@superstition222: If any company wants to break the mould and, as a first, really provide equity in the eye candy department, contact me and I will work for you. I am serious. I am beyond bored with the grizzled, old, wrinkled, homely-looking "heroic" male lead — and assorted less-than-lovely NPCs. That, of course, is always coupled with attractive females. What's the point, for a gay gamer like me, in being able to have a haggard old homely guy who is able to romance homely men? It's not interesting. I'd rather play the female because at least she looks okay. If you're going to make romance compelling for all players you need to stop embedding the looks double standard.

It is not necessary to subject gamers who can't tolerate looking at beautiful men to that, either. It's easy enough to give people choice, up front, about how they like their men and their women. Remember Total Recall, where Arnold is asked how he likes his mates, before the action starts? Make it a setting, literally. Of course, having to encounter a few actually attractive male NPCs shouldn't kill anyone. However, it could be a setting to apply additional ugliness/age to male NPCs to satisfy the mindset, for those who need that. Apparently, a lot do because this is perpetuated, over and over, for as long as I can remember in gaming. It's profoundly humorous that so many were so concerned with how pretty the rendering is for the hair of the old man in Witcher 3, for instance. He needs pretty hair even though he's ugly? Hmm...

Even better than control over just the haggardness of the avatar's skin would be to give people their choice of avatar (not just the avatar's sex). And, the word is sex, not gender. I see gender used all over the Internet when discussing this game. Gender is about self-concept and other complexities, not basic biological fact (dimorphism via DNA). People are scared of the word sex in this culture so they substitute another similar, but not the same, word, erroneously. People have a biological sex and they have a gender. Two different things.

As usual, the male lead is haggard, older, and uglier than the female alternative. Does she have black bags under her eyes? Nope. Wrinkles? Not really. Why is it that developers always make male characters uglier, and that includes the NPCs? Is it really necessary? For a game that supposedly makes it fair for all players it, once again, seems to subscribe to the gaming industry fiction that only women can be beautiful.

Oh, and in two days it will be 11 years... ELEVEN YEARS... since the Athlon 64-bit processor was released to the market. Maybe in another 11 EA will find its missing head somewhere in an area known as the posterior. Well, that is if it's still in business. But, we know one thing about America, it's certainly possible to fail upwardly.

(64-bit binary? Surely you jest! Who needs 64-bit RAM limits for a tablet game?)

This game doesn't deserve even one star. EA has shoveled out Sims 1 + lots of expansions, Sims 2 + lots of expansions, and Sims 3 + lots of expansions. It was crappy and crass the first time. The second time it was atrocious. The third time it was pathetic. This time... words just fail. Why? Because this is the first time the base game completely stinks in comparison with the previous incarnation's base game. In the quest to milk every dollar we're stuck with graphics designed for 10 year old hardware (may as well play The Sims 2 instead) and an even more watered-down corporate drone look for the Sims themselves.

At least in SimAnt there was a spider that could eat one of the many identical ants. In this game, where is the spider? The next game we need is one where all the EA drones who put draining wallets far ahead of producing humanity-enriching art (that happens to be profitable) are milked themselves. Oh, that's right... this game had a dev team of four people. Everyone else is working on the psychological studies to find out how to maximize the profitability of the DLCs.

Sequels need to build upon the existing content. BUILD UPON. That means adding, not subtracting. EA has also threatened that if it doesn't make enough undeserved cash on Sims 4 there won't be a sequel. We can only hope!

They managed to turn SimCity into a glorified tablet app and now they've done it with the Sims. Of course, it doesn't come with a price of $1.99.