Sims 3 Wanders Around The World Getting Lost (a review)

Amazon is fast. My pre-ordered copy of the new Sims expansion arrived on release day.

I ordered it before I saw in the news that EA fired a whole bunch of people before the holidays. I’m not sure if I would have boycotted it had I known, but I will allow that this downsizing makes me angry, especially in connection with . . . all the stuff I’ve been noting for all the years, about how game companies are frequently clueless with regard to what the customers want, and now there will be a bunch of hungry children on Christmas due to EA’s business failings in this regard.

However, if the downsized employees contain the team responsible for Sims 3, and specifically this new expansion . . . maybe EA figured this out on its own and will now resume making quality products. One can hope, anyway.

So I installed the expansion (which annoyed me by patching the main game and then patching the expansion – on release day!) and created a brand new sim, Ms. Mary Sue Manticore. True to the Mary Sue spirit, she’s wearing a black hoodie over a red shirt with jeans and converses, much like the ones you’d find piled up on my bedroom floor, and she has red hair and green eyes. Unlike me, she is a productive writer, having started out with a memoir entitled “My Childhood Sucked” before working her way to a successful sci fi series about pirates with lasers. She is also gainfully employed as a journalist (lol), which doesn’t quite pay enough for extended vacations in the expansion’s three official countries: China, Egypt and France (China costs the least, France the most). So I used the cash cheat (ctrl+C, kaching, enter).

Note that the expansion comes with a few new hairstyles and outfits, along with new personality traits. Oh, I’m sorry, did you want to make your main Mary Sue a world traveler? You don’t necessarily have to start over, because now there’s an aspiration reward that lets you change your sim’s personality around and substitute, say, a love for adventure and photography for previous traits like insanity.

Many of the new hairstyles and outfits seem to focus on Indiana Jones, including many Indiana Jones outfits for women sims who enjoy cross-dressing. I am positive the middle-aged executard who greenlighted this project has no clue whatsoever that this forty-year-old movie franchise doesn’t exactly resonate with today’s youth, and I’d know that even if I hadn’t been yelled at by a Noo Yawk editor for name checking Indy back in the ‘90s when writing for a demographic in its 20s.

It’s telling, though. Apparently, EA thinks now video games should be about excitement, and adventure, not about kicking back building sim houses and arranging furniture. And once your sim saves up the 1300 minimum in travel expenses (not including souvenir t-shirts and restaurants), you can click on the computer and export your sim to a land of . . . well . . .

First you get a long loading screen while a cheery melody featuring some of the less frequently used MIDI voices plays. I can just hear the composers chortling with glee over finally being able to use “shamisen” and “tabla,” and I predict that I’ll have the “mute music” box checked again before too long.

Mary Sue made it into only two foreign countries last night. France costs too much, and it was getting late. A visit overseas takes place in the same time warp that may be familiar to vacationers from previous sims games – if you go on vacation at 7:00 p.m. Friday, you can spend several days at your destination before returning home at 7:01 p.m. Friday.

Once you get past the loading screen, you get a panoramic view of yet another sim landscape, with trees and a river. In Egypt they were palm trees, in China bamboo and maple. Buildings abound, created with several new build-mode elements – pagoda roofs, tiled fountains. This part at least is intriguing. Rather than having to choose a hotel, as in the past expansion, Mary Sue immediately arrived at a “base camp.” This is your only option until you get rich enough to buy a vacation home.

A word about visas. For your first trip, you only get a three day visa. As you do more things in the country, you earn points to unlock more visa days. This means it will take your sim multiple visits to get to the coveted “I saw all the content!” stage. To each country. And while you are there, you have to . . . well, let me ease into this.

At the Egyptian base camp I briefly wondered why I was staying in a tent, when I know for a fact that Cairo has hotels, some of which even have room service and wi-fi. I’m presuming I’m in Cairo due to the proximity of things meant to represent the sphinx and the great pyramid. And yet, I’m staying at what appears to be an architectural site outside town. In China I at least got what looked sort of like a youth hostel.

While Mary Sue was wandering around looking at the tents, I noticed a shiny, sparkling bulletin board. I thought “hey, that looks like something from WoW!” because the sparkle effects were identical to the ones that appear on WoW quest items. This was a recent addition to simplify things for people who had trouble seeing items they were supposed to click and weren’t as smart as my colorblind friend who would just sweep the area with the mouse and look for cursor changes.

I moused over the sparkly bulletin board. A little WoW-style gear appeared. I clicked the gear and the bulletin board gave me a quest.

After a little interface bar appeared to tell me that my job was now to go talk to some dude, I clicked it, and this sent Mary Sue bicycling off to the dude in question. He sent her to get some relic from a tomb, which I’ll describe in a bit, and after that, he sent her to collect four gemstones. Then I had to chat up the townspeople about some nefarious corporation, but I got deported in the middle of that.

That’s right, Sims 3 now has WoW quests. However. Since Sims doesn’t really have fighting, you just go over where the gemstones are lying on the ground (helpfully indicated by large pointing arrows on the map) and grab them, which is even more boring than fighting and looting mobs. More about this in a bit too.

First I want to talk about this tomb. There are several tombs, in fact, and if you want those visa points, you need to visit them, and steal, uh, liberate, uh, discover and remove artifacts inside. The tombs are a series of rooms with locked doors, and to open them you have to shove stone pillars onto helpfully lit-up squares of floor tile, Lara Croft-style. Except this is the freaking Sims, not Tomb Raider, so you have to position yourself just right next to the stone block, and mouse around until you get a direction arrow, and then choose “push” or “push far.” And you need to do most of this “action” part of the game fast, before your sim’s bars go red and it collapses from exhaustion. You can buy tents (along with survival rations and “shower in a can”) to take into the tombs so you can camp there, assuming you find a room large enough to pitch your tent.

The person who came up with this idea is a flaming moron.

I dunno, your mileage may vary. You might be one of those Sims players who sits around thinking “you know, now that I’ve got this mansard roof scaled just right with the balconies, I wish I could just run into the tomb next door and steal a few gigantic rubies sitting around on endtables for that purpose.” You might even be the kind of freaking dense Sims player that doesn’t understand that you could just hit the old alt-F4 and actually play Tomb Raider, WoW, or something else that is pretty much focused toward helping you have a satisfactory questing and loot-acquiring experience, complete with dedicated game engine and user interface.

And maybe you have also suffered severe brain trauma and think it’s still 1978 and Raiders of the Lost Ark would be a fabulous subject for a videogame.

If you’re one of these people, I sincerely hope that Obama’s health insurance program will eventually get you the treatment you need. If you’re not, there’s a good chance you’ll agree with my assessment that yes, the suit who greenlighted this piece of crap is, indeed, a flaming moron. Possibly even worse. Possibly he’s also the reason all those hardworking people lost their jobs. It seems like a pretty safe bet that anybody working under this idiot’s direction will eventually lose their job, while he (sorry to be sexist, it’s just my direct experience indicates most people who get huge amounts of funding to do asinine things are male) sails away on his golden parachute to wreck someone else’s brand name and/or livelihood.

There are a few things about the expansion that I do like. For one thing, there are some decent meshes for Asian and Middle Eastern clothes, and the NPCs have ethnically appropriate names, and their physical features look Egyptian and Chinese. Not to mention the building elements, which I haven’t explored yet.

I’m really going to have to put on the political correctness hat and say a few words, though.

I remember thinking when I installed the very first Sims game, “wow, look at all the languages!” I had visions of gamers in Manila and Sao Paulo and Osaka and Amsterdam and Cleveland all making their own sim neighborhoods and sending each other custom content. Later on, when there was custom content, I spent much time happily investigating sites from various countries, learning useful phrases like “click here to download.” Later sim innovations like the face generator and the introduction of different foods like sushi buttressed this impression.

In this expansion, apparently based on a movie from the ‘70s which was itself an homage to movies of the ‘40s, all that globalistic foundation is reduced to “foreign countries are where normal suburban folks go to pillage tombs.” These foreign countries have harsh visa restrictions but apparently will let you leave the country with all the antique artifacts you can stuff into your luggage.

At least in the vacation expansions for Sims 1 and 2 you could do touristy things like go swimming and learn to dance the hula. The natives might be a confusing array of black people with platinum blonde hair, Asian surnames and Hispanic first names, but at least you didn’t have to steal things from them. And you had the leisure to interact with them instead of rushing around collecting gemstones for the quest guy.

So on the one hand, now you can make even more diverse sims, and feed them shawarma and falafel, egg rolls and frog legs, dress them in hijabs or . . . those great big coolie hats, you know the kind I’m talking about, straw, pointy, about three feet diameter. The perfect attire for sneaking around the Forbidden City swiping knickknacks. You can even get an achievement for bringing home sufficiently large piles of loot, and you don’t even have to give it to a museum or anything, you can just arrange it on your coffee table.

And you still can’t reasonably play more than one household, especially if you get involved in the ridiculous visa points minigame. So you don’t really get to use all those great local costumes unless your main quest toon wants to play dress up. Forget having a family from Cairo down the block with a tiled fountain in their front lawn, and a Chinese family . . . wearing coolie hats working on their backyard rice paddy, I guess.

I haven’t read many of the other reviews of Sims 3, so I’m not sure if it has been well received or if most other gamers are like me and found it a bit lacking. I regularly get comments here on my past sim entries, from players frantic because the game mechanics ate their painstakingly designed characters. They aren’t like other game-frustration-type-comments, “argh that puzzle took me three days to solve, this game is complicated!” or “it hangs on loading and randomly crashes.” The people having Sims 3 issues have invested time – and emotional energy -- in making their characters, and with that in mind, the game’s malfunctions have a sadistic edge. If Lara Croft crashes you can get her back, no big deal, but when the computer arbitrarily devours a few hours worth of idle creativity, people get upset.

We’re talking about a custom-designed avatar that you made, and spent three or four hours exploring her moods and desires and taste in interior décor, her love life and circle of friends. People invest emotions in their creations. Even hard-hearted power gamers like me who create sims in bulk lots to populate . . . I dunno, the barren neighborhood of vacant lots I painstakingly emptied out before getting bored and wandering back to WoW, because there was no way I could see to get that “wow, I filled up this whole sheet of paper with doodles while I was on the phone and it looks kinda cool” sense in a game that constantly discourages you from actually playing it.

Anyway, it looks as though EA might have responded to complaints about Sims 3’s flaws by hiring some flaming moron who knows nothing about video games to try and fix it by making it more like Tomb Raider and WoW. Thus making things worse.

If they wanted to combine Sims with some other lucrative brand name, they could have done so much better. For example, EA makes some excellent sports games. How about having your sim show up at the stadium and get ported into a quick round of soccer or basketball? You’re probably aware I’m not a huge Grand Theft Auto fan, but I wouldn’t mind some more urban building elements. And making sims do WoW quests is just silly, but I’ll bet players would adore a time travel expansion that lets them make medieval villages and hobbit shires and elf treehouses and similar. But Tomb Raider? Come on.

I recommend this expansion if you have money to burn and want to see just how bad things are, or if you want some new trees and building elements so you can build things, later, maybe, assuming they make this piece o’crap (which formerly was one of the greatest titles in computer game history, if not the greatest) playable.