| The Sims 3 (PC/Mac DVD) |  | From: Electronic Arts
Category: Video Games
List Price: £39.99
Buy New: £19.99
as of 12/3/2010 17:40 CST details
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New (23) Used (20) Collectible (1) from £19.98
Seller: Ashton
Rating:  332 reviews
Platforms: Windows XP, Mac OS X
Genre: life-simulation-games
ESRB: Rating Pending
Media: CD-ROM
Operating System: Mac OS X
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.3
Dimensions (in): 7.4 x 5.4 x 0.6
MPN: SIMS3PC
EAN: 5030930060879
ASIN: B0015YDH6O
Release Date: June 5, 2009
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
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Product Description
The game that first opened up the world of video games to a wider audience is back, going beyond being just a virtual dollhouse to a complete interactive neighbourhood. The basic concept is still the same though, as you create your own computerised family and help (or hinder) them in achieving their lifetime dreams.
Instead of just dealing with one house at a time though, your whole sims town is part of one continuous map, with neighbours going about their business independently. Likewise your own family can explore at will and interact with any and all buildings and people.
Once fully grown a sim can have up to 60 personality traits - from loner to flirt - all of which you can influence via their environment and the people they interact with. However you want to play and whatever you want to do it's easier than ever to create your own virtual soap opera. - New Seamless, Open Neighbourhood - Explore the Neighbourhood Freely: See the sights with your Sims! The new seamless neighbourhood architecture allows your Sims to roam freely around the neighbourhood and visit their loved one and friends or foes. Discovering other Sims homes and families, traveling around to new locations like City Hall or the local park will create a whole new way of life for your Sims.
- New Create A Sim - Create Any Sim You Can Imagine: In addition to the open, living neighbourhood, the all-new Create-a-Sim interface will feature easy-to-use design tools that allow you to make truly detailed Sims that are more realistic than ever. Create-a-Sim gives you the incredible freedom to customise just about any Sim you can imagine.
- New Realistic Personalities - Every Sim Is A Unique Person, With A Distinct Personality: With the innovative and proprietary Realistic Personality System in The Sims 3, you can attribute each character with five distinct personality traits, helping shape yo
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| Customer Reviews:
 The Sims 3 is a huge step up from The Sims 2 June 14, 2009
Olivia Stanley (UK)
202 out of 208 found this review helpful
I have played on the Sims 2 for many years and own all the expansion packs and most of the stuff packs. However, a few months before The Sims 3 came out, I began to feel bored of the Sims 2 as I eagerly awaited the Sims 3. I constantly read information about the upcoming game, so much that my expectations were extremely high! I was concerned as my computer did not meet the minimum requirements, but there was no need for me to worry.
The game works perfectly and is giving me hours of enjoyment. The game automatically chose low graphics settings, although if I had not checked the options tab, I would have assumed they were on high. The graphics are incredible and 100 times better than they were on The Sims 2.
The features are also amazing. The create-a-style tool means that you can literally create any colour on any design for any object. If you wanted, you could have a pink heart bath tub and matching toilet. You can literally make any object look exactly how you want it and make any other object match it percectly.
Create-a-sim has also been improved. You can use create-a-style on clothes which means you could make your sims slippers match their pyjamas! You now choose the shoes separately for each outfit and you can easily adjust each body feature to create a really lifelike self sim.
You can also now select traits for your sim. These have replaced personality points and have a big effect on the life on your sim. If you choose to make your sim a 'kleptomaniac' for example, your sim would 'accidently' take another sims objects.
Another great improvement is the fact that your sim can now have their baby at the hospital. This is a great addition to the game and makes pregnancy much more exciting.
Overall, this is an amazing game and I would recommend it to anyone, even if you haven't enjoyed the sims in the past.
Outstanding Upgrade from The Sims 2 June 11, 2009
Dismal Angel (Scotland)
119 out of 130 found this review helpful
It was years in the making, and finally, here it is. Some fans may be disappointed by the lack of objects, the lack of clothing, hairstyles, and limitations of career paths, but they are those who are finding themselves jumping into the new version of The Sims after having been exposed to the previous version and it's immense amount of Expansion Packs.
CREATE-A-SIM
Creating a sim gives you the option to not only tweak skintones (from six different samples, you can use a slider to select from different tones rather than the four tones from the previous game) and facial features far more advanced than the previous version (adding in beauty marks, or freckles), but body type, skinny, fat, lean or muscular (unfortunately though you can't tweak the hip, thigh, waist and bust size of your sims though I would have liked to have seen that implemented).
Hairstyles are limited, however, you have an advanced system that lets you alter the colours of hair from root to tip, so your sim can have hair colour as crazy as vivid postbox red with electric blue tips, lime green highlights, and white roots (I wouldn't recommend it, but you catch my drift). You can even save your own hair colour creations for future use so you don't have to re-pick each colour for another sim.
The Sims clothing, again is limited, but you can mix and match outfits, and add your own patterns and colour the patterns much like with the hair - you can make a colour darker, or lighter, you can change the texture of the fabrics. More importantly, much to fans delight, the Sims have SHOES! No longer do Sims have to wear flipflops with every decent pair of jeans, or have to wear ugly pumps with dresses. You get to choose the shoes, and get to alter the colour and pattern of those too! And incredibly, with the accessory system, you can even impliment socks, stockings and tights to the overall look!
Your sim can be more unique looking than ever with several make-up styles which just like hair and clothing, you can change the colours of by sliders, and palettes rather than just being able to choose from a few set styles.
BUILD MODE:
Build mode is just as advanced as Create-A-Sim. The interface is far more user-friendly than the previous versions, making it easier to find exactly what you're looking for. There aren't very many window/door styles to choose from, however they are ALL recolourable, making it very easy to mix and match them in a pinch with a little work. You can even save the colours and textures for future use. Wallpapers and floors are JUST as designable as almost everything else in the game, you can change the textures of paint, wallpapers, siding, and bricks, carpets, tiles; this tool is even so powerful it will let you change the colours of each individual board in your hardwood floor!
The stairs we were limited to (modular and base) are now an intertwined setting that come with the option of no railing and a deletable/recolourable wall. You can actually have floating stairs now on every stair type regardless, you can also add on any of the available rails to any stairtype regardless if they match or not. My only gripe is that the stairs and the rails themselves are not designable like most of the other features.
Roofs, foundations, stairs, and fences, are NON-designable and therefore, the only things you can't use the re-colour tool on. Quite sad really as many of the rails don't match anything in particular and the same goes for the stairs and fences. A slight draw back though. Also, the pool has no diving board anymore (hopefully will come with a future expansion).
BUY MODE:
Buy mode comes with a very limited amount of items to choose from, with there being something like perhaps only five types of kitchen counter to choose from, six different sofa/chair types, and a few dining tables, etc. However, the fact that you can actually change all of these items with the re-colouring tool, and change the patterns, colours, textures, fabrics, gives you a large canvis to play with in terms of interior design. One thing that used to bug the hell out of me about both previous games (Sims and Sims 2) was being limited to furniture that just did SIMPLY not match anything - this is no longer the case, as you can force nearly every object (except the paintings, the plants and a few decoration items), into matching anything you want it to match.
GAMEPLAY:
EA have worked ridiculously long and hard hours and taken into account every fans individual opinion into what would make the game more enjoyable and playable. They've tweaked the game so precisely that Sims are much more independent to the point where regardless of how much of a bad mood your sims are in, they will still go to work and not miss their carpool, and that Teenage sims will come home and eventually during the point of the day, take out their homework (kept in their inventory at all times), and begin to work on it at the nearest surface they can find - kitchen table, bedroom desk; they will even do it on community lots.
The game is so seamless now that your sim can go wandering across the town without waiting on ridiculous loading times. The game only loads the objects, textures and colours of whatever the game screen is focusing on so it allows for fast loading times and gives you the freedom to take your sims to a community lot whenever the mood takes you. You can let your sim go jogging and watch them pass by beautifully lit scenery - they can go visit their friends on different lots, and interact with their furniture (don't go into your neighbours fridges though, it's inappropriate and they don't like it!).
Rather than having the old skills to work on, your sims have a few new ones to work on, painting, guitar, writing, handiness, athleticism, gardening, and a few more I don't think I've even stumbled on yet!
Your sims don't have a choice of five personality types to choose from anymore. No longer are you stuck with a wealth obsessed sim, or a sim who is ultimately aspiring to woohoo with 25 different sims. Now your sims have traits, and they can have five of them. They range from anything such as naturally artistic, to slobby, to neat and green-thumbed (yes, you can grow veggies in TS3, but you need to find the seeds first!) and with sixty different traits to choose from, you can really make a unique sim with a very special personality.
CAREERS:
Careers are much easier and yet more challenging to cope with in this game. While sims are at work, a small panel will appear in the top let hand side of the screen showing a list of activities they can participate in at work, working hard, business as usual? Suck up to the boss? If your sim is starting to stress out at work, you can select "take it easy" so that their fun motive begins to slowly refill and they begin to de-stress again. Or you can select them to talk with their colleagues, increasing relationships with them will help promotions. Opportunities arise every now and then which also give them a chance to progress up the career ladder a little by performing tasks.
OVERALL:
Some people expected a brand new game, but what we have here is a re-imagining of the old game, and it's much more complex and well thought out, and alot of those niggling stupid problems that got on your nerves in the previous one is no longer the case. £30 for this right now is WELL worth the money, you will definately get more gameplay out of this than you ever did with the old one; and to make it even better you can extend the life of your sims to short to ridiculously epic so you can finally get everything done and have your sim be the millionaires in their lifetime that you always aspired they would be.
Don't believe this will never live up to the Sims 2, it already has far surpassed it.
 Was expecting so much better September 10, 2009
Sarah (UK)
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
I had been looking forward to the Sims 3 for months and I had really high hopes that EA had created a brilliant game for 2009 but I was very let down when I purchased it. Apart from the new features including the neighbourhood and the design patterns, the actual gameplay itself gets very boring after a while which is a shame because I was expecting something worth the money I paid. There's nothing special about the interactions and the clock is ridiculously slow even on "ultra-fast" It feels like EA have taken a step back rather than forward and since buying the game back in June, I've probably been on it about 10 times...yes, I got that bored.
The Sims 1 and 2 are far better in comparision to the overrated Sims 3. While it does offer you a few hours of fun at the start, pretty soon you will begin to lose interest and I regret wasting my money on a game which promised significant changes but failed to deliver.
I'd say this is an ok game overall but but it's nothing special so I'm very let down.
One small step for sims, a giant leap for simmers! August 8, 2009
Clare (Plymouth, Devon, UK)
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
The Sims 3 is a game about creating and controlling your own world and the people in it.
I've been an avid simmer from the beginning with all the sims 1 and 2 plus expansions and one of my biggest issues with the game was the load times. With The Sims 3 that's all gone. The initial load screen is much faster and now neighbourhoods/households are just one click away without the long tedious load times.
The sims 3 has another feature which I'm totally in love with and that's the create a style tool. This lets you customise the pattern/style of any object/clothes/wall/floor. Remember in the past when you were trying to match wood types on items you downloaded to make a matching kitchen? Well now you can do it yourself without the hassle of finding ones to match. It also lets you put your favourite patterns onto the EA clothes yourself in a quick and simple way.
As for skill points, they're now easier to gain with specific books to read, tv channels to watch and classes to take.
I have to say this is definitely the best 'Sims' yet and if you have 1 or 2 you'll love the improvements and if you don't this is the place to start!
My one gripe is the nanny is now gone and I have to hire a babysitter for my kids who'll only stay for a set amount of time which can be a pain if your sim adults have jobs but c'est la vie, maybe that will be fixed in an expansion pack later on.
Another things I love (and yes I know this review is a little rambling but I just want to pick out the high points in terms of improvements) is that your kids can inherit your traits (a LOT more choice here and they actually have an effect in game - e.g. can't stand art trait means art has a negative environment effect on your sim, kleptomaniac trait means your sim will take things from other sims houses etc) and if you treat your kids right you can choose their traits, if you don't and use the birthday cake to force them to age sometimes you'll be randomly assigned traits (just a cautionary tale my poor little girl got insanity from that one!)
The jobs are better in sims 3 too, whilst you still don't go into their job you get a drop down list to choose whether you want them to work hard, slack off, meet/chat to co-workers or suck up to the boss. Your sim has more criteria to meet for gaining promotion based on these relationships. I made one of my sims a politician and one of the criteria was funding, she had to throw campaign fund-raiser parties and get money from others to be able to gain her promotion. You also now get side tasks that you can accept or decline which can boost your pay, job performance or skills.
I love this game and I'm looking forward to the world adventures expansion pack! Get simming!
 Compared to the sims 2 ... August 3, 2009
addicted2amazon
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
The sims 3 is a highly addictive game, which I would recommend to any sims fan. If you are not that keen a player I would suggest sticking to the sims 2 as the sims 3 is not that much of an upgrade.
The game is set in either Riverview or Sunset Valley. One of these towns comes with the game and the other can be download from the sims 3 website. You can no longer create your own town like you would in the sims 2. You are stuck with these two.
When you start the game the view of the town is now different. In the old sims you would move the cursor to the edge of the screen, now you have to hold down the right down mouse button and drag the mouse, which can be annoying at first if you're using a laptop trackpad.
The main feature of the sims 3 is creating your sims. The sims appear more life like than the sims 2 and you can now customise their clothes, hair colour, eye colour, make up and personality. Sims can have upto five traits. These traits reflect how they act and their wishes, for example a sim who has the insane trait often wants to talk to themselves. Sims also have favourites and you can also adjust their voice, weight and muscles. There are seven lifestages sims will go through; babies, toddlers, children, teenagers, young adults, adults and elders. This is the same as the sims 2, but with the young adults added in. If you had the sims 2 university expansion pack you will know that added an extra life stage where the sims went to uni, but in the sims 3 young adults have little, if not no difference to adults.
The sims also have lifetime wishes and daily wishes like in the sims 2. Granting your sim their lifetime wish and daily wishes gives you points, which you spend on various things such as fertility treatment to raise their chances of having twins and tripplets, midlife crisis so they can change their personality traits or a collection helper which locates insects, rocks, and seeds. The rewards are not as physical based as the sims 2 e.g. hot tub which everyone could use, the sims 3 rewards are mainly for that sim only. The sims needs have also changed as they no longer have one for environment. The skills have also changed as cleaning is no longer a skill. Your sims can now learn the writing skill. Handiness is the new name for mechanical. The creative skill no longer exists as such, instead sims now learn guitar and painting as separate skills.
One of the best features of the sims 3 is that you can play with all the sims in your household even if they are not in the same lot. For example, one sim may be at home, one at the beach and one at a friends house. You can still play with all of them at the same time.
You can now watch your sims go to work, although you can not watch them while they work. There are some jobs that were available in the sims 2 such as medical, and new jobs such as musician. Also in the sims 3, not only can teens get part time jobs but so can adults. These are jobs such as working in the bookstore, the spa or the grocery store. Sims can now buy their groceries from the store instead of over the phone, and they can now decide what to buy. This seems like a cool new feature but can be annoying as you then have to drag the items from your sims inventory to the fridge, as other sims will also want to prepare meals. Your sims can also grow their own vegetables and fish, like they did in the sims 2 seasons. They can use these when cooking or sell them. Your sims no longer have to buy clothes. They just go to the wardrobe and select "plan outfit", which is a great money and time saver.
Overall I like this game, mainly because of the new customising feature and how you can play with each sim no matter where in the neighbourhood they are. I also like some of the new decorative objects such as toilet paper because it makes the game look more realistic. What I don't like about the game is the new stairs tools. It took me a while to get into it. Instead of having stairs that connected between the ground and foundation, and then the stairs to connect the different floors of the house as separate options like in the sims 2, the sims 3 has one tool where you adjust the height and width of the steps. Also I didn't like that there is now no piano and toddlers can no longer learn the charisma skill, although they can now read books which teach they the art skill and writing skill, and children have a building blocks table where they can learn the handiness skill.
If you're a sims fan, then buy the game. If you enjoy the sims 2 and only play the game occasionally, stick to it. Also make sure you have the right system requirements. I run mine on a windows vista laptop and it works fine. Only problem is that I'm constantly running out of storage space because of the game.
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