The Sims 3 review (2009)

The Sims 3 review - PC Gamer issue #202 (UK, July 2009)

My wedding was a disaster, beginning when one of the guests died during the party. We weren't close, but witnessing his ghost prompted a recurring wish to see more. Soon I was wandering the catacombs beneath the graveyard, getting emotionally scarred by zombie bears and emerging, smeared with dirt, in only my underpants. esporist.com

To make matters worse, I misunderstood the purpose of a 'Wedding Party'. It's not meant to celebrate the engagement, but to be the wedding itself. My guests left unhappy when no marriage took place, and both my fiancée and I felt guilty for missing our big day.

Make no mistake. That 'I' is me—a smaller, virtual but no less hairy me. The Sims 3, like the previous games, is all about controlling people.

All growed up

Need to Know

What is it? The second sequel in the series of life simulators that have sold over 100 million copies.
Release date June 2, 2009
Expect to pay £35 / $50 in 2009
Developer The Sims Studio
Publisher EA
Play it on 2GHz Dual Core, 2GB RAM, 128MB 3D card
Link The Sims 3 official site

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You begin by moulding their appearance (bearded, thinnish, roguishly handsome), selecting their five personality traits (Childish, Good, Friendly, Artistic, Computer Whizz) and dropping them into their own home in suburbia (two- bedroom, single floor, modest).

In the original game, what followed inevitably trapped you into being a kind of incorporeal maid, buying the furniture and making sure your little masters didn't wet themselves.

Those days are gone. Set their free will to full and your Sims are now capable of maintaining their own needs: Hunger, Social, Bladder, Hygiene, Energy, Fun. Stick the game on fast forward, wander off, and when you return your characters will have showered, used the toilet and gone off to work all by themselves. You can, if you want, completely ignore their needs and focus on the far more enjoyable job of fulfilling their wishes. That desire to see ghosts? That wasn't mine, that was Little Graham's.

Replacing the system of wants and fears from The Sims 2, wishes take two forms. Lifetime Wishes are chosen when you first create a Sim and limited by your selected personality traits—Graham's life goal is to become Master of the Arts by learning to paint and play guitar.

Along the way, smaller wishes inspired by the events in a Sim's life present themselves. When your Sim wishes something, you can dismiss it or promise to make it happen.

There's no punishment for failure, but accomplishing wishes gathers Lifetime Happiness points that can be spent on special rewards. Like, for example, a fertility treatment that increases the chance of twins and triplets. A ghost seen, a wife married, a newly learned recipe and some guitar practice later, little Ada and Boudica are born.

Wishes not only give your play direction, but meaning. Events inspire wishes. The fulfilment of wishes in turn inspires more events.

Life moves forward in a compulsive loop of improving skills, gaining promotions and buying new stuff, all of it purposeful because your Sim wanted it, and had a reason for wanting it.

A life less ordinary

Broadly defined, there are three roles a Sims player can assume: The Narcissist, who creates their own lives in lovingly accurate or idealised detail; The Soap Writer, who crafts tales of illicit affairs and melodrama; and The Sociopath, who locks Sims in a room, removes the door and watches unfeelingly as they weep, collapse and eventually starve to death. I find I move from one role to the next as my interest and attachment fluctuates.

Modelling Sims on yourself and your loved ones changes the way you play. The callous whims that might otherwise dictate your decisions are now too uncomfortable to pursue.

I only want a quiet, comfortable life for Little Graham. The great flaw of The Sims, unchanged in The Sims 3, is that accomplishing this goal renders the game boring. Each day becomes rote: go to work, come home, help the kids, kiss my wife, go to bed and start over. I become trapped in a life of Ballardian comfort, and it's here that I hit my mid-life crisis as a player.

In lieu of erotic car crashes, I start hitting fast forward. I strive for more anecdotes, quicker, but the character being me encourages caution. Eventually, I wish for nothing more exciting than to cook a good meal.

We know this from every other storytelling medium: the most interesting lives involve suffering. My next creations are still inspired by the real world, but I'm far more willing to lead them to pain and heartbreak. Meet Ross, Tim, Craig, Tom and Tony, five bachelors sharing a two-bedroom house, each shabbily designed in the insanely detailed Create-a-Sim tool. I put myself in there, too. I couldn't resist.

Small town life

Their house is in Sunset Valley, the only town to ship with the game. While The Sims 2 had destinations beyond your own house, visiting them meant a discouragingly long load. Now your hometown is exactly that, explorable on foot, bike or car. While you run your Sims, others are living, dying and breeding all around you. This once claustrophobic game now has a greater scope and a sense of exploration.

Each location serves a purpose. Tom's Lifetime Wish is to become a Creature-Robot Cross Breeder, so he gets a job at the science facility.

Tim wants to be an international secret agent, and starts by working at the police station. If you have the funds, you can become a partner or owner of these businesses. Tim also bought the local diner, Tim's House of Meat-Like Byproducts, and became a director of the local hospital. Tim's wages kept the entire household in spaghetti.

You can't see inside any of the work-related buildings. Your Sims' actions there are influenced via a drop-down menu. Tom's Workaholic trait causes him to default to 'Work Hard' status, but I make sure to set Ross, the resident Party Animal, to 'Meet Co-workers'.

Graham, meanwhile, is directed to use the fitness facilities at the military base. Time at a local French restaurant has rendered him chubby.

Buildings you can see inside include community lots—a gym, an art gallery, the park—or neighbourhood houses. Ross visited one of the rich families in town, letting me try their cool, expensive toys. After being distracted by Tim, who had again set fire to the kitchen back home, I was surprised by a message telling me Ross had stolen a lamp from his new friends. Possessed by the Kleptomaniac trait, Ross could—with or without provocation from me—thieve randomly. Coincidentally, I'd later direct Ross to befriend all the other rich families in town, gradually collecting a nice living-room set in the process.

Traits let you clearly define the personalities of your characters, and create entirely different situations. Craig's Evil trait inspires him to pursue the criminal career path, but he struggles because he's also Inappropriate and Insane. Aside from being arrested after his first day of work, he's also stolen candy from a baby, insulted that baby to her mother, and eventually entered into a fistfight with the woman. Which he lost. These things wouldn't happen with Tim, whose Excitable, Childish and Over-Excitable traits mostly just cause him to really like playing computer games.

Sim-ilaraties

Fundamentally, The Sims 3 is still The Sims. Although a significant improvement, wishes are just a small change from The Sims 2's wants and fears. Traits are just a better version of the previous personality points.

The roamable town feels essential, but it's mostly a technological leap. There are new video editing tools, letting you create sets, soundtracks, edit and share custom content, but people were doing that before, too. You'll be doing exactly the kinds of things you did in previous games. It's just a lot slicker.

What EA have done is create a platform for a new generation of expansion packs and downloadable content. Depending on where they take it, this might be like 'needing' to buy all your old films again on Blu- ray, or it might allow for new, exciting additions as towns expand in scope and scale. If you already have expansion packs for Sims 2 that add seasons, pets and witches, the basic Sims 3 feels like a step back.

Yet the core of The Sims 3 is more powerful than ever. Their world, all jaunty music and exaggerated animation, isn't just a platform for expansion packs, but for exploring your own feelings.

Tony was the first of us in the house to die. 93 days old, he was cleaning some dishes in the kitchen when it happened. We buried him in the front garden next to a gigantic meteorite Ross had found, and engraved upon his tombstone an epitaph: "He made our writing gooder. A lot." That night the entire house mourned. Even Craig. At the far corner of the house, Tony's bed stood out, empty. After playing for nearly 40 hours, I still haven't reached the role of The Sociopath.

Bennett Foddy first encountered games on a ZX Spectrum at the age of five, an experience that made him "ravenous for games on all platforms". Graduating to the Commodore Amiga, Foddy eventually encountered PC gaming through getting lost in Zork on a loaner computer brought home by his parents from work, and playing NetHack with his sister. "My sister had printed out all the game FAQs on dot matrix paper," he says. "That was a formative gaming experience for me."

In 2006, while pursuing a career in academia, Foddy began teaching himself programming. Two years later he released QWOP, the ragdoll-physics running game that became an online sensation. The unusual control scheme and physics-based slapstick of QWOP would become a signature of Foddy's games, further explored in 2011's GIRP and 2017's Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy.

Foddy's most recent game is Baby Steps, the open-world hiking simulator co-created with Gabe Cuzillo and Maxi Boch. A six-year-long project that painted the ideas behind QWOP onto a much larger canvas, it was a creative risk that has ultimately paid off for Foddy & co. "We were worried that people wouldn't get the ideas we were putting in there, that it would come off as a rage game," he says. "[But] it definitely resonated, so I feel creatively happy with that."

Foddy is currently exploring ideas for his next project. But he took some time out to guide me through the rugged virtual pathways of his PC. We stumbled along the unfamiliar slopes of gaming history, before collapsing at the apex of modern CRPGs.

What game are you currently playing?

I'm in this period of time [where] I guess I'm still recovering from burnout from a pretty intense six-year project. I've been dipping in, I've been playing a lot of stuff as it comes out, but not much is catching my attention or engaging with me long term.

The thing that I keep coming back to, where my gaming hours are going at the moment, is I've been playing Brogue, which is an open source roguelike game. It's getting on in years, but this is an exciting week for roguelikes, because NetHack five just came out, the first point release for NetHack in fifteen to twenty years or something like that.

Brogue is different than NetHack in that it's heavily automated. You can press X on your keyboard and it automatically plays itself until there's a decision to be made. And so it's kind of like a slot machine … and I find that's really good if I'm in a low brain [mode, and] don't have a lot of effort to bring to playing a game.

I don't think I'd ever make a roguelike. I made a little mod of Brogue that was for two players simultaneously. But it's bad, so it will never get released. Turns out waiting for the other person to move—or like, you can let people move whenever they want, but then the other player is advancing all of the monsters—is not a good idea.

What was the previous game you played, and is it still installed?

There's a website that I love called weloveit.io, which I recommend to people. It has a visual list of every single Steam release, along with some screenshots and a one-line description, and you can just see a firehose of everything that's coming out. And you can filter it … I like to look at games that have really positive reviews, but only less than 100 reviews, but also games that have more than 15,000 reviews.

Yesterday, I played a game called Subfloor. It's like a friendslop horror game—I use that term with love …. You're going into a dark space and trying to get trash and bring it back for selling it and taking pictures. It was kind of interesting. I enjoyed playing it with a friend, but now I'll move on to the next one.

I'm interested in big trends right now. You definitely feel that friendslop is still very big, and I think it has a lot of room in there. I don't actually think it's a genre, it's more a production style, or a production constraint. Friendslop, to me, is a multiplayer game that's made scaleable because you make technical choices that put very little strain on servers. You don't need dedicated servers because you design the game so it's played with friends.

Then, if you have to scale it from zero players to 20 million players like they did with Peak or Lethal Company, you're not screwed. You look at these competitive shooters, like triple-A releases. If they're not making a certain amount of money right out of the gate, they have to kill the whole project.

What is the oldest game (by release date) currently installed on your PC?

Another thing that I got interested in lately, I was thinking about Tetris. I was reading about the history of that. And one of the things that's interesting is that after Alexei Pajitnov made Tetris, people don't know this but he's an incredibly prolific designer.

He's made so many games, and it's gonna sound egotistical to say this … but I can't help as a game designer, identifying with his problem, which is that he made this little game almost by accident, Tetris, in '85 or '84 or whenever it was made, and struggled to really recapture that.

[So] I've been playing a game called Shawl. Its original name is in Russian. He made it in 1986 and it's a DOS game you can find on free websites. It's the closest in intent to Tetris in staying very abstract and trying to look for that compelling gameplay again.

I definitely sympathise. The oldest game I'm known for is QWOP, a game that I made almost as a gag, or very quickly anyway, in a week or two in 2008, and it took me years of reflecting to be able to understand what resonated for people about that. Because I wasn't setting out to make something like that, that would work in the way it did work.

I love some of his old games that are not Tetris, but Shawl is not good. But to me, there is something fascinating here. And I would love one day to hear the full history of these designs.

What is the highest number of hours you have in any given game, according to Steam?

I was looking at this. It says I have 300 hours in Dark Souls 2, and it says I have 300 hours in Elite Dangerous. But I think those are both fake numbers because I used to leave my computer on at my office at NYU … the first one that I think is correct, it says I have 280 hours in Noita.

Every now and again, somebody makes a game that's like 'Oh shit, that's for me.' Right? It's got an aesthetic that feels like the old freeware DOS games that I used to love. It's obviously inspired by the Japanese falling sand games that were on the web back in the day. But I think it's also inspired by that game Liero, which I think also may be Finnish.

I really, really love it, and I'm so impressed by it. Petri [Purho] has given some talks about this, but it's such a hard thing to do. When there's so much chaos in the system, it's so hard to control that as a designer. I played an early version of Noita, maybe 10 years before it finally came out. And it was like 'You're a wizard, you're casting spells that turn every piece of dirt on the screen into flammable gas and then everything catches fire.' To be able to make a game that's not just always blowing up out of that is an incredible achievement.

What game will you never, ever uninstall?

I'm not sentimental about this stuff, but if I look at my actual Steam, I can see a game that should have been uninstalled, but is not uninstalled. It's Baldur's Gate 3.

I liked that game a lot, but here's what happened to me. Got a lot of enjoyment out of Act 1 and 2. Then [in] Act 3, I got daunted. It was too big and so I stopped. And that was a really long time ago now, but I also don't feel like I can be done with it, right? I've got all these characters, I've got all this progress, and it doesn't feel good that I'm leaving it there, so it's probably going to stay installed on the computer.

What's a piece of non-gaming software installed on your PC that you simply couldn't live without?

The one that I'm most fond of is Substance Designer, which is a piece of software that's designed for making materials that you then paint onto photorealistic characters. That's the point of it. But what it actually is, is a 3D oriented visual programming language for making an image that you like. And to me, it's been useful for so many different things.

Weirdly, Photoshop and all the other Photoshop competitors that are out there are annoying to use for games purposes. In trying to cater to visual designers and photographers, it's just not technical enough for a video game … you need something that's nerdier. And so nerdy Photoshop for me is Substance Designer. It's not meant for that purpose. But it's just fantastic.

How tidy is your desktop screen?

I used to care about this a lot, and [it] was either really organised or it was fastidiously empty. But I feel like both Windows and Mac have, over time, de-emphasised the desktop massively. You don't use it for launching programs. You certainly don't use it for accessing files. It's not really for anything.

And so Steam becomes your desktop. Or the Start menu becomes your desktop. Or the search bar is your desktop. It's very much a residual part of an operating system. So I can't really tell you how tidy my desktop screen is because I don't see it.