The Sims 3
The best-selling franchise takes it to a new level with the long-awaited third edition!
One of the most anticipated games of 2009 is The Sims 3 from Electronic Arts. Originally scheduled for release in February the release date was delayed until early June which only increased the level of anticipation. Mac users were unexpectedly included in this anticipation when it was revealed that the game would be a simultaneous release, for both Macs and PCs, and on the same disc no less! Now that it has finally arrived does it live up to the hype and is it accessible for those of us with various disabilities? For the most part yes and definitely yes respectively.
After installing The Sims 3 the first thing you’re going to want to do is register with The Sims 3 community website. This is where you’re able to download tons of free user created content, paid content created by the developers, game updates, and even a free town as a reward for your purchase. You can also upload your own content and browse the forums for advice and help. The "Game Launcher" window is what you see when you first launch The Sims 3 and this is where you can easily manage all your downloaded and uploaded content. I was able to download a whole bunch of user-created content from the community website into the Game Launcher without a hitch. Once you’re ready to play you need only click the "play" button in the Game Launcher and you’re ready to go!
Perhaps the best thing about past Sims games was how there were so many different ways to play. You could build houses, create Sims, create objects, make movies, or just try to run your Sims life, among other things. So there was a little something for everybody. The Sims 3 continues this tradition with a few significant additions - traits, opportunities, and the seamless world.
You can have the game generate sims for you but the real fun is creating your own sims, including creating yourself. The tools for doing this are as sophisticated as ever. You can customize everything from the eyebrows, the chin, the skin color, and now even the body proportions! So you can have plus-size sims as well as the usual lean ones. However there are still some limitations. For one you can’t adjust the height. Perhaps this is to ensure that all the customized clothing fits every sim? It’s not a deal-breaker or anything but it would be nice to be able to customize the height of your sims. I also found the selection of hairstyles to be quite limited. I couldn’t quite find one that matched my hairstyle and there was nothing close to my dad’s hairstyle. I also couldn’t find eyeglasses that matched mine or my father’s. Perhaps this problem will be solved via the community website and custom content. But for now between those things and a few others the alter egos for myself and my father aren’t entirely accurate. However in my case I tried to project what I might look like had I never been in a wheelchair which made it even more challenging. I did manage to make a spitting image of my friend Daniel though and he was certainly shocked and amazed to see it!
When you’re finished building your sim you’re then presented with a list of traits to choose from. This is something new to the franchise and really adds a lot of interesting possibilities to the game. The list is quite extensive and includes everything from friendly and hot-headed to frugal and clumsy. You have to pick five traits for each sim and chances are you going to find five that suits any real person you’re trying to re-create (if you’re trying to re-create a real person that is). With so many combinations it essentially means that no two sims will be alike. Based on what traits you choose you are then presented with a choice of five "lifetime wishes" for your sim to strive to achieve. You must pick one of them but you don’t necessarily have to try to follow that path. In my case my alter ego’s lifetime wish is to become a newspaper reporter.
I dropped my alter ego, as well as my father’s and my friend Daniel’s, into furnished homes so I could start playing in live "story mode" immediately. However you could build your own home or anybody’s home if you like. My plan was to play myself and let the artificial intelligence take care of the others. I soon discovered how entertaining and amusing this is and discovered perhaps my favorite way to play. More on this later.
As with previous games your sims still have needs to be maintained such as hygiene, hunger, and energy but thankfully there isn’t as much emphasis on that this time around. In the previous games it sometimes seemed like I spent all my time having my sim eat, sleep, and go to the bathroom, among other things. But this time around the status bars for each need don’t seem to run out as quick, plus most of the time your sims seem smart enough to take care of these things themselves without you doing anything. I was impressed with the level of artificial intelligence in this regard. As before you can purchase objects that help facilitate these needs such as a coffee maker for energy or a stereo system for your fun level. On a related note, on the community website somebody posted a Terminal hack that allows you to listen to your own iTunes music through any audio device your sim owns in-game. That’s pretty darn cool! It’s hilarious watching my alter ego dance to Billy Ocean’s "Caribbean Queen"!
But things get really interesting when your sim goes outside - yes I said outside. In previous games your sims were essentially limited to the lot they lived on. But now that limit is gone and your sims can literally go just about anywhere in the entire town, with no loading screens to get in the way either! It’s completely seamless. Want to go down to the park to have a picnic or the beach to relax and read a book? Now you can. On foot, on a bike, or even in a car! You could even go to many of the public buildings such as the hospital, the bookstore, and the grocery store. However unfortunately while your sim can enter these buildings and do things inside of them, like work or shop, you can’t really see inside these buildings. If you zoom the camera in close enough you can kind of see the furnishings and so forth through the transparent walls but that’s about it. So these buildings are commonly referred to as "rabbit holes". I’m not sure why this is so, and it was slightly disappointing to me, but it’s really not that big a deal as you can still "interact" with these buildings. For example, when you go into the bookstore a "buy and sell" screen pops up with a selection of books available for purchase. This is reminiscent of going to a shop in a role-playing game. If your sim has a job in a particular building a menu will pop up when your sim enters giving you choices on how you want your sim to conduct himself or herself while at work. So even though you can’t really see inside these "rabbit holes" they all serve various purposes thus giving your sims reasons to go to them.
Throughout your travels you encounter and observe other sims going about their business. This is where I stumbled on what is perhaps my favorite way to play. I actually ran into my father and my friend Daniel at various times going about their own business. I then started following them around with the camera controls just to see what they were doing and where they were going. I discovered my father already had a job at the newspaper which you may recall is the lifetime wish of my sim! My sim is currently working as a lowly bed pan cleaner at the local hospital. I also have witnessed a younger woman exiting my father’s house on two different occasions. I can’t help but wonder what he’s up to in there! I have yet to create my mother and put her into the game but I guess I better hurry before my father gets too comfortable! As for my friend Daniel my sim went over to meet him at his house and discovered that he has a car despite the fact that he is unemployed. I need to find out how he got a car without a job because I’m barely making ends meet! He also seems to be quite the host as I frequently see multiple visitors going to his house. He’s kind of like that for real which makes this almost too realistic. But that’s a good thing and one of the reasons I really like The Sims 3. So based on this experiment with my father and my friend Daniel my top priority is to create alter egos of just about everybody I know, including perhaps some celebrities and athletes that I don’t know personally, and placing them in my fictional town. Then I can sit back and watch and see how they interact with my sim and the town in general. This may seem a little strange but it just seems more interesting to me when the other sims are people I’m familiar with as opposed to pre-generated sims with generic names. As I alluded to above the great thing about this game is there’s just so many ways to enjoy it. It looks like this is my favorite way to do so.
Now I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention opportunities, wishes, and lifetime happiness points. In story mode your sim is occasionally presented with opportunities. Think of an opportunity like a quest your character might get in a role-playing game. If you’re able to successfully complete an opportunity your sim will get a reward, like money or an object for example. One example was my boss at work encouraging me to read a specific book. So as soon as my sim had some time I had him go down to the bookstore, purchase that book, then read from it whenever there was some free time. A tab at the bottom of the screen keeps you updated with the status of each opportunity and when you complete them. Upon completing this opportunity it put me in good favor with my boss. Another opportunity had my sim entering a grilling contest at the park on a Sunday afternoon. My Sim had to grill five hot dogs and upon doing so I was notified that I won the grilling contest and received a nice hunk of cash! I really like this addition to the game because it gives it more of a role-playing feel and it gives you more ways to earn cash. Wishes are similar to opportunities but are more personal and give you hints per se as to what your sim might desire. Occasionally your sim will have a wish which will show up at the bottom of the screen. For example, your sim might wish that he or she had a computer. So if you find a way to get him or her one then they’ll be happier and earn lifetime happiness points. You can choose to ignore these wishes but then you won’t earn the lifetime happiness points associated with them. When you accumulate enough lifetime happiness points you can use them to purchase special rewards like additional traits and cool objects. There’s just so much to do here!
When I first started up the game it automatically set all the graphical effects settings based on the hardware it detected that I was using. Being that I’m on a first generation iMac with a 128 MB video card I barely meet the system requirements therefore most of the settings were set to medium with a few being just below that. That said the game still looks pretty good to me. There’s been some complaints about there being no support for anti-aliasing and shadows in the Mac version but that doesn’t really make that much of a difference to me since I barely meet the system requirements as it is. However Electronic Arts is aware of the issue and a patch to correct this problem is forthcoming. Sound effects are plentiful. Everything from running water to doors closing and food in a frying pan to the sound of cars speeding by. It’s all there. The 3-D graphics and vast amount of sound effects make The Sims 3 an immersive experience.
There are some issues however. While the game is certainly playable for me things can get somewhat jerky when there is a lot going on simultaneously on the screen. The further you zoom the camera out the slower things can sometimes get as well because there’s more in view that the game has to keep track of. I like to keep pretty zoomed in most of the time anyways so this isn’t really an issue for me. Naturally with more RAM (I have 2 MB) and a better video card you won’t have to worry about these things as much. From a technical standpoint the biggest issue I have with the game is the occasional occurrence of some really nasty lockups. It doesn’t seem to matter what I’m doing but all of a sudden the screen gets all garbled to where you can’t make anything out anymore. The worst part is there’s no way out of this except for shutting my Mac down completely and restarting. Force quit doesn’t work. I can actually physically do a force quit with the combination of a mouth stick and the knuckles on my right hand but I can’t reach the shutdown button on the back of my iMac. I’ve had four of these lockups in about 20 hours of gameplay and two of them happened when I was alone. On those two occasions there was nothing I could do but go away from my computer and do something else. Quite frustrating. The best possible advice I could give to avoid this is to try not to have too many other applications running while playing and turn off Time Machine, if you use it, while playing. Lots of other Mac users have reported a problem with The Sims 3 and Time Machine and I can confirm that at least two of my lockups occurred while Time Machine was running. I’m not certain this will completely solve the problem but until they come out with a patch to fix this issue it looks like it will help.
I’m happy to say The Sims 3 is quite friendly from an interface standpoint. If you use a one-button mouse, like a Headmaster Plus for example, you can have complete control of the game with a little help from some third-party applications. On the interface panel at the bottom of the screen there are buttons for doing things such as rotating the camera, zooming in and out, taking a screenshot, and recording a movie. These can all be used by left-clicking on them. Commands like these are usually reserved for keyboard combinations so this is quite refreshing. There are also keyboard equivalents for those commands as well. I wish every game gave us such options. In the play area of the screen you can do a right-click and drag to move the view around. But one button mice users fret not as you can do the same thing by turning on something called "edge scrolling" in the options menu. This moves the view around by simply holding the cursor near the edge of the screen in the direction you want to move the view. There are also some situations where you do need to perform a right-click while playing. Dismissing a wish, for example, is done this way. If you’re using a one-button mouse you could get the handy little control panel "One Finger Snap" I’ve mentioned in other reviews to take care of the right-clicking problem. This nifty little control panel has solved this problem for me a number of times with different games. Or, if you’re a KeyStrokes user, you could simply put the game into windowed mode by pressing the key combination "Command-Return". KeyStrokes works perfectly with The Sims 3 in windowed mode and resolves any remaining interface issues there might be as you would then have full access to a keyboard while playing. SwitchXS and the KeyStrokes dwell-clicking panel should work well in this regard as well. The game does run a little bit slower in windowed mode however, just as some other games tend to do. But it’s definitely playable, even for somebody who barely meets the system requirements such as myself. If you want to force the game to launch in windowed mode all the time follow these steps:
a) Open up the "config" file at:
/Users/
b) Locate the line: [macdrv]
c) Make that section look something like this (pick the resolution you want, in this example I use 1280x800):
d) Save & Quit the file
e) Launch The Sims 3 and it will be in a window, 1280x800 resolution
The Sims 3 uses Transgaming’s Cider technology to make the game playable on Macs. The windowed mode hack I described in my review of Spore, also a Cider port, is almost exactly the same but there is a difference. The Spore hack required the line "[sdldrv]" to be changed while with The Sims 3 it’s the "[macdrv]" line. My apologies if there was any confusion before.
For the adventurous out there you could try using MacSpeech Dictate or Voice Commander to take care of any remaining interface issues. ATMac had this great article about adding an AppleScript that enables various mouse clicking commands in MacSpeech Dictate. I’ve tried it and it works really well however being that I can barely run The Sims 3 as it is I wouldn’t dare try to run MacSpeech Dictate simultaneously. Other resource-hogging games have crashed when I tried to do just that. So until I get a new Mac or more RAM I’ll go with Voice Commander in such situations where voice commands are my only options. Voice Commander is still evolving and doesn’t always work but if you learn the ins and outs of it you’ll find it can be a very valuable piece of software. Check out David O’Connor’s great two-part article (part one and part two) on this great little application.
Despite some of the flaws I mentioned I’d have to consider The Sims 3 a must-buy game. In all my ramblings I hardly even mentioned building mode, buy mode, making movies, and skills. The amount of things you can do with this game is just incredible. It has the type of long-lasting appeal that could keep you playing for years. And provided you have the hardware to run it fortunately it doesn’t appear to be one of those games that is out of reach, from an interface standpoint, for disabled gamers. Now what is my sim and his neighbors up to now...
The Sims 3 is available for the PC and Macintosh.
Macintosh digital download available at GameTree Online.
PC digital download available at Direct2Drive.
The Sims 3 Minimum Hardware Requirements:
FOR WINDOWS XP
- 2.0 GHz P4 processor or equivalent
- 1 GB RAM
- 128 MB Video Card with support for Pixel Shader 2.0
- The latest version of DirectX 9.0c
- Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 2
- At least 6.1 GB of hard drive space with at least 1 GB of additional space for custom content and saved games
FOR WINDOWS VISTA
- 2.4 GHz P4 processor or equivalent
- 1.5 GB RAM
- 128 MB Video Card with support for Pixel Shader 2.0
- Microsoft Windows Vista Service Pack 1
- At least 6.1 GB of hard drive space with at least 1 GB of additional space for custom content and saved games
For computers using built-in graphics chipsets under Windows, the game requires at least:
- Intel Integrated Chipset, GMA 3-Series or above
- 2.6 GHz Pentium D CPU, or 1.8 GHz Core 2 Duo, or equivalent
- 0.5 GB additional RAM
FOR MAC OS X
- Mac OS X 10.5.7 Leopard or higher
- Intel Core Duo Processor
- 2 GB RAM
- ATI X1600 or Nvidia 7300 GT with 128 MB of Video RAM, or Intel Integrated GMA X3100.
- At least 6.1 GB of hard drive space with at least 1 GB of additional space for custom content and saved games
This game will not run on PowerPC (G3/G4/G5) based Mac systems, or the GMA 950 class of integrated video cards.
For more detailed information about supported video cards click here.
Paul Natsch
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