My Review of Sims 3 Ambitions

Hi neglected blog,

My dog, er, bunny ate my blog posts, and then I left them in the sun and they melted, and, um, hackers deleted them. That too.

WoW has been frustrating. My guildleader vanished on April Fools Day and hasn’t logged in since, and another officer stepped up to the leadership role. And we still haven’t killed the Lich King on 25s, although we finally got Sindragosa the other night. And I’m still inclined toward some kind of a change to some other guild/server/game, but since I’m not sure what I want, I’ll keep doing what I’m doing until I figure it out. Meanwhile, I’ve got several toons with nice, high gearscores, and I’m starting to favor the mage.

Meanwhile, a new Sims 3 expansion came out, Ambitions. I’ve been steadily playing it. I still have a few core issues with Sims 3; the unwieldiness of changing characters, and the way they tend to wander off on their own after you do change characters, so that your astronauts end up getting jobs selling fast food and your linebackers jog themselves slender, and my empress of evil character, who lives in a copy of the house from Psycho, acquired a baby when I accidentally left aging on for two or three minutes. Way to go, EA. Maybe next you can make a word processing program that rewrites all your documents while you’re sleeping, in case anyone says anything bad about your games.

Anyway, Ambitions is part of the “let’s force players to play some other kind of game even though they specifically purchased a sandboxy, dollhouse type sim!” marketing strategy. You may recall my rants about how the previous expansion assumed we’d all rather be playing Tomb Raider, visiting exotic foreign countries to steal artifacts while staying in decrepit youth hostels (just like James Bond and Lara Croft always do, bunking down next to tourists with khaki cargo shorts and backpacks /sarcasm) until we’ve already played it through and can actually acquire additional houses/lots to remodel.

Ambitions is actually more of a step in the right direction. It allows more customizing of the towns, and gives you the sculpting skill so you can make statues of your favorite sims, and the ability to give the NPCs makeovers and tattoos. Plus there’s a consignment store so your sims can sell things to each other, and washing machines and dryers, so your sims can frantically do laundry every 20 minutes. And I believe they’ve finally locked up jobs so your politician sim doesn’t decide to become a classical musician the minute you turn your back.

In fact, this review is a little premature because I haven’t even touched a few of the functions. City planner for example, which lets you alter the town. And investigator – I just have never really cared for detectives.

I’ve got a fireman though. He even has a husband – I don’t know if this is a bug, but previously I couldn’t even get my lesbian soldiers to even go steady, which caused a bit of annoyance when I stopped playing them and discovered one-half of the couple was lusting over half the town. Seriously, every time I made a new sim, she’d be out there on the front porch trying to get to know them better – the game wasn’t recognizing the fact she was already in a relationship and was treating her like a single sim. Now, in an unheralded footnote, same gender sims can marry. They don’t change names, but their status changes to husband/husband or wife/wife, and they have a little wedding ring icon. So now I’ve got a couple of married women soldiers (take that, don’t ask don’t tell) and my hunky fireman is married to a twinkie doctor and drives a lavender fire truck.

To get the fire truck, which you can paint any color you want, you have to work your way up through the fire fighter career. Which is sort of fun. You hang around the fire station maintaining the alarm and playing chess with your co-workers until an alarm comes in, then you go visit one of your other sim houses. You might even get to break open the doors with axes to rescue trapped sims.

The whole idea was to have sims’ careers be playable. According to some designer interview I read, this was an effort to tempt players who refuse to come out of build mode into playing the game differently. Why is it BAD to play the game like it was intended, and why do we need to coerce them into playing some other game – does this mean the EA sports games are going to follow the same tactic and try to get us to spend time decorating players’ houses while discouraging us from working on the World Cup and/or Super Bowl?

Anyway, as you might have guessed, Ambitions careers are fun if you want to play a single sim, and not so fun if you want to play a houseful of them, because it’s difficult to control two career sims at the same time, because the careers take place in realtime. The freelance careers, fishing and gardening and inventing and so on, now require your sim to register at city hall, and then they get 10 levels of moderately amusing titles to progress through, receiving rewards of medals and (identical) trophies at intervals. I understand the investigator career is playable like the firefighter career, but most of the rest seem to follow the same hastily-slapped-together freelance treatment.

But there are other features that are more promising, proving that not everyone on the EA development team is a clueless profit-focused non-gamer who neither understands nor respects the playerbase.

For example, inventing. An inventor sim can make lots of widgets, which are useless yet interesting bits of décor. They can also make time machines. Yu can’t exactly accompany your sim on a trip to the past like you can follow them to work at the fire station. They enter the time machine, it shimmers while some repetitive text about their adventures appears, and then they come out, sometimes with money, or books, or even a new outfit (so far I’ve seen caveman/woman, and knight in armor/ren faire lady, with standard spandex jumpsuits for future time travelers). Once you unlock outfits, you also get extra wardrobe slots. A nice bonus.

Then there’s the whole notion of using the time machine to have babies. You entice your beloved into getting in the time machine for some past or future woohoo, and a few days later, your offspring pops out of the time machine, ready to join the family unit. My past child came out as a teenager, my future children both came out as elderly. I’ll leave it up to the sim physicists to explain why that happens. It’s still kind of cool, especially if you want your sims to procreate without turning aging on and possibly causing your supervillains to become single parents.

Another thing inventors can do is dig up the yard for minerals and metals using a craftable backhoe. This usually creates a gaping hole, and you can explore it and have wild adventures with underground gnomes (again, you don’t actually go there, you get text balloons and possibly a reward). After it’s explored, you can use it as a quick transport to other areas. Which I haven’t done yet, and I don’t know if you’re restricted to the main property, but it’s an unusual way to move sims around the lot.

And they get robots, at max level. Robots aren’t quite like the old Tom Servo model. They are independent sims who never have to shower, but they do eat and sleep, and pee. They come in male and female models, and they won’t make babies, although you can woohoo in the time machine with them. Don’t ask me why you’d want to do that.

So in summary, Ambitions is a great expansion, but not for the reasons it thinks it is. Of course, if they had pitched it as “now with gay marriage, extra wardrobe slots, backhoes and time machine sex,” probably nobody would have bought it but me.

Now if they’d only bring back Seasons and let me do something about the relentless Truman Show-esque cheeriness of my little seaside resort town. Which, to this particular native of various resort-y type places adjacent to the Pacific Ocean, is over-the-top, even despite the grim industrial section I just built for my robot factory and tattooed biker family (oh yeah, you also get an official mesh for motorcycles, woohoo). That place could use some rain and fog.