The Sims 3 Exclusive Hands-On - From Top to Bottom
We get our hands on The Sims 3 and have a no-holds-barred report on what the game has to offer.
The Sims 3. It's the next game in one of the most popular computer game series in the last 10 years--a series of games that's all about the joys, loves, careers, and embarrassing moments in the lives of little computer people. We've just played the game extensively and have much to report on its new features, improvements, and the way you don't always have to worry about having to send your little sims to the bathroom.
The Sims 3 expands on the extensive customization options of The Sims 2 in many ways. The Create-A-Sim character creation utility has grown and improved, offering five major categories of customization: basics, hair, looks, clothing, and personality. Basics offers six selectable stages of a sim's life span (as opposed to five in The Sims 2): toddler, child, teenager, young adult, adult, and elder. Younger sims will have more-limited choices than older ones when it comes to the game's new personality options, which we'll explain shortly. Basics also offers a full gradient slider with various hues for different skin colors (such as light, dark, and swarthy--or blue, red, and green if you prefer to make characters who look more like aliens or movie monsters) and gradient sliders for your characters' stature, which set both how much body fat they have and how much musculature they have.
Hair lets you select from a variety of preset hairstyles (or hair-plus-accessory styles, such as baseball caps, top hats, and bicycle helmets) with completely adjustable hair color layers for your character's base color, roots, tips, and highlights. The looks panel offers the ability to customize your character's basic head shape (or choose from a preset shape), along with eye shape and color, nose shape, lip shape and color, beauty marks such as moles and freckles, and colored cosmetics for eye shadow, lipstick, and face paint. Every single color choice has both a variety of presets as well as a free-form gradient option that lets you select whatever color, hue, and gamma levels you prefer.
The clothing menu is stocked with a predictably huge array of preset clothes for everyday wear, formal occasions, sleeping, athletic workouts, and swimming, and most of these offer mix-and-match top-and-bottom selections (or one-piece outfits if you prefer)--all customizable by color or using the game's new create-a-style system, which lets you customize a color or color pattern, save it, share it with your friends, and apply it to anything that can have a pattern applied to it, such as your character's clothes, living room sofa, wallpaper, carpet, and car paint job.
The personality menu has been completely revamped for The Sims 3, including not only provisions for your sim's favorite food, color, and music--as well as a customizable "simlish" (gibberish) voice with adjustable pitch--but also the much-talked-about traits system, which completely replaces The Sims 2's arcane and sometimes-confusing "personality sliders that give you a horoscope" system. The Sims 3 instead helps you define each sim's personality with more than 60 "traits," which we've revealed in a previous story. Toddlers start with only two traits, children get three, teenagers get four, and young adults get the game's maximum number of five.
Of the huge variety of traits, many can be extremely advantageous, while others can be extremely disadvantageous, especially when stacked together. There are clearly combinations of traits that were placed in the game for people who prefer to play toward a specific goal. For instance, one of our sims took the following traits: good sense of humor (which makes your sim's jokes funnier and more likely to strengthen a relationship); party animal (which guarantees that all invited guests will show up and also makes them more likely to bring gifts); schmoozer (which makes your sim a more-persuasive talker and grants extra dialogue options like "flatter" and "praise"); charismatic (which makes your sim gain charisma skill faster, have better conversations, and make friends faster); and friendly, which makes your social interactions more impactful overall. This set of traits is a natural for a popularity-based lifetime wish, such as making 15 friends. Of course, if you don't care to be as ambitious, or instead prefer to play the game as more of an observer, you can load up your characters with flaws such as absentminded, technophobe, no sense of humor, and so on, toss the characters together in the same house, and watch the sparks fly.
Review Scores
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Game Info
- Release Date: Oct 26, 2010
- ESRB: TTitles rated T (Teen) have content that may be suitable for ages 13 and older.
- Release Date: Jun 2, 2009
- ESRB: TTitles rated T (Teen) have content that may be suitable for ages 13 and older.
- Release Date: Nov 15, 2010
- ESRB: TTitles rated T (Teen) have content that may be suitable for ages 13 and older.
- Release Date: Mar 22, 2011
- ESRB: TTitles rated T (Teen) have content that may be suitable for ages 13 and older.
- Release Date: May 29, 2009
- ESRB: TTitles rated T (Teen) have content that may be suitable for ages 13 and older.
- Release Date: May 5, 2009
- Release Date: Aug 20, 2009
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The Sims 3
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- Publisher(s): Electronic Arts
- Developer(s): The Sims Studio
- Genre: Puzzle
- Release: May 5, 2009 (US)
- ESRB: T
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