Rush Boom Turtle: Tom Chick's Sims 3 RTS Challenge
Are you hardcore enough to play The Sims 3 as a real-time strategy game?
6/9/2009 3:38 PM | 14 Comments | Page 1 of 2
This year's E3 was a terrible place for a real-time strategy gamer. Partly because there were so few RTSes on display.
Supreme Commander 2 was there as a mock-up of how the game might play one day. It was a canned "now these guys attack these guys" demo, so it's really too early to draw any conclusions. The good news is that Gas Powered Games has learned a lot from the original
Supreme Commander, as well as the terrible Xbox 360 version, as well as
Demigod. One of the best things you can say about
Supreme Commander 2 is that it's being created by a company wiser than the one that made the original
Supreme Commander.
Supreme Commander 2
Then there was
R.U.S.E., which looks so bog-standard that Ubisoft resorted to demoing it on a super-expensive magic touch table, which is sort of the asexual tech-geek equivalent of a booth babe. (Although those were there, too.)
Overlord II looks exciting in a more action-gaming way than strategy-gaming way. No sign of anything new on the Pikmin front yet. And it was an E3 without any
StarCraft II.
East India Company is probably the next best hope for RTSes. It looks like a nice compromise between Merchant Prince and
Empire: Total War. It's from a first-time developer, which is always a little scary -- but it did make for a great demo, and I hope it speaks to my strategy-gamer geek cred when I say it was one of my favorite demos at E3.
However, the real reason this year's E3 was a terrible place for real-time strategy gamers is because it meant we couldn't be home playing the latest real-time strategy game, which was released just as E3 got underway. I'm talking, of course, about
The Sims 3.
R.U.S.E.
Real-time strategy?, you ask. Absolutely, I reply. The core gameplay mechanic of an RTS is converting resources. In most real-time strategy games, this is a matter of converting gold, timber, tiberium or vespene gas into military forces, which you then use to mess up the other guy's conversion process. The difference in
The Sims 3 is that you're converting time into happiness. Also, you're not necessarily messing up anyone else's conversion process, since
The Sims 3 is a single-player sandbox.
If you're not sold, I could drone on at length about it. But instead, I'm just going to throw down a gauntlet for you and anyone else to take up. How well can you manage the conversion process in
The Sims 3? How much Happiness can you wring from a Sim's life given the limited lifespan? Are you enough of an RTS gamer to stop building bases and training units and to instead take the Tom Chick
Sims 3 RTS Challenge? (If it makes a difference, there will be prizes! Keep reading.)
In
The Sims 3, each Sim can acquire up to five traits. Almost all of the traits are positive, giving your Sim special bonuses. There are a handful of negative traits, but there's no incentive to take them. You might end up with a negative trait as a result of an unfortunate upbringing, but you would never do this voluntarily. Why choose Cowardly when you could be Brave instead? Oh, sure, you might want to role-play a cowardly character. But now we've left the realm of strategy gaming, haven't we? Now that you're off pretending to be a character who's afraid of the dark, there's no reason for you to be reading a column about real-time strategy games, is there?
