Oh All Right, I'll Give It Another Chance

As it so happens . . .

My WoW server has been crashing over the past couple of days. So I went back and gave Sims World Adventures a little more attention.

Like any video game, it’s a collaboration between the art people and the story people and the code people and the brain dead suits. And while a lot of the concept is still kinda dumb IMO, the art people did an awesome job, and there really is a different feel to each of the countries, and I applaud the way the locals look and dress local without a lot of stereotyping (nobody is actually wearing the coolie hats that I’ve seen yet).

The quests and dungeons aren’t too bad once you get beyond the "We Are The World" meets "Temple of Doom," kicks it in the knee and takes its lunch money atmosphere and sit down for a refreshing breakfast of ice cream with a roomful of other adventurers dressed like Indy, also enjoying a breakfast of ice cream. It makes me want to create a country of Elvises who eat nothing but pancakes, or gorilla suit people who live on key line pie.

Apparently a big architectural feature with this expansion is the ability to do multilayered dungeons, which is actually pretty awesome. The quests are on more or less a straight chain – start with China, off to Egypt and then France for the expert level. Once your sim gets a visa level of 3 (requiring lots of quests) you can buy a vacation home to display all the stuff you’ve been looting.

I’m not sure how it would work with multiple sims – if they can stay as long as the longest visaholder in the family or what. The quests are definitely designed for one sim at a time.

And I had a great moment when I finally made my way down the hall past a bunch of traps and opened a door to find: a bathroom, with toilet and sink and tub. Straight out of the sims. And convenient, because my sim needed a bio break right around then.

I still have a bit of that “my favorite sandbox has been invaded by a psycho bully boy who demands we all play Indiana Jones because that’s what he wants to play” outrage but there are bright spots. Breaking boards with sim fu is fun. The koi carp ponds are amazing. There are a few build mode things, not as many as I’d hoped, and some scary new fashions. Owning houses in multiple countries gives me four (4) active lots to vandalize and decorate.

Oh yeah. There’s wine. I mean “nectar.” You can store it in your dungeon on wineracks, and although I haven’t got involved in it yet, apparently you can now run a whole sub game as a vineyard owner. This sounds intriguing.