Last curtain call for The Sims 3?
As with most of the other expansions, Showtime adds a new town to play in, Starlight Shores. Clearly Hollywood-inspired (right down to the Simlish "Hollywood" sign on the hills outside town), it's a nice-looking location with most of the standard amenities, including some of the facade-style buildings (but no skyscrapers) first introduced in previous expansion, Late Night. It doesn't feel like a huge, bustling place (in fact, if there are no performances in progress, it can be quite the ghost town), but the venues are generally nice to look at and well-designed. While the number of new objects in Showtime is certainly huge, many of these remain decorative objects, and the best objects in Showtime were already featured in The Sims 2. Among these are the karaoke machine, pool tables, DJ booth and dance sphere. There's also a new mechanical bull, capable of whipping your Sims around at breakneck speeds with hilarious results. It's fun, competent stuff, but it's also familiar stuff if you're a long term fan of the series, and nothing that really revitalizes the game.
Showtime does add a large number of great-looking animations to the game, mostly associated with its three new professions. These new jobs are the heart of Showtime, and they're a solid addition to the game. Unlike the mediocre band career in Late Night, Showtime makes working in the performing arts into a well-organized, practical career with a much better pay off. The new jobs available are singer, acrobat and magician, but they play out essentially the same way: you'll wander around town, performing in public for tips, or visiting a variety of venues around Starlight Shores for higher-paying gigs. Earning a gig means going through a brief audition for the venue's proprietor, then showing up on stage at the scheduled time. Working your way up from performing silly singing telegrams to performing in front of a large (though actually fake) audience can be rewarding, but it can also be a bit of a grind.
The actual gigs are where the real fun takes place. Your Sim can set up the stage with a variety of props, then takes the stage and performs whatever actions you feel like queueing up. Reaching higher ranks in each profession unlocks new actions, and new outfits to wear on stage. Audiences will respond kindly or unkindly to the performance, even going as far as throwing food and other items onto the stage! While there is a bit of interactivity available in the shows, I never really felt like my input was having an effect on the outcome, and the whole process of finding jobs, then performing the onstage actions over and over eventually becomes dull. It's also possible to watch other Sims perform around town that aren't under your control, although with only three career paths to follow, it won't take that long to see all of them.
Showtime also boasts a number of new "social" features, such as the ability to send and receive performing Sims from your online friends, or send and receive messages from your profile "wall." Unfortunately, even if you opt out of the online functionality, the game will still give your Sims wishes to "host a visiting performer" or otherwise encourage you to participate in the online features. It all has an annoying Facebook style feel to it, and it's something many players might not welcome in their games. It's also one of the glitchiest parts of this expansion, so you might want to wait until EA releases yet another patch to address it.
Showtime also makes good use of the Celebrity system from previous expansion Late Night: each gig will reward your Sim with a few Celebrity points, making the whole Celebrity system much more meaningful than if you were playing Late Night on its own. Unfortunately, bands and singers are completely (and bafflingly) exclusive, so there's no way your band will ever have a lead singer, and no way your singer will ever be backed up with a proper trio of musicians. Design decisions like these really reduce the potential for fun in The Sims 3, and make the EP content feel tacked on, rather than smoothly integrated.
Overall, Showtime is a decent expansion pack. The new town is nice, if unremarkable, the new jobs are fun for a little while, and the new objects will make your night clubs and bars a little less empty. But as with the other expansions, it's a poor value overall and if you're not seriously interested in playing the three new professions, it's extremely difficult to justify the purchase. Showtime is best left to only the most dedicated TS3 fans.