The Sims 3

It is hard for me to think of anything more mainstream yet more subversive than The Sims franchise. On one hand, few games have sold like The Sims has sold, based on the numbers, everyone and their grandma owns a copy. On the other hand, this game is about directing the lives of virtual people; from mundane tasks like brushing their teeth to supernatural events like vampirism or being abducted by aliens. The way The Sims pulls this off is by being charming and funny, and by letting players pretty much do whatever they want. Given that almost every game out there is about scoring touchdowns, matching gems, or shooting people in the head, there is something rebellious about a game that encourages players to work on their social and professional lives instead.

Still I never played The Sims all that much, not because I did not like the game but because I did not like the way it performed. You could not leave your in-game home without running into a long loading screen and, after a few expansion packs and downloads it turned into a bloated hog of a game with thousands of appliances, outfits and accessories clogging up poorly organized menus.

Thankfully, The Sims 3 fixes a few of these issues by making it easier to browse through the in-game content and by loading your entire city up at once. This way, if you decide to travel anywhere there is no interruption in the story. If you want you can even send all your family members to different locations and switch between them instantly. Your characters (called Sims in the game) are also a lot more independent now. If you leave them alone they will take good care of themselves although they will sometimes run into path-finding issues, taking the worse possible route to get from point A to point B.

Other improvements include a trait system taken straight from the newspaper personal ads. Instead of using numbers to define your characters you now use words such as natural cook, hopeless romantic, great kisser, and green thumb to make your character unique. Better yet, there are a bunch of traits that you will never see in a personal ad such as insane, kleptomaniac, hates children, or evil; a trait which makes your character genuinely enjoy ruining everyone else’s lives.

Also, while this game lacks the big things that the past expansions introduced such as the ability to own pets or go to college, it did keep all the little pleasures like fishing, growing vegetables, and purchasing cars. These options let you do some funny things with your characters, like a stay at home dad who grows all the food the family eats in the garden and sells the surplus to the local grocery store. Another Sim could write books and live off the royalties, while working part time jobs to help support this alternate lifestyle. Still pretty much what every Sim has in common is that they all want to eat, sleep, have fun, and “woohoo” every once in a while; “woohoo” being code for getting laid. Yes, the game acknowledges the existence of sex (in a PG way) and is in fact quite liberal in that regard, allowing same sex couples to get married and adopt children.

The Sims franchise has always been a pleasant anomaly in the gaming industry, mocked by “hardcore gamers” yet supported by a hardcore community of 3D artists and coders.  Still, like I said earlier, some people cannot wrap their head around a game that does not involve killing, which makes me think they need to go out there, meet some new friends and get some “woohoo”.