So, after 40 hours and something minutes I finally finished torrenting the game. Installed without a problem and the game neither crashed nor caused my laptop to explode/catch fire while running it.
The first thing I did was create a family. I'm not nearly as impressed as a lot of people seem to be about the CAS. The sims are butt ugly and no matter what I did I couldn't change the overall appearance of my sims very much. The "advanced" controls were rather pointless. They're more basic and there is very little you can change. I find it's a huge step back from Body Shop. The sims heads are strangely large, as well.
The weight slider was neat, though setting it to the skinniest point didn't seem very skinny at all. I was expecting some walking skeletons. :/ All the sims seem short and stocky.
The clothing meshes weren't so bad, though I'm not sure how I feel about choosing patterns and colours. It seems like a giant pain in the ass to me. It might be that it was just overwhelming at the time and figuring out how to save specific choices as "custom content" will probably help, but I'm rather disgruntled at the moment.
The traits are neat, I admit. While I haven't played long enough to see how they individually effect a sim, I know by reading that it's mostly superficial and that they don't really change anything in the long run. You're not evil by taking a "wicked shower" or however it went (I know it was mentioned earlier?). I want evil sims to set fire to bushes, trip sims, poison someone's "blended drink". The way things are currently is rather corny and childish (hurr, I know it's a
"kids" teen game), but dammit I want some evil-take-over-the-city-sims.
I tried following the tutorial, but got bored rather quickly. "Blah, blah, yes I know how to buy a couch. Jobs, blah, blah, blah." I might going through it again if it has any useful stuff... maybe.
I think the idea of an open neighbourhood is good in concept, but in reality it... really pisses off people like me who need to keep a eye on the entire area so sims aren't doing what I don't want them to do. The buildings and scenery are amazing, I admit. I don't know how I feel about sims disappearing into buildings. Sure, it gives the sims more options (like going to a concert), but I feels more like a game, like Pes said, and not a toy. While I have told my sim to go to a concert, I can't follow them and
tell them to throw their bra on stage keep the story I have going in my head. It's like running into a wall.
Speaking of stories, I don't like how we're pretty much forced into playing along with Eaxis "storyline". My neighbourhoods are rarely "normal". In TS2 I have a zombie apocalypse hood (zombie apocalyse in TS3, by the way, would be very exciting), a sort of gloomy, dictatorial vibe, Stepford-Wife-ish background, etc. With townies doing whatever the hell they want I can't give my neighourhood any theme of my choosing.
I do like how the sims have personalities now, from their traits. One sim was walking down the street, shouting and being rather obnoxious while another ditzy teenager with huge earings easily grew bored of listening to my sim squee over her new house. But like I said, it's rather superficial.
Decorating houses is going to become very tedious now, me thinks. I love how we have the option of changing little details, but only to a point. Just like in CAS, it feels like a pain in the ass. I haven't quite figured out how to save a specific design as a whole instead of just a certain pattern combination, but once I do, hopefully I'll feel differently.
I've noticed that a lot of furniture seems to have been taken directly from TS2 and recycled, but what else is new? This displeased me. I also noticed, as I was poking through the usual assortment of ugly window coverings, that windows actually
bleed through.
I tried a bunch of different window coverings, but the same thing happened to all of them. I didn't try different windows, but I can only assume, this is Eaxis afterall, that it's the same for all of them.
Soon after the window covering incident I saved and exited.
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