dnd a long time ago. I have (or the GM gives me) a base idea of the world and I come up with a character concept intended to fit within that world. Without the EPs and CC, there are certain characters I can't make. That's fine. I'm a cooperative player and don't fight the party or insist my world view trumps the GMs (or at least if I make a cowboy, I know I'm playing him in a world where everyone has a cell phone.) So I've come up with several character concepts that should fit in the TS3 world (modern, maybe slightly post-modern, town-y/cityscape or something, slightly nutso, a world with ghosts and Goths as NPCs). The thing is, my characters still don't fit. Even if I'm giving them traits off the list and expected careers within the game, the characters break. I've got one more idea to try that's pretty much perfect for this world and if that still doesn't work, I'll just give up and go back to TS2. I'm kind of surprising myself by trying this hard to like this game anyway. And there is a lot about it I do like. And maybe I'm underestimating JM and he can fix more than I'm crediting. Or if the first EP really is business and is like OFB maybe that will help as it opened up so many options in TS2. I'm not sure, but of course TS2 is always there for me.

I left my self Sim alone for awhile to work on another family. He has the hopeless romantic trait, and when I decided to check on him, he had a romantic interest in some female townie. My Sims are always gay, especially my self Sim. So, I ended what interest he had to her, and hooked him up with a guy Sim. I'm glad I checked in before he married her!

See the way I look at it, if you reacht he top of the skill tree, and make masterpieces, you should be able to crank out things like this for quality and realism

(http://airbrushworkshops.com/images/ticastepwebOpt.jpg)

or at least this

(http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_osrVjnPbdEM/R_9CQHuP7dI/AAAAAAAAAig/mSNAAKjty2A/s400/photo+realistic+5.jpg)


Instead the game runs the picture through a cheap pixelizer to make it look painted and we get this

(http://www.cs.washington.edu/building/art/ChuckClose/big-emma.jpg)

I'm not disputing that the paintings look like poo… Photoshop filters are for sheep. However, the examples in you counter argument are perhaps not the best. That Chuck Close painting would be in a museum long before that photo referenced mess. Like so much of what I've been reading about TS3, the abstracting of paintings should be an optional feature. On the up side, photography is almost guaranteed to be in an EP.

Lurker:  Very interesting post.  You mentioned a lot of things I didn't know existed for Sims 2.  I was surprised at a few of them.  Here are my observations from the Sims 2 base game.

Sims always slept in their assigned bed in my game unless someone else was already relaxing there.  I was always amazed when people said Sims never slept in their own bed.  I wonder if it was because they kept their Sims busy until they dropped from exhaustion and they'd end up using the closest bed instead.  After you'd sent them to the same bed a couple of times, they'd always use that one.

I even saw evidence that in a house with several toilets that Sims had a preferred toilet they'd use.  I finally got some confirmation of this when I had a ghost complain because I'd sold the original toilet.  That was what finally convinced people that Sims did indeed have a bed preference:  how else would a ghost know that you'd sold their bed?

I never ever had problems getting Sims to eat at a particular table.  I had posts on the BBS showing how to set up a house so that cooked food was eaten in the formal dining room while uncooked food (cereal, sandwiches) was eaten in a breakfast area.  I had several different house setups where this worked without problems.  This was all in the base game.

If you sent a Sim to water some flowers, he would continue watering other flowers that needed it.  If not all flowers needed watering, he'd stop before watering them all.  There may be something like that going on here.

When we first had gyms, Sims would use all the exercise equipment and even take showers.  At some point that was broken, and Sims only used certain exercise stuff and never showered.  I forget exactly when that happened, but it annoyed me considerably.

Sims would go to the fridge and fix food if they were hungry.  There were no leftovers at the time.

I ran a dozen or so totally autonomous households, three adults each, through about 27 days.  After getting it set up and everyone had jobs, it was totally hands off.  The only hack I used was Pay-At-Box so we didn't have a repo man coming.  My Sims not only survived, they thrived.  A few got fairly high in their careers.  No one ever died.  I don't even remember anyone peeing on the floor.  It did take setting up enough fridges so they wouldn't run out of food, and putting two stoves in each house in case one got glitched.  Broken showers and toilets gave them plenty of opportunities  to skill up in cleaning; a swimming pool built body, two easels each with paintings already started built creativity, a telescope (set up inside) built logic, they'd cook autonomously.  Oh yes... they usually slept in the same bed the whole time.

It will be interesting to see how much of this carried over to TS3.   I'm waiting for the retail game.

Hook

Some people will think I'm crazy, but I actually prefer that third picture sanmonroe gave. At least it has some personality! Granted, it's amazing that the first artist is able to make a digital painting that looks exactly like a photograph, but making a painting that looks exactly like a photograph is pointless. You may as well just take an actual picture, and call it a day. Not to mention, in order for such artists to make those pieces they need a photograph of it first, which makes the whole situation redundant. I'd rather have imperfect creativity than robot-like perfection any day.

Aside from that rant, I would actually prefer to see diverse filter effects for sim paintings. I think it'd be pretty spiffy to see a sim using pointillism, a charcoal effect, ect.

We do have cell phone pictures. However, they suffer from the same problem: the photos are darkened even more than still paintings/portraits, and the camera movement is unacceptable. It is nearly impossible to actually capture your subject. Cell phone photos are also small compared to paintings.

Community showers being autonomously used were broken by an EP, can't remember which one, and never repaired.

Leftovers were introduced in Seasons, but EA in all their failness forgot to code the 'autonomous take leftovers when hungry'. You had to put a mod to solve that. At least in Sims 3 base game they've put the leftovers options and it really works: they'll randomly take one if they're hungry. Knowing EA that still do amaze me.

If i get it correctly to make your houses have different dining parts without mods you have to build the house differently, like create two kitchens and two dining areas? 'cause otherwise it won't work as they'll always sit at the closest chair from where you've put the meal - counter or table, sims don't care. No i never tried this because there's not a single house in the whole world that have a double kitchen and i rarely ever use a grill, so i have to use Inge's table/counter controller. If it's not that, i really want to know. ???

Hook, beds indeed never worked for me in Sims 2, neither sleep nor relax. However i did not always called it a day when they were exausted. For example a tired or even just bored sim will go relax in a random bed, yet he always end up in the wrong bed. I always had that, from the base 'til now. My latest example: family living for more than a year in the same house, same beds, aging off. For a year i guide them to sleep in their 'own' beds. Yet a year after the kid will go relax on parents' bed because parents' bed is closer than kid's room, preventing daddy to sleep. Arg. I read a lot of stuff about that concern & it seems that the bed auto-assign is indeed coded in the game but it's totally broken. At least for single bed as the only left feature more or less working thing is the bedside memory (so only for a double bed), but even that was screwed, repaired and broken again several times with the EPs and anyway won't prevent a third sim to actually use that bed, may it be sleeping or relaxing.
Now when i'm in sims 3, a tired sims autonomously goes to his own bed, regardless of his bedroom location in the house (tested in a big house with 3 bedrooms and 4 sims). And if you control sim A and click on sim B bed the pie menu will clearly say "Sleep in sim B bed", i.e. the bed owner's name appears to warn you you've clicked on the wrong bed. So i'm darn reliefed to have that working in Sims 3 since it highly annoyed me in Sims 2.

I concur about the beds.  My understanding of how it was intended to work is that, the more you directed a sim to use the same bed, the more they would start to see it as their bed until they eventually would always sleep in the same bed.  I never had it work.  The more common situation would be grown sims autonomously sleeping in their kids' beds regardless of how many times I'd wake them up and force them back to their own bed.     

Our sims only get 3 custom outfits per category - can we remake those custom outfits if we change our minds or are those the clothes they are stuck with for the entire age? And does this include EA made clothing as well?

Druscylla, you can 'remake' your 3 outifts whenever you want by clicking 'plan an outfit' on the closet. Just like when you've done them the first time, small numbered tabs will be on the upper left of the CAS screen; these are your outfits numbers for each category. Click on the number tab that you want to edit and make all the changes. Exit the mini CAS normally, your outfits will be updated.

Yes the ugly one would end up in a museum. However, the artist was TRYING to make a painting that looked like modern art crap, not trying to make a realistic one. If I tell my sim to make an abstract painting, it is fine if it comes out looking like modern art. But if I tell it to make a portrait, or realistic painting, and the sim is a master of the art, it should come out near perfect. Its not like near photo-realistic art is a new thing

(http://www.paintinghere.com/UploadPic/Pierre-Auguste%20Cot/big/Le%20Printemps.jpg)

not like this

(http://www.udeducation.org/teach/asj/monson_images/13.jpg)

Thats not a digitally made photo. That was done by hand by three guys.

It may not be high art, but it shows that when you want to hand paint something realistic, even burn out hippies with an airgun can do so.

I can't find the option to, 'ask to move in' either. WTF! It's just not there.

This is the house layout I published on the BBS:

http://s43.photobucket.com/albums/e375/lhookins/SimsPics/Kitchenlayout.jpg

One kitchen, a formal dining room and a breakfast area.  If the distances were correct, they'd always use the closest spot.  When cooking food, the closest counter to the stove was the closest to the dining room, and that's where they'd put the serving platter.  The prep area was closer to the breakfast area than to the dining room, and that's where they'd leave the serving platters for food that didn't require cooking.  I never had a problem with Sims eating in the wrong place.

Other houses had the "breakfast area" on the back porch, right off the kitchen.  As long as the serving counters were closer to the tables you wanted them to use, they'd use the right tables.  In one case the serving counter for the main dining room was IN the dining room.  I never thought to coordinate the comfort of of the chairs involved, so I don't know if that made any difference.

I never had problems with grills, but I don't remember exactly how I solved that.  I may have had a kitchen counter somewhere between the grill and the outdoor tables, or they'd use the closest kitchen counter for the serving platter.  On community lots where there were no kitchen counters, I would always put an empty table next to the grill, and after putting out individual plates on tables with chairs the serving platter would usually end up on the table next to the grill.

One thing I always did for the beds was have identical beds as much as possible.  The kids' beds didn't have more comfort than the parents' beds if the beds were different.  While Sims would relax in the closest bed, they'd seek out their own bed to sleep... as long as someone else wasn't already relaxing there.  If that happened, you usually had to retrain them on which bed to use.  Sometimes that got a little wonky.  I suspect that if the comfort was different, Sims would seek out the highest comfort bed first.

Nice of them to fix the beds in TS3.  Will they still relax on the closest bed, or do they use their own?

Hook

Wow, saw that years ago and already tried doing it but only ended with a headache and sims eating at the wrong place. I got fed up being forced to redo the kitchen and dining area like 5 times. Do you have a working layout picture with counter islands for breakfast + dining table? Really curious to see if that one is doable wituout a controller. But the problem is there in sims 3, and it's there since sims 2; i.e. if you don't watchout for the layout or don't use a controller, you'll have sims eating almost anywhere. A example: i had a huge home shop lot where the distance layout scheme didn't work at all: a huge room with 3 or 4 tables and yet the sims grabs his plate, turn around to cross the big room, walk toward the lower floor to eat on a tiny table that i've put down for the coffee & smoke break. And that only due to the first table nearest him when he grabbed the plate was filled with sims. GAH! Whan i saw that i went to Simlogical and grabbed the controller.

Yes beds are totally fixed, even when they just relax/read they'll always take their own bed. And it works after they've only slept once in it.

I cannot take this shit any more.

It took me 15 minutes to put a roof on a house today.  Apparently my walls were "uneven".  How the fuck is that even possible on a flattened lot.  Auto roof INSISTED on putting a roof over the balcony, despite a fence being there.  Non-auto roof insisted on sucking balls and not covering the rooms properly.

Selling a bookcase = All your books now go into your inventory!  Where you have to manually put them back in the bookcase, one by one.  The big bookcase with the glass?  I don't think you can even put books in that, it wasn't likeing my trying.

Growing fruit = All your fruit goes into your inventory!  Where you have to manually put it in the fridge, one by one.

Why have a driveway?  Your bike and car has to be in your inventory for you to drive to work!

Big open plan living, EA?  No loading screens?  That's because instead of actual community lots there are now huge black holes where nothing happens!  Now there's what I call fucking creative effort.

I've given up.  This game blows goats.

Placing flooring first helps to eliminate that, but yeah. I hate the roofing anyway. We have less directional roofs if you look at the options, and again are missing individually adjustable roof heights.

I just got done with a house using that one. It works, it just works better if you approach it from the front.

There's a tab on the upper left corner of inventory items with more than one in the slot. Grab and drag that to the fridge and it should move all of the type at once.

I don't really mind the rabbit holes, except for the bookstore and grocery store. Or the spa...it would be nice to see that one. The career sites, though...why do I want to watch a sim work for six hours? I do really, really miss being able to build meaningful community lots of my own.

I never messed much with the counter islands.  I doubt it would work without a controller.  I was never happy with the way they worked.

One problem with going to another floor to eat... I seem to remember that distances were counted as if everything was on the same floor.  If you wanted to put a table on another floor, it had to be far away from the others or it could get chosen in preference to a table on the same floor with the Sim.

Hook

I see now that it is in traditional media, so that was my mistake. However, I don't think that you understand what I meant by a digital painting. "Digitally made photo" implies something rather different, so I feel the need to explain. Painting on a canvas, and using a stylus to paint inside an art program both take equal amounts of skill. The weaknesses and strengths of the mediums are different, though. Thanks for the correction, but it doesn't actually change anything about my argument. A boring ass painting, is a boring ass painting, no matter which medium was used. Your last example in a separate post was a much better example of your point, but guess what? It's still not perfect realism.. The artist is still using a lot of impressionistic elements to influence the feel of the painting. This can mostly be seen in the background, and in the exaggerated light and darkness to draw your eye to certain details. I totally agree that the painting filters in the Sims 3 leave much to be desired, but I respect what they were trying to achieve. If the sim paintings were merely screenshots slapped onto a canvas, then you may as well have taken a screenshot and called it a day.

My self Sim had a visitor at his house, and they were becoming good friends. I was just about to look for the move in interaction, when the other Sim asked mine to move in with HIM. I got the popup for it, saying something like how good they were getting along. So I clicked yes, and my Sim moved in with the other guy. That's new. :)

Arguing about the quality of paintings I posted is pointless. The point is that every custom painting in the game looks bad. It doesn't matter what they were "trying to achieve", Bob Dole can try to achieve an erection without viagra, but if in the process he shits the bed and vomits on Elizabeth then it doesn't matter if he got to half mast! Unless the Doles are into that sort of thing, then it is a big success! A simple screenshot slapped on the canvas would have been better than what we got.

Well... You kinda made it the point when you used them for your argument that the Sims 3 paintings were crap, but apparently I digress. Sims 2 paintings merely being screenshots always defeated the purpose of having sim "paintings" for me.

Interesting.

After my post, by the way, I found that to "ask to move in", you must entertain the potential room-mate with selections from the "Friendly" interaction, then, finally, the option appears. Apparently moving in has nothing to do with romance anymore, as I've never seen the option pop up under Romantic interactions.

It does fall in line with this game being about "community" and the interaction of said community. There are some really good ideas in the game but for some reason I am just not excited by this game. Too linear, too easy (all you need to do is show up two days at work to get promoted - skills not required), or too many EA created characters running about for me perhaps.  I have never played any of the in-game families as they hit the pail as soon as I started the game and townies and other assorted were avoided like the plague or killed never to regenerate again. I just can't put my finger on it but I have an over all feeling of "blah" about the whole thing. It just doesn't feel like my Sims living in my Sims' neighbourhood it feels like EA's Sims living in EA's neighbourhood and thus I don't give a shite about them.      

I'm still unsure about the game.

While I do enjoy some of the new features (traits, laptops, better inventories etc) the whole game is starting to feel like a chore. Do I like my sims achieving their lifetime wishes? Yes. Is it worth the hours of gameplay to get them there? No.
Also I don't like the way that the lots work, it feels like a step back ( I know that's been said before).

There have been a few good points though; killing the Goth family was prticularly satisfying. I also like that charisma can be built though interacting with other sims it seems more natural than talking to a mirror.

I could say that, in a way, this game was built for me. I did not like rotating in TS2 so from the very beginning I was looking forward to "one family only" play. I hated loading screens and there are none now. There are many new elements that do enrich gameplay; there are also some bugs and some stupid - though mostly understandable - design flaws (like the "immaculate conception" problem) but on the whole, I can't say anything really bad about TS3. I don't even miss hacks - cheats that came with the game are quite enough for me ATM.

So why do I prefer lurking on forums (which I have been doing for a long time here)
instead of just catching the most important news and hurrying back to the game? Like some other people in this thread I don't know for sure. I'll just say that it does not feel sexy like TS2 did, and I am not talking about skins or interactions from adult sites. I guess it's a lot of small signals that one "reads" mostly on subconscious level and that all add up in the end, making the game unattractive for some of us.

That's why I said the distance part didn't always work: kitchen/eating cantina was on the far left side of the building, but the tiny table downstairs was on the right side (serving platters on the left of the cantina tables). Logically, even considering everything on the same floor, he never should have done that. And my two cleaning sims don't have time to go get that plate, too much to do already. Annoying. Well I generally don't mind for that but on communities and home shops there's no time for such things and the fail must be stomped quickly.

It could be the fact that nearly all the sims have pudding faces. Or the unusual amount of obese sims. I don't know, do you?

There's a tab on the upper left corner of inventory items with more than one in the slot. Grab and drag that to the fridge and it should move all of the type at once.
[/quote]

OMG!  Thank you so so much for that info!  I thought there had to be a way, just hadn't figured it out!  Thank you, thank you, thank you!

No, the point I made was that any reasonably talented artist can make photorealistic art IF THEY WANT TO DO THAT. Sims can only make sloppy smudgy crap with poor color balance.

If I wanted my sim to make an ugly abstract painting, I would choose that option, and not the regular one.

The pictures I posted illustrate that point. Even hillbillies with a paint gun can make photorealistic art.

I agree with you, some of the filters they used are ugly, but sometimes I think that they did not want the sims to always paint photorealistic paintings. There's a filter that looks like oil paint brushstrokes on canvas, and one where they make blobs of colour that I think they were aiming for watercolours. But then there is the filter where the poor sim paints with neon contours on all details and then I start thinking what the hell was going through their heads at the time they programmed that option into the game. At least the default paintings are nice when they paint them without any filters.

Yeah, but since when has "what EAxis was aiming for" translated into something that people actually wanted. Having sims paint in different "styles" is an interesting concept, but in the hands of EAxis, it turns into a massive pile of fail.

I disagree that all the sims 3 paintings -by sims- are crap.  I've gotten some really pretty impressionistic paintings of the waterfall area. It does seem to be somewhat random, but I do prefer it to the sims 2 method.  And if I don't like a still-life, I just sell it.

Well in regards to the sims having the creepiest eyes ever, I will say that about a week ago, I had a pretty scary dream in which the "bad guy" in it had eyes just like in TS3.  I haven't been that enthused to play the game since then.

I've been having fun with the game for the most part, but it's getting annoying.  For one thing, nearly every-other sim day, a family moves out for no reason, never to be seen again.  Not that I was particularly attached to them, but so far I've lost about 6 households.  The game keeps moving in uglier and uglier townies to replace them, so what was the point of them moving out in the first place?  Apparently it wasn't for population control.  I also find myself spending too much time watching them sleep.  They should have greatly reduced or speeded up sleep time like they did with eating.  It seems sleep takes much longer in Sims 3, though I haven't timed it.

I've been having Gage Briody knock up chicks all over town.  Funny thing is the game seems to favor its own adopted spawn as Gage has lost 3/15 kids to various accidents (fire, starvation).  I haven't yet seen an adopted kid croak yet.

Hi! I've been searching for this. So it's not just me missing some check box under roof tools... the roof-height slider in TS3 is really worst than it was in TS2's Mansion & Garden! I can't believe it... are EA people crazy? One of the most useful tools and they had to mess it up. Why? >:(

You can try this method: Tutorial - How to create a basic roof with different slope angles (http://nene.modthesims.info/showthread.php?t=344816).

Are you telling me the undo button understands <add roof> as an action but not <set roof height>? That's what the tutorial says, right? That's wonderful and absolutely brightens my lot-builder-addicted-day. Thank you.

A note on Sims 3 painting and the belief that blurry paintings are realistic while smudgy painting are not...

(http://i.telegraph.co.uk/telegraph/multimedia/archive/01483/artist_1483778i.jpg)

(http://i.telegraph.co.uk/telegraph/multimedia/archive/01483/bikini-underwater_1483782i.jpg)

(http://i.telegraph.co.uk/telegraph/multimedia/archive/01483/man-in-water_1483789i.jpg)

These are not photographs.  These are paintings. 

So yes, I'd like to think that a Sim with level 10 painting and perhaps the Perfectionist train could realistically do away with the gamey Photoshop filters that are arbitrarily shoved down the player's throats by the game.