The Sims 3
Lifestyles of the wretched and infragrant.
It is an incredibly hard game to become bored by. There's always some new torture to inflict, some new place to visit, someone new to pester or romance. And yet, it is still very much The Sims, only now heaving with extra optional toys. For all the improvements - primarily the relaxation of the pressures upon your sims, so you don't have to plan every day around bathroom breaks anymore - it isn't going to convince anyone with a dislike of the previous games to relax their contempt. Even those that have embraced the series will find a few aspects unsatisfying, like all these places you can send your sims to, yet for the most part their actions there are hidden.
Workplaces, cinemas, sports stadiums, even spooky crypts are visible as buildings in the town, but their interiors aren't shown - the joy of seeing your carefully-designed sim dropped into a new situation is denied in favour of watching a floating bar gradually fill as they perform their invisible tasks. Possibly it's a necessary sacrifice in making a world without loading screens, or possibly these are gaps to be filled in by the inevitable slew of expansion packs - but certainly, it's a shame that so many conceptually fun locations prove so meatless.
It's also perhaps a shame that the roster of content in the game - clothes, items, wallpapers - is relatively thin. EA has elected to push community-built content front and centre, a pre-game launcher app offering a raft of player-made goodies to download. Despite knee-jerk grumbles that there are only three types of hi-fi to choose from, realistically this is a good thing. It'll quickly make the game far more visually diverse than it could be just with hired EA monkeys constantly churning out new curtains and tables. It's borrowed a big old page from Spore's book, leveraging the community to push the game far beyond its out-of-the-box limits.
Clearly, that stuff isn't available in our review code, however, resulting in a game that perhaps looks a little more austere than (hopefully) it ultimately will. What is in our code is the Style tool, with which you can dramatically alter item colours, then save them as a new object you can yourself upload to the shared servers. It may not sound especially profound, but it's incredibly straightforward.
It's the raft of minor additions like that which mean, despite a few pulled punches, that The Sims 3 is a broad and ridiculously charming game that manages to significantly expand upon its critical formula without ever becoming overwhelming. It's that much closer to what a Sims player has always wanted from The Sims: to create themselves, and their friends, and then set them loose upon the world. It's both more of a role-playing game than it's ever been before, and more of a design game than it's ever been before. It may suffer a few glaring compromises, but it's an essential play for anyone with an interest in what videogames can achieve outside of a targeting reticule.