My second completed game of 2011 is The Sims 3 from EA
There’s something about simulation games that appeals to my addictive nature, I’ve spent many an hour scrutinising the right layout for my residential zoning in SimCity, flying around the city putting out fires and saving lives (and modding the source files with hilarious consequences) in SimCopter and, despite its dollhouse-like nature, I was also bitten by the The Sims bug when it was released in 2000.
Having finished the latest iteration it seems like nothing has really changed since that first release. For the first 20 or so hours I did enjoy it, but as I neared completion it became apparent that I was hating it, and there were two main reasons. Firstly, it crashed, a lot, and with a lack of autosave feature, this meant much retreading of hard earned progress. Secondly, the idiotic Sims, despite giving them personality traits and goals, they seem quite happy to just saunter around doing any old bollocks.
It’s a huge burden to still have to micromanage every aspect of their behaviour if you want to succeed at the game. Annoyingly, sims will readily ignore the queue of activities you’ve arranged for them if you take the camera into one of the other enviroments. There’s a whole town full of things for your sims to do, like go to work in an office, or an visit an army base, but as soon as they enter these buildings you are left with a blank space for the duration of the activity. Why on earth would you want to follow them around if you can’t see what they’re up to?!
Not having played the PC version I don’t know how much was cut out for the console release, but I’m resolute that I won’t ever be playing another The Sims game. Well, not for at least 10 years anyway.
