Whether you enjoy the game or not relies mostly on whether you were hoping for a better open-ended toy than TS2, with the best features of TS2 ported intact, or destined to be ported in future EPs.

TS3 is a goal-oriented game that forces you to play The One Fambly. If I understand correctly, you can "save as" your One Fambly Household, go mess with another family, and then unfreeze The One Fambly without penalty. Each different One Fambly you choose to create and pilot around makes its own bubbleverse. You can't play, like in TS2, one family and then go directly to family B and expect them to have not done something stupid or fatal or irritating, like get fat/thin, lose jobs, buy stupid crap, move / die, marry, or have a litter of pinto-bean sproglets.

You can take pains to fight the fat puddingy defaults in CAS3, make a passel of Sims, seed them into the low-rent properties available for the dirt poor noob Sims, and interact with them, but you can only control one family. So if you wanted a MATY hood, you'd be out of luck. Even if all MATY Sims could magically fit on one lot, which they can't, then you'd be out of separate homebases. Say you want to make The Butthaus and The Peebase. Butthaus denizens will only do as you command when they are The One Fambly. Peebase will have Sims being independently stupid, no matter how you set your free will toggler. Pees will be dying, losing jobs, divorcing and marrying, get stuff repossesed, burning down their kitchens, staring into space, and generally being dumb Sims. If you get the Butts toeing the line and on track and save your game, and swop to the Peebase, nothing you did in Butthaus registers at Peebase, and now the Butts are off being stupid Sims. The two bubbleverses do not dovetail or overlap.

The objects, hairs, outfits, etc. are severely limited. It is probably because EA hoped to sell us stuff for $20 a set.

Once you meet the goals a few times in the game, it gets boring. While the collecting is entertaining, briefly, now, it isn't going to stay that way.

The ability to customize almost all objects / outfits / hairs is very good. No more mismatched Maxis fug. The selection of objects that can't be customized, however, is puzzling. Other items defy matching, such as kitchen appliances. Most of the default patterns aren't bad.

There are some shortcuts, if you poke about. Say Sim A wants watermelon. Sim B, same household, can haz. But Sim A is at the spa, and Sim B is at work. You can, as Simdeity, go to the household, click to open the fridge, drag the melon in there from Sim B's inventory, then select Sim A, open fridge, drag the melon to A's inventory. Thus A and B can exchange food while being in two different places. I assume this sort of thing is limited to stuff that fits in personal inventories. I assume A can find a rock, you as Simdeity can go to their homebase, drag it onto a surface or floor, then have B pick it up or drag it into B's inventory.

Birthday cake can't go in  the fridge. If you were hoping to haz some caek, forget it; unless you use it right away and deal with the aging up side effect, you wind up with a Sim bitching about soiled food in their Hammerspace / inventory. I don't know if it works only as caek if aging is set to off. Somehow I doubt it.

Being able to wander hood-wide is great. Being able to invite yourself inside other Sims' homes is great. The limitations (no showering, getting booted out at 3am, etc) can probably be hacked eventually.

You can buy books your Sim isn't leveled up enough to use, notably, recipes. AFAIK, they vanish. You waste your money.

If your Sim gets a craving, I haven't figured out how you can buy that food item at a rabbithole restaurant. I suspect you have to read / take classes / figure out ingredient lists for these items and make them at home.

I suspect that making a building you made into a community lot turns it into a shell / rabbithole, but haven't tried it yet. I'm not sure why you'd bother, unless there is a way to make an alternate set of businesses. Since they are rabbitholes, I'm not sure what the point of that would be. If it just makes it non-residential and little else, IDGI. Perhaps someone else can speak to that.

I miss being able to hire a gardener! It is not exciting, after the first time or two, to see your Sim gardening. It is even less interesting to watch them read.

The maid continues to be mostly useless. Stupid newspapers!

Room dividers are useless for anything but colour-filling floor tiles, AFAICT.

Some of the EAxian houses / lots that you can put into the 'hood are really nicely designed. Kudos to whichever poor overworked EA drone made them. Lighting / water effects are decent. I've seen a LOT worse.

Genetics takes a giant step backwards from TS2. You are almost guaranteed a fugly babby and thus fugly future generations. Skin tones are not blended; all genetics is a coin toss affair. Babbys will get unmodified traits from both parents, at random. "Dyed" hair gets passsed down. If you want to try to outguess the gene blender, make your mating Sims look almost alike. If A has red / auburn / gold / orange hair selected, make sure B has the exact same thing. If A has black / dark brown / light brown / pink and B has brown / dark blonde / blue / light blonde, you will possibly get a kid with Spin-Art-coloured hair. I believe Zaza already posted pix of her Rainbow Brite-headed boy Sim.

Even thin-faced Sims get a weird double chin effect.

Some traits are great, especially skills-based traits. Some traits handicap your Sims instead of help them, though, which means that, for efficiency's sake, you will probably eventually choose traits that make skillinating (or meeting new people, or whatever) less of a pain in the ass.

Wishes and moodlets are both clever.

Job opportunities are a step up from chance cards, though I did get an occasional chance card-like decision pop-up.

It is visually attractive and loads quickly. Build / Buy will frustrate and please in equal measure. In build, the controls are overly burdened with useless sparkly crap. In buy, some items show up only in category menus but not in room-related menus and v. versa. If you know some item "belongs" outside, but is also a decor item, you might find it in one or the other location but only sometimes in both.

There are more "slots" on surfaces, and the 45-degree angle rotation and usable diagonal walls are GREAT.

Cars are a step WAY down from TS2. I don't know why they bothered. Often, my Sims will not even bother to use their cars when they are setting off from home. I got two Sims two cars, and they walked or hailed taxis anyway.

There are few "macro"-like commands, as expected. For example, there is no "recycle all" option for old newspapers, so your Sim will trek back and forth and you must direct it to clean each paper separately. On the other hand, "harvest" and "tend garden" seem to push Sims to harvest or tend all plants nearby.

EA basically ignored what made TS1 and TS2 wildly successful and personal to each player. TS2 was more of a toolbox for independent play ideas. TS3 forces goal-oriented / single household play, has designed the code to be difficult to mod (unless you are a programmer type), has forced mini-games on the player (the mandatory book-reading / collecting stuff/ boring skillinating), and forces fugly Townies on you that you cannot easily burninate, drowninate, or mutilate (many of which will call your Sims with whiny "WRY U NO CALL MEH? U BAD FWEND!" messages if you don't waste time dealing with thier F-liness all the time).

With TS3, you are forced to play how EA thinks you should play, and meet their goals, and so on. As a supplement to TS2 (like the Castaway Stories, or the console version, or Sims Wii), it is fine, and the designers of the visuals are to be praised. TS2 remains superior in terms of making the game yours, personally, and telling stories with multiple households, and designing Sim characters. EA adding more 'hoods won't fix the basic problem, here. It's more like Sims 2.25 or something than Sims 3.

In many ways, TS3 feels like a precursor to TS2 (something the designers may have picked up on, as the 'hood is supposedly a "prequel" 'hood to TS2's Pleasantville), even if you are comparing base game to base game. TS2's handling of genetics is far superior. TS3's handling of object custom design tools and colour wheels is superior to TS2's (think of all the permutations of Maxis Match items and multiple items / recolours for objects, or just how many different eye colour / design files there were) EXCEPT when designing Sims. You can make "monsters" in TS2, or simply design realistically-proportioned faces, for the most part. In TS3, even the thinnest face is still puddling-y and pudgy, and there are serious clipping problems with the fugly hair and with fat Sims holding things.

The fact that there ARE fat Sims is a bonus.

I like that there aren't any supernatural creatures wandering about (except ghosts). If your style is more realistic, the basic set-up of TS3 works with that. The ghosts are more like translucent Sims than ghosts, since they can apparently breed and wander about being just as boring as non-ghost Sims. I haven't had any Sim deaths (other than random people I don't recall my Sims meeting!), but other people have apparently been perplexed about what to do with tombstones, etc.

I like some of the subtle humour, which was always a highlight of EAxean SIms games. Nec and I both have wandering gnome statues. Hers is still on her lot, doing creepy and funny things. Mine apparently wandered off-lot and vanished. (Boo!)  I also like it that the peeing obsession has simmered down. I had a pregnant Sim yarf (and it was green, not blue, hooray), but not one has peed anywhere but in a terlet (that I know of).

I understand why we aren't allowed to follow Sims into their jobs, but am rather sad, too. Since there are various scenarios your Sim can choose, they COULD have scripted each scenario with random Sims playing co-workers / boss, and designed interiors. it would require vastly more power and time, though, and I suspect that after the first few dozen views, it would get boring anyway. I didn't like the cut scenes in TS2 much.

Tutorials answer a lot of questions I don't need help with, but do not answer a lot of things that would benefit from a step-by-step pro and con breakdown in a tute (such as how to switch from Fambly A and Fambly B, how to move with and without your stuff, pros and cons of various settings in Options).

As already noted, stopping Story Progression does not stop non-One Fambly families from going about their business of being stupid and Simly and moving away / dying / breeding / having babies suddenly appear out of nowhere with no explanation. The memory system was buggy in TS2, but at least you could peek in and get an idea of what happened to that Sim, and with whom, where. In TS3, you have to keep all those events in your user-edited bio or just remember them.

I'm not sure what function the "fave clour" serves, though apparently "fave food" gets a happy reaction from the Sim, and I assume that "fave music" is the same, though I did not note any increased enthusiasm from my Sim.

Stuff still breaks for no apparent reason in your house, not from misuse or overuse. It breaks ONLY so your Sim has to fix or replace it, and thus make the tinkering / handyperson skillination useful. PROTIP: it is less of a pain in the ass to just go into build/buy and replace it. SRSly. Unless you like the idea of a Sim you may actually like getting electrocuted while fixing a cheap appliance, which, of course, you might. You may also get an opportunity to go WAY outside your Sim's chosen job description or skillset, like my journalist / non-tinkering / non-cooking-skilled Sim did: she was asked to fix a restaurant's plumbing. WOT?

The lack of loading screens between destinations is great; props for that. Occasionally I'll move too quickly for my laptop to keep up with, and I'll see blank grey meshes take on their specific colours, or have things like watering cans pop into Sims' hands belatedly, but those are minor quibbles, and well worth not having to get up and get a drink while a non-homebase destination loads up. How will EA handle getting from 'hood A (the default) and other rumoured 'hoods we can add? Will The One Fambly be able to use a "travel" rabbithole to get from A to B, or will THAT mean loading screens? Will stuff done in 'hood B carry back over into hood 'A? If The One Fambly members meet mates or accept jobs in 'hood B, will they still have them when back in 'hood A? It will be interesting to see what happens.

Bottom line: It isn't open-ended like TS2. If you don't mind being forced to play legacy-style, and re more into designing and building, or if you are a casual player who won't be likely to tire of the mini-games, it is not a bad game, though NOT worth $50. If EA had chosen to promote this as a Simverse goal-like game, rather than as a successor to TS2, I suspect we'd be less RAEG-filled.  Play it as a supplement, not as a game that takes what we actually LIKED and WANTED in TS2 and ignores that in favour of selling content online in the EA Store, "shinies" we honestly don't need, mini-games and rabbit-hole community lots, etc. TS3 makes it difficult to form an attachment to a single family, if you want to explore all the different traits / careers / etc. TS2 allowed players to make as many different "worlds" and "families" as they could think up (and their machines could run)...you could have a Sci Fi 'hood, a Victorian 'hood, a 'hood that included the mystical creatures, a 'hood that was free of werewolves and plant people and so on (beyond the defaults, which could be kept away with hacks and mods if you wanted), a 'hood that had both Sims and buildings YOU designed and liked, and so on.

Supposedly you can assign hair / makeup to each outfit category, but I will be buggered if I could figure out how. Also, as noted earlier, the hairstyles mostly suck and clip into the Sims. If accessories can go on either hand / side, it is also not obvious how it is done.

Male hairstyles are particularly pathetic, with nothing in between teen / 20-something scruffy and Balding Mid-life Crisis Guy or Buttrocker. Men in their late 20s-late 40s have nothing, really; and, as Pescado already ROARED about, there are no Long Beards or Chrome Dome Bald Heads.

I do like the colour wheels. They get a bene for those.

Keeping in mind that wacky haircolour and skin colour and eyebrows, etc., seem to be thrown in a Cuisinart and doled out at random to any sproggens, I tried to make more androgynous Sims, and soon gave up. There are few combinations of Sim builder traits and preferences that still look decent if you swop the genders around.

Struggling to avoid a pudding-y Sim means that the CAS stage takes 5x as long, and even not-so-fat-faced Sims can wind up with mysterious double chins. DNW.

My audio is stuttering, which may be a personal issue since I multitask and am running TS3 in windowed mode. It is also SLOW to respond to CAS turn arrows, and all too quick to respond to mouseover movement directives.

In windowed mode (800x...), when you create your Sims (plural) in CAS and get asked to drag and drop them to determine their relationship, the window, which is not drag and droppable, is directly on top of your Sims. However, random flailing about with your mouse will pop the Sims into the relationship "family tree" portrait boxxen.

Other than the novelty factor of a new game on hand, it isn't impressing me yet, save the aforementioned colour wheel idea.

I was relieved to see that there was no counterpart to "dislikes children"...if there was a "broody" or "clown car" trait, imagine how much worse the rampant ensproggening going on would be! Egads.

If cntl+shift+C still opens the cheatiness, do we have confirmation on what works yet? I see "help", but I could have sworn I heard someone claim "motherlode" and "testing cheats enabled" still work. O RLY? Do share, plz.

Of course, there are also at least two dozen MATYzens who are using RELOADED right now, successfully.

Anyone with a working game who did NOT use RELOADED? Raise your hand.

Yes.

When using the installer-spawned game exe, it wants to phone home. Denying it access to the Net makes it have a tanty and stop loading the game. This happens even when you say DNW to the EA Download Manager during install. Selecting either normal or custom install makes no appreciable difference.
When using TSE.exe from the crack folder, it doesn't phone home, but neither will it stay in the Processes list in taskmgr; IOW, it fails to load. Tried this both before and after uninstall/reinstall of installer-spawned exe.

It does seem to be very touchy. It took four tries with WinRAR to get the iso usable by Daemon. What changed? Not a damn thing. Perhaps a file of that size is just prone to misbehavior on my machine. It also does not like being stored on one drive and extracted to another. It also requires a LOT of elbow room. Plan on double the space it claims to need, to be sure.

ETA: It also wants to phone home and sulks when told no, so more poking with sharp sticks is required.

He forgot this bit:

Pescado: "It's not the real game" is an irrelevant argument.
Pescado: The problems that exist in the game are deeply rooted design decisions that would not be overturned even within several months.
Lorelei: these [conspiracy] theorists are probably just bitter [that other] people got it before they did AND said it is 90% crappy

Pescado's response would at least have added some weight to the response, rather than just quoting me out of context responding to Inge's facetiousness in like fashion.

I can help: it is spelled "Chili."

The check is in the mail. For realz, this time.

Whoever figures out how to make a tool that identifies the CC your game actually accesses in each neighborhood will be the hero of TS2 Community.

Sometimes you want to cull CC, but have forgotten which Sim or lot is using what. If a tool could scan the whole game for "stuff that loads up in this hood" and include non-occupied lots and not-selected Sims, people will kiss their toes in gratitude.

Removing something vital just because you don't recognize its name and then having custom architectural elements or wallpaper or plants or outfits  or terrains or accessories or whatever flashing blue / reverting to Maxis fug or the game refusing to cooperate at all is a PAIN IN THE REAR.

Oh wait, I will go rush to grab my #2 pencils and hurry back to contribute to one of a half dozen threads on this subject, which is all about subjective opinion and not facts anyway.

I wouldn't want strangers to be all disappointed in MATY's lack of enthusiasm for their pet subject.

Also, what do you think about all the pee, Apartment Life's Witches, and Bella Goth's whereabouts? Please fill out this questionnaire in triplicate and write neatly.

What do you get for paying at P-bucket that you don't get free?

FWIW, I especially liked the Beeton reference.

I don't give a crap about LyricLee, beyond being well aware of her nuttiness. Also, the Army of Twelves prodded into attacking Delphy and trying to recruit Pescado (all because LL got caught being an asshat, repeatedly, was removed from her position of pseudopower, and was out for revenge for her hurt butt) was lulz. I think I still have the logs. Medico FTL.

I have no animosity towards LL. I think she's a big LOLcow, that's all.

As for Stupid being inconsistent about accepting the same info from different sources, I believe I have hurt wes_h's little feelings in the past, or something. I probably used logic and/or facts to poke a pin in one of his rants, but I don't remember. He apparently does.

You'll notice that I shrugged and stopped arguing with that particular  Stupid. Arguing with Stupids wastes my time, and Stupids refuse to get a clue.

You could find a series of logs, emails and screenshots of a TSR apologist admitting they raided the booty while whining about it and that they hacked some websites, and a Stupid would waste your time claiming you made it all up in Photoshop.

At some point, you shrug, go do something else that doesn't risk you getting any Stupid Cooties on you, and let Stupids marinate in their own puddles of Stupid.

Bingo.

And wes_h, the logs are actually available (or were) if you know where to look on PMBD.

In other words, U R WRONG.

Thomas uses hacking into other people's systems quite frequently as a way to resolve his frustrations. When I say "he" below, assume it means "Thomas or an approved 'agent of TSR'".

1. He has ATTEMPTED to hack MATY .
2. He hacked into Coconut's Wordpress blog.
3. He hacked into LJ's simsecret (and possibly other anti-TSR blogs).
4. He has hacked into MTS2.
5. He has revealed the Power Words (real names), home addresses, paypal (etc.) info of his SUBSCRIBERS.
6. He has blocked legitimate paying subscribers from using TSR, even though they have had nothing to do with the paysite / freesite controversy.
7. He has ATTEMPTED to hack PMBD. Also, TSR stooges like Atwa have helped themselves to the booty, including TSR items, while yelling about the booty. (See also Lyric Lee's hypocrisy of raiding the booty while yelling about the booty.)
8. Attempts to discuss TSR's illegal or shitty activities on the official BBS get deleted, and may get you banned if you persist (at the BBS, interestingly enough).
9. TSR openly discusses hacking as a weapon against people / sites who disagree with their shitty policies.

Is that about right? Did I leave any shitty behavior out?

My Sony VAIO laptop with an NVidia card runs Sims 2. I do have a cooling pad under it, but that is a fairly recent purchase. Prior to that, I rigged up a way to prop it up on a laptray that has a lip on it so air circulated under it at all times.

Brand new, with all the stuff it has, it would have cost $3500 US. I got it for around a grand through UBid, and insisted on XP. Other than some drama when Geek Squad farked up my installed programs and some minor glitches that had nothing to do with games, it has been serviceable and has a huge screen, which I need for artz, and lots of storage, which I need for packrattiness and large artz & audio and video programs, and is maxxed out on RAMz.

The only slot to stick things in that it does not come with is the Olde Skool floppy drive. If I really need one, I still have the craptop running 98.

Yes, it is a SONY, and I got it before the SecuROM fiasco. Interestingly enough, SecuROM farked up the SONY CD/DVD functionality. That is boneheadedness beyond adequate description, really.

Also, UBid, w00t and NewEgg(?) all offer substantially lower prices on things than do bigbox chainstores and compy stores.

They may be explained on MATY Wikka.

WTF.

Oh hell no.

 

Interesting. I haven't even heard even a hint that this is something being considered, however.

And we are talking about EA, here. That would take mostly-unfukt coding skills.

And yes, I would be annoyed, too, if a CAS spouse wandered off and got autonomously hitched before being used in the storytelling manner intended.

I'm getting conflicting information about whether we would be able to mess with other, NPC, household arrangements, though.  If you are restricted to piloting one family and can't have more than one household to manage, how would we get inside these households to remove the sprog pens? And if they are autonomous, as has been implied, no doubt they will just buy babby cots if they reproduce.

So, again, I see the town outside your bubble of god power running amok with Townies being fertile and stupid; yards littered with trash and crawling with vermin, gardens dying from neglect, stinking puddles of unnaturally blue pee everywhere, tombstones in the middle of the road, flaming houses, and so on. You & I know it is unlikely they will improve the AI enough for Townies to make sensible life choices. These are hapless, helpless, incredibly dim pixel creatures that, up to this point, lacked the ability to pull themselves out of pools, or to do minor household repair / cook a slice of cheese toast without risking death.

So the options are:

1. We have SOME control of households besides The One Household To Rule Them All, and will have to spend a lot of time mopping pee and making sure Townies don't breed like rats or kill themselves being stupid.

2. We will have NO control of households other than The One Household To Rule Them All, and the Townies who are supposedly going to carry on with their own lives simultaneously with the denizens in The One Household To Rule Them All are going to render the town a stinking slagpit of corpses, burnination, disease, floods of urine and squalling, feral, orphan babbies on the brink of death.

3. Modification of #1: "living lives simultaneously" with the denizens of The One Household To Rule Them All means that Townies don't do much at all but occasionally get older and drop dead, and exist only to become "activated" in some way by contact with your playables, much like some default EA Sims can be wooed and added to households, or befriended, or fought with, or whatever. Surely nothing can go wrong with this plan, as more and more Townies become "activated" and wander off to wreak havok outside of your sphere of control.

4. Option I haven't considered yet, which is, one hopes, better than the prior 3.

I confess that I have been DNW about S3 to the point where I may have missed some details that would clarify this for me and soothe my concerns. I have read reviews here and there, and this thread, but perhaps I missed some information that would clear this up.

I just have visions of Maxis-fugly idiot Townies breeding like cockroaches and filling up the game with MBs of useless, hideous-looking, unplayable NPCs.

DO NOT WANT.

As I've said before, the first thing I did before even getting The Sims 2 was find and download default replacements and Peshacks. My game had fug and bork and lame for about five minutes, then I shut it down and installed my preciouses, and the fug and bork and lame was (mostly) gone.

I'm a visual person who likes to tweak every setting I can. Making it difficult for me to do so, given that I find the EA aesthetic and 12ish sense of humor obnoxious for the most part, is FAIL. One character pissing herself constantly is rather amusing, and yet in Sims 2, you can leave her "homebase" alone and go play another household when the joke wanes for you. An entire town full of constantly pissing, house-burning, kermit-flailing, poorly-dressed deformed cretins who think tickling and joy buzzering strangers is LULZ is a big DNW. A little juvenelia goes a long way. After you see it 4,000 times, screw it. DNW.

@ Honorable Aide: Yep, that's it! But I found mine for five cents in a thrift.

@ Dark Trepie: LOL, INVISIBLE BIKE!

LOL!

That's the name of the Best Toy Ever Discovered By Ferretkind.

A portrait:


A short sample of the sound that drives them wild with glee:
http://www.4shared.com/file/85142142/cf52c596/Jeffrey_Toy.html

You're the first person I've met who might have figured out the reference from whence Jeffrey the Toy's moniker came.