Sims 3 After Dark – If You Are Going to Sim Francisco, Be Sure And Wear A Flower Mesh In Your Hair

WoW is, at the moment, vastly boring. All I do in there is bother Anzu, and the guys in Zul Farrak that drop the tiger and raptor mounts, and help kill the Lich King again whenever the guild needs my assistance. The boredom shall continue up through the next month when the expansion comes out. That makes it a perfect time for a Sims expansion, and I must say, this is my favorite one yet.

That’s probably because it is completely San Francisco-centric.

In the last two incarnations of Sims, your out-of-town areas were linked to your main suburb, but that’s not the case for the new Sims 3 urban environment, which stands on its own, although it has its own France, China and Egypt attached for your sims that feel like wandering around France picking up stray diamonds off the ground, or wrestling mummies. So while you do get a few suburban standalone houses in the Richmond/Sunset and Sausalito areas, your urban sims live in high rise apartments. I wouldn’t mind moving a few of my suburban sims to Sim Francisco, but that would mean abandoning their painstakingly created houses.

I love sim apartments. Building a sim house to my perfectionistic standards can take agonizing hours adjusting the wallpaper shade, but redecorating an apartment is no big deal, plus you don’t have to deal with landscaping because everything has a default awesome view of the bridge and the other skyscrapers.

Sim Francisco is different from World Adventures in that the designers have obviously been here, rather than the ones who designed Egypt based on old Indiana Jones films. The map is loaded with obscure little jokes calculated to appeal to locals. The greasy spoon diner corresponds roughly to Mission Rock Café, and there’s a dive bar right by Zeitgeist’s approximate location, and sims zip around town by taking a subway with a logo suspiciously similar to BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit), which is much better than the real-life BART, which basically hauls suburbanites in and out of downtown rather than giving urbanites a way to run across town without getting rained on.

And the art museum makes an appearance – a few years ago I attended an exhibition at the art museum that was tied to an exhibition at a lot decorated to look like the museum in Sims Online, where patrons could chat with the Sims Online toons running around the virtual version. I wore a red dress. Then I went home, logged into Sims Online and sent my toon to the virtual museum, wearing a red dress. Now I can send various Sims 3 sims to the “same” museum in red dresses. Yay, art.

While life in the suburbs is heavily involved with landscaping and procreating, in the city what’s important is celebrities. They come in a range from one star to five, and the more you party with them, the more celebrity points you accumulate. Until the day arrives when manufacturers give you free luxury goods and you can afford to buy a house in Sausalito where you can display them. This is a lot like how the real San Francisco works. There are careers too, which you will need to afford the down payment on your ridiculously overpriced suburban paradise (just like the real ones!), but underachieving sims are perfectly capable of living a life devoted to haunting dive bars while writing just enough pulp fiction to keep the bills paid.

Also in this expansion are the long-awaited vampires. The first character I made, in fact, was a vampire, Mr. Edgar Sparklie, a writer of trashy fiction who has bleached blond hair and a soul patch. Getting vampirized wasn’t tough at all, he just befriended a vampire and asked. Then all his bars turned purplish, he developed a sunshine debuff and he began living on plasma from the refrigerator. He also drank blood from a few sims before the celebrity gossips caught on and trashed his nightlife reputation for a few days. Damn you Perez Hilton!

If I had to whine anything, actually I’d whine first about suburbia, which has given me all sorts of technical glitches lately. For example, I was dumb enough to make a houseful of robots, and whenever they go outside, all the townspeople stand around going “omg! A robot!” and refuse to leave whatever lot they’re on, until they build up a big laggy mob of looping reaction emotes. Urbanites are more sophisticated; when they see a vampire they just leave.

This expansion also brings back many fun things from the past: bubble blowers (which now have a variety of bubble flavors to give you various buffs ranging from +romance to extra funny jokes), hot tubs, dance floors, and band instruments. I have a sim band now, grinding away in the decrepit ex-factory rehearsal studio I built them in Soma. All the instruments skill at different rates, so don’t try asking the guitar player to sit in for the drummer. Plus there are fountains, and elevators, and probably a few more build items I haven’t found yet. And burrito trucks.

I’ve got quite a bit of love for my hometown. I’m very pleased at our baseball team’s recent pwnage, and I can go on at length about subjects like Emperor Norton, or the evil Pacific Heights lawyers with their neighbor-eating dogs, or the Pan Pacific Exposition, or the Summer of Love. Or the over nine thousand reasons why San Francisco is far more awesome than New York

(a city which was very popular in the 1920’s, currently seems to be mainly inhabited by self-referential journalists in denial, Wall Street thugs and people who aren’t cool enough to live on the Jersey Shore).

This expansion isn’t perfect on the geography, but it definitely gets the spirit right. In fact, I’m very strongly tempted to just avoid that other game, World of Rare Mount Farming or whatever it’s called, and spend the night leveling the Grateful Airplane. What I need now is a Keith Richards hair mesh . . .