The Sims 3 (PC)
Hey look, more Sims!
6/3/2009 3:02 PM | 10 Comments | Page 1 of 3
What's Hot: New personality traits like unlucky and clumsy mean you can finally create that Gilligan character you always wanted.
What's Not: EA is holding back some of the best stuff for download.
Ted had a great idea:
Tiny animals.
We'd been friends long enough for me to appreciate the genius of the notion, and to realize that it would never happen. He's a book agent, after all. Not a genetic scientist.
Still, Ted figured that if you could bioengineer exotic animals -- elephants, giraffes, water buffalo -- to about the size of a small house pet, you'd have a viable business. I mean, how precious would it be to own a Chihuahua-sized rhino? Teeny tiny things are just so cute!
I really don't know if you can do this in the game, but it looks like fun.
Ted dreamed it up, but Will Wright built it -- teeny, tiny, cute little human beings that you could own and nurture. Some people have kids as the ultimate social experiment, and some try out their most dangerous experiments in life manipulation by playing The Sims.
Ten years later
The Sims 3 arrives. Like a good Catholic family,
The Sims 3 is tied to a rhetoric of progress. With each new arrival, hope soars that, where its older siblings were retarded or unsophisticated, this little guy will be the Ivy League genius, the golden child, the progeny that will define the entire Sims family. In a word,
The Sims 3 comes with all the expectation that it will just be
better than all the other Sims games that have come before.
And as bright and smart and perky and filled with potential like a new puppy as the new version is, the apple never falls far from the tree. The Sims is the Sims and
The Sims 3 is, for better or worse, more of the same.
Here I'd like to take a short break from your normally scheduled game review to point out something seemingly trivial, but central: the release date.
Today, the long-planned and carefully orchestrated
Sims 3 release date, also happens to be the day before E3 proper, or the second day of E3 in practice -- or, in the parlance of marketing, a period of time banned for any marketing communication not directly related to the biggest event on the videogame calendar. Why release one of the biggest games of the year -- shoot, the decade -- during E3?
Yes Glen, I will search for unicorns in space
Simple.
You don't care.
And for good reason.
E3 may augur the fortunes of new games and steadfast game franchises from Far Cry to Mario. But for the people who buy The Sims, E3 is just a location on a
Battleship game board. Caring about the launch of a game like
The Sims 3 during the hubbub of a videogame trade show is like worrying about slotting Oprah opposite "Jackass" on the television schedule. Let's just say that the audience is a little different.
That's right. The Sims is the Oprah programming in the world of "Jackass" gamers.
The only reason that "gamers" care about the Sims franchise is because they have forgotten that it was never cool to play The Sims. To wit:
Flash back to E3 -- party like it's -- 1999. That was the year that Sid Meier launched the sublime
Alpha Centauri,
Final Fantasy VII defined the fantasy genre on the console,
Planescape: Torment offered a glimpse of the rich narrative possible in the medium, and
Seaman proposed that the Dreamcast was actually a platform for art. In the wake of this golden outpouring of interactive creativity, that straggly dude that made
SimCity and
SimAnt was hoarsely demoing a game on the show floor about taking out the trash and remembering to shower. He had exactly one thing in his favor at that E3, and that was that SimCity had made a lot of money. But in those days, you were only as good as your last hit, and Will Wright was screaming into the E3 maelstrom that it was worth straining to hear all about the innate fun in making sandwiches and falling in love.
