The Sims 3 – Xbox 360

As someone mentioned here, it’s fun to play God. It’s even more fun when I have the chance to create real life friends in the virtual world (they even look and act eerily like the real people I know) and see what kind of crazy awkward situations you can put them in (or watch them flourish in specific job situations and/or hobbies/talents).

This game is like a black hole that sucks away any sense of time you may have in the real world. On the first day, I sat through 11 straight hours without even batting an eyelash (other than to grab a quick bite or two and use the restroom). That’s how addictive this game is. It’s incredible that you can have so much control over everyone’s lives, as well as how you make friends, interact with NPCs, and learn skills that really define who your Sims are over the course of their lifetimes. I also like how there is so much attention to detail in terms of how you can design and build the home of your dreams. You can landscape, paint, wallpaper, roof to your heart’s content, and buy all sorts of cool stuff to put in the house.

I have heard about the glitch involving people who have game freezes due to possibly too many objects in their inventory or game (I have yet to encounter this problem, fingers crossed) – however, I’m just being very careful about how I manage my stuff in game and am hoping that the problem doesn’t affect me.

The game controls fabulously. There is definitely a bit of a learning curve at first when you pick up the game. But once you figure it out thanks to some helpful tutorials, it will all make sense and feel like second nature to you. I do notice that there is a slight lag when it comes to load screens in game (and there are a lot of them) but for the most part it didn’t distract me that much. I was too busy in my little sandbox, watching my Sims move up in life (and watching my kid grow up). Throw in some intrigue (such as one of my housemates bringing her lesbian lover home for some “woo hoo”), a little karma here and there (which is one great addition to the game – it really makes it fun when you can use ‘powers’ to create dramatic situations) and you have the recipe for an amazing game that will suck the very life out of you.

My challenge now is to not ditch my real life friends because their Sim counterparts are just that much more interesting lol!

There are some things to like about playing the Sims on console, namely that you get to play on a large TV screen (assuming you have a large TV), but the downsides of console vs. PC can’t be ignored by anyone who truly loves this game.

The zoom function on console is atrocious. You simply can’t get a good close look at any individual Sim or on any given item in gameplay, which I find very disappointing. The white halo surrounding the Sim you control is also really annoying.

You can’t have more than six playable Sims at any given time while PC allows up to eight. Additionally, on PC, you can “kick out” any Sims you don’t feel like playing anymore. It results in their just walking out of the house and not coming back, and they’ll continue on as NPCs. On console, there are only two ways you can get rid of a Sim you don’t want anymore. You can kill them by starving them to death or drowning them in the pool, or you can move the entire household to a new lot, leaving the unwanted Sim behind, at which point that Sim is deleted from the game entirely. I wish I had known that before I had my Sims start breeding like rabbits.

There are persistent glitches that EA unsurprisingly hasn’t addressed. A major one is the family’s inventory going poof several Sim weeks into gameplay. In just one game, I’ve lost my Sims’ individual inventory and, later on, the entire contents of their refrigerator and bookcase. That’s pretty frustrating when you’ve spent time accumulating hard-to-acquire items such as life fruit and death fish. Pro tip: Break up those items into every inventory you have at your disposal so you at least don’t lose all of it at once.

The breaking point for me and why I’m planning on recreating my “heir” Sim on PC shortly is the lack of expansion packs. You can play regular Sims or Sims Pets, but you can’t combine the two, and none of the other games (World Adventures, Ambitions, Generations, Nightlife, or Showtime) are available on console. It’s pretty clear that this will never change.