iPhone App of the Week: The Sims 3

It's been 2 weeks since I last wrote for this 'weekly' column, and no I'm getting back to it in a semi-big way. One of the more high-profile demoes in the iPhone developer event last March was The Sims 3, so while The Sims 3 for iPhone has indeed been released out in the wild together with its PC and Mac counterparts, the current stable release doesn't have the features demoed a few months ago. Basically, by the time this blog post is published, the new update with the new features might get released with it.

But let's get back on topic: The Sims 3 for the iPhone and iPod touch.

Basically, it's a ground-up version of The Sims 3 on the PC. Whatever features they could fit in, they probably fit in. There's a nagging feeling that the game is incomplete for me, though, but the feeling is explained in the first paragraph albeit indirectly.

So yeah, The Sims 3. Load times are awfully long (but not as long as Assassin's Creed) but the main menu is kinda different from that of the actual game. Consider it the launcher.

Aside from the big-ass "Start Game" button, there are four menu options: "Goals Checklist" which acts like an unlockable list of achievements, "More Games" basically takes you to the App Store to see all the iPhone games under Electronic Arts, "Options" which lets you set the music volume and "Help & About" which is... do I need to define it?

The first thing you'll probably want to do is to just start the game already, so let's tap that play button and start.

We gotta select a save slot though. This kind of reminds me of the actual game's save system as well.

So let's start creating our Sim.

The creation interface is actually reminiscent to that of the PC version, but the graphics, of course, are a long shot to the real game. Obviously, the iPhone version does not feature the "Create a Style" mode nor does it offer the same level of power over the customization of your Sims.

In fact, it's more of The Sims 1 wherein you can only choose between a limited (very limited) number of faces that have been pre-made by the developers.

But at least you can also change the hair style separately unlike The Sims 1.

Choosing between different shirts and pants is also kinda limited, but at least the selection of shirts and pants are strictly separate for a bit of mixing and matching.

Yes, shoes can be selected too. There are no selections for Formal wear, Underwear, Pajamas, and all those other clothing types however.

Next part of Sim creation involves determining what your Sims' life dream will be (Persona) as well as their distinctive traits. There are actually just five personas you can choose from unlike in The Sims 3 for the PC where the "personas" or lifetime dreams are dependent on the traits themselves.

Whatever Persona you choose, you'll be stuck with for the rest of your Sim's life. Now we get to define our Sim's actual traits of which the Sim will be stuck with as well. There are loads of traits to choose from like in the real game, but you're only limited to five. No, you can't choose contradictory traits meaning that your Sim can't both have "No Sense of Humor" and "Good Sense of Humor".
Let's give the guy a name, shall we?
After waiting 10 seconds for the keyboard to load and typing the name (I named him Gary... no last names here), we finally get moved into our new home automagically.

The tutorial instantly starts and welcomes us to the world of The Sims 3.

Let's touch aspects of camera control while we're in our home since it's kinda integral for our personal tastes as to whether the camera view is okay. Since there is an actual 3D plane involved, pinching won't let you zoom in or out. Pinching lets you tilt the camera left or right, and zooming requires a slider found on the right side of the screen. Panning the camera only requires one finger moving to whatever direction.

The tutorial also states that movement only requires one touch. Basically, touch wherever you want your Sim to go.

But what if I want to use, say, the telephone? Well, we can just touch the telephone and some options will appear.

An exclusive feature of this phone from the phone in the full-fledged game, I think, is the "Job search" option.

Like the real Sims games, it also has a Wish system. You can lock onto wishes, but since this is not like the PC version, locking on requires these dialog boxes, and they may become rather annoying overtime.

One of the biggest draws of The Sims 3 is how seamless your house is to the environment. The iPhone version, however, requires you to press some yellow thing at the edge of your house if you want to see the Town Map.

Unfortunately, not all houses and lots get the same hovering labels as your house. You'll only get them labels when you visit them, but you can know what the buildings are when you touch them which is a bit of a weird design decision for me. Ultimately, they might've been aiming for you to explore a bit.

The HUD lets you see your Sim's needs (picture below), what specific needs are very much fulfilled, what wishes are locked, and the "three-dots-menu" which lets you save, exit, etc..
You can walk to establishments and get jobs inside it, shop for goods, or just walk to it.
You can also visit the houses of other Sims like in the real game. But unlike the full-fledged game wherein you have to know the people to be able to visit their homes, you can randomly go inside people's houses.

Now that I've gone inside the house, I can meet people. The interactions are obviously kind of limited, but it's actually kind of the same as the interactions found in the full-fledged game wherein interactions are buried in menus. Weirdly (or not, depending on your view), it allows two men to "be romantic...", but that was also present in the full-fledged games.

You can also check the status of your relationship with the guy you're talking to. Still, there are also shortcut buttons for you to go home or into town.

Occasionally, Sims let you choose whether you want to participate in some side-missions. Pictured below is an example.

But what about Buy and Build mode, you say? Well, they're in the iPhone too albeit limited as well.

You can choose as to whether you want to buy new stuff, or just move or sell your existing stuff.

Let's try to buy new stuff, although my Sim doesn't have much money.

Like the PC counterpart, the items are also categorized according to function by default.

The catch is, there are some locked stuff that can supposedly be unlocked through doing missions among other stuff.

Placing or moving objects also operate on a grid system like the PC counterpart.

Normally, I would give a rating, but for now, I'm not. Like the real Sims, it's kinda big and the things you could do are pretty many but not as much as the full-fledged game. The game is kinda limited and at times buggy though, so perhaps you should wait until the actual update comes along.

The Sims 3 First Impressions

Unfortunately my brother is playing right now so I can't exactly provide any screenshots as much as I want to. Anyway, I pre-ordered The Sims 3 from Trinoma Datablitz a few weeks ago and it's just now that we were able to get to it. Obviously, if you surf the Internet a lot, it's no secret that publisher Electronic Arts places much faith in this game as it is being marketed rather aggressively across many forms. But enough about marketing, let's get on with the actual game.

Let's talk about the stuff that actually came in with the box. Since pre-ordering automatically enables you to a more costly Collector's Edition (although those who pre-order apparently have gotten a 200 peso decrease from the retail price of the Collector's Edition which is 2500 PHP), I got soooo many freebies. Those who pre-order (which means it's not part of the Collector's Edition) also get a nice mug and a simple black t-shirt with the plumbob. Then the inside of the collector's edition has a 2GB USB drive shaped like the iconic plumbob (check my Twitter account for pictures of the USB drive) which comes pre-loaded with Sims 3 wallpapers, screensavers and the theme song, a free download code for the European car from the Sims store, and a preview hard copy of the Prima Guide. Other less tangible freebies include a Sims 2 expansion of choice (which my brother gave to his friend and is only available for those who pre-ordered), and $10 worth of SimPoints when you register your game (all original retail copies have free $10). Note that all copies of The Sims 3 is also compatible with both Windows and Intel-based Macs on the same disc.

Installation took quite a long time to finish, and the Sims 3 Launcher took really long to load up. This particular launcher basically has links to The Sims 3 Store and it also acts as a download manager for purchased items. Of course, the Launcher has a big-ass Play button too.

So yeah, I click the Play button and guess what happened: the screen became black, the monitor changed resolutions, and suddenly there was a white border- and it didn't look normal. I only heard the audio cue of the EA logo, so my intuition told me that I should press the Start button- which I did- and maximize it again. Guess what, it solved the problem. Now I have to live with this relatively minor irritation!

The game made up for it by loading up surprisingly swiftly though. I never remembered the Sims 2 loading up so quickly, even during when it first launched, but it must be said that it could be attributed to my decent dual-core setup. Minimum specifications for The Sims 3 is actually very kind: a Pentium 4 is still all it needs- and it kinda shows in the graphics.

I thought it was just the same graphic fidelity as The Sims 2 and it was art direction that made it look more realistic, but there is actually a bit of an improvement in The Sims 3- but not by all that much. Instinctively, I selected the default Sunset Valley neighborhood and instantly noticed the absence of the option for creating custom neighborhoods. It should be noted that it is not Maxis that is developing the game this time around, but EA Redwood Shores. Still, a lot of the changes they made are actually for the better even if at first, experienced players will get thrown off.

Instinctively, I chose to Create A Sim, and boy did it take longer than I would in The Sims 2 to make a person. Getting used to the granular controls might take some time for me, but they're fun to mess around with nonetheless. By default, the game actually picks the Young Adult age group for some reason. In The Sims 2, the young adult was the age group that experienced college, but it seems that in this game, Young Adult is the same as Adult in the first two Sims. When it then came to the clothes, it was suddenly a world of flexibility. All of a sudden, I was choosing my own styles, colors and yes, shoes. The Create A Style mode surprisingly hooked me as I'm not normally into mixing and matching shapes and colors and patterns. It's a lot of fun to use this tool, and it took little time for me to get used to the filters and hierarchies. Hair coloration also works as advertised as you can now adjust a Sim's roots, highlights, base, and more. Making celebrity lookalikes just became a lot easier this time around, and early on in this stage do I find myself falling in love with The Sims 3 already!

Lastly, you can also set some interesting personality traits to your Sim. Instead of the archaic celestial signs system, you can actually put personality traits into your Sim through clicking actual adjectives- and boy are there a lot of them. These personality traits will actually narrow down the appropriate goals your Sim might want to have. For example, my Sim didn't have the option to have the goal of taking over the world, but the Sim of my brother had it. It's very interesting to experiment with them, so I might even go for the Evil trait later on. Perhaps a bit less of an impact to gameplay is the new Favorites system which could replace the Turn-On and Turn-Off system introduced in The Sims 2 Nightlife. It's just you selecting what food or musical genre your Sim wants, etc..

Now it's time to move in the family. I chose not to create my own house for now, so I moved her in a pre-made house. Yeah, I made a girl named Caroline Reese- a suggestion from my brother. Anyway, I moved her in and suddenly my younger brother wanted to play. I felt like giving him a chance to play so I saved the game.

This is where confusion starts. In The Sims and The Sims 2, it would be that pressing the button with the three dots (or F5) and click "Neighborhood" would send you back to the neighborhood view so you could select a new family or create a new Sim. In this game, it's radically different. For starters, there is no Neighborhood view where you can choose the next Sim you want to control, it's the Main Menu where you can choose the next Sim you want to control, and you have to select "New Game" from the Main Menu so you can access the neighborhood and create a new Sim. In time, I'll get used to it, but it's kind of clunky if you ask me.

Anyway, after actually restarting the computer because Windows froze, my brother started playing and creating his Sim. Next thing he did was to create an empty lot and build a new house. Just clicking at the Buy mode revealed a complete revamp of the UI. There were tabs that categorized the objects by function, and below those tabs would be really huge representations of what would've been a typical category in The Sims 2. And I mean HUGE. This makes for a more user-friendly experience for novice players, but experienced players (like me) will have to get used to them. The Build mode for creating a house is actually no different and could potentially be a bit of a hassle for experienced players. You are presented with a huge representation of an actual house, and there you could pick whether you want to edit the terrain, create a garden, make the foundation, etc..

So far, the actual building process seems like it's the same as The Sims 2. It's the color-coordination that's actually different. For example, you want to match the couch of your living room to the color of the walls in the room. Well, you can summon the Style editor and actually match it. It's really amazing what you can do with the versatile editor. You can actually use it on practically any object, and you can change the color of either, in the case of the aforementioned couch, the cushions or the wooden support. Trust me, just that aspect will already addict you.

I have yet to actually experience living life with a Sim, but I'll just reflect my impressions when I get to review it. It will be quite the task to review a game of this scale. So far, I am really loving the creation aspects of it, but the actual gameplay will have to wait.

Sims 3 First Expansion Pack Details

While The Sims 3 is getting ready to reproduce about a hundred million copies for retail, details about the first expansion pack have already been purportedly leaked.

There is yet a name for the expansion pack, but one of the alleged major points of the new expansion pack involves a 1st person perspective that can only be unlocked by those who pick the "Master Criminal" and/or "Evil" dreams and personalities respectively.

This enables those kinds of Sims to not only steal candy and other invaluable items in first person view, but to also be able to carjack ala Grand Theft Auto, kill other Sims and wield weapons in the first person view.

Other additions not relative to the first person view include the ability to create gangster mobs, hire hookers through the phone or through Craigslist in your computer, gain access to secret underground lots and hideouts (or create one yourself), and do drugs.

Those who pick the "Insane" personality have a bonus though: they can unlock doomsday machines!

These new additions will not only bring more realism to the simulation series, but also bring in a new slew of hardcore gamers because of the now dangerously jacked-up rating. As if sexual activities implied by the "Try for Baby" option wasn't thin a line enough!