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Now Playing. "Wall With Dado" by T1na Badgraph1csghost
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On this day in 2009, The Sims 3 was released for Windows and Mac OS X. It was famous, or shall we say "infamous", for managing to be more stripped down than the core version of The Sims 2 and having patches issued that caused more problems than they solved. Of course, by the time The Sims 4 came around in 2014, you could enrich your stripped down core Sims 3 with a bevy of expensive add-ons and Sims Store-exclusive DLC. The photo here demonstrates some of that, being set in Bridgeport, which came with the 3rd expansion pack, Late Night. My memories of Bridgeport are mostly of fixing Sims Division's oversights and renovating several of the buildings. I suppose that could be the franchise's epitaph, really: "Don't think about this too hard, the players are just going to mod it anyway."
Okay, complaint over. Despite the way it sounds, I do have good memories of playing this game. And, despite how much criticism I heaped on EA Games on the forums at the time, I did end up with most of the expansion packs, mostly through compilations. Near the end, before EA Desktop and the Dark Time, I discovered that various people had decrapified the Store content and put it up on the Internet Archive, which kind of opened the floodgates, if you catch my drift. I discovered that my initial fears about Origin being unhackable had been about as far from reality as you could get. Long before finding that stuff on the Archive, though; I'd discovered the Sims Compressorizer Redux when I needed a way to unlock my first-run Store content (that I got with a complimentary Simpoints card in a compilation, I might add; I never bought any DLC with real money) when it refused to install after I had to reinstall my game following a maintenance issue. The Compressorizer has a feature called "decrapify", which essentially strips the DLC of its dependencies and allows anyone to use it. So, that's what I meant when I said "decrapified Store content". A couple months ago, I discovered the scene release of The Sims 3's entire run; every expansion pack, stuff pack, and piece of expensive downloadable content. Unfortunately, my hard drive is too small to hold it now, but I'm working on that.
As I said, the photo up there is of Marina Field in Bridgeport, but you wouldn't recognise it from a stock install. Using various bits of other expansion packs and DLCs; such as the Store's basketball hoop, Supernatural's transporter booth, and a custom terrain paint I made myself, I got it looking like a true inner-city park. A step between street ball and Central Park, if you like; I made similar modifications to the large park over by the bodega. After I figured out how to make apartments, I built a new one over by the waterfront. Of course, the most time-consuming bit was the library. I don't know who built Bridgeport's library, but I can only assume that they had never seen a library before. My first impression of that lot was, "Oh cool, this is an awesome building! Cool walkway over the basement entrance! Loads of time and energy went... went into... oh, the inside looks like that. Get me out of here." Clearly it needed immediate renovation, which I did. It took me about 6 hours, but I got it done. Fortunately, I saved it and all my other renovations into the bin so I could just demolish the existing one and build the renovated one in its place on a new save file.
With all this criticism I'm piling onto The Sims 3, we have to recognise its open-world feature. They needed a hook to get players over from The Sims 2, so they made the neighbourhood completely open. Lots would load when sims passed by, meaning that, if it was a community lot, they could enter it without the player needing to wait for loading screens. This meant that the game needed to load more at one go, which would increase the neighbourhood loading time, but the time spent waiting at one loading screen was mitigated by the lack of same everytime you wanted to go to the chess table down by the green. The Sims 4 didn't even attempt to do this, leading to a very segmented, very claustrophobic experience. Going jogging in Moonlight Falls? You can jog all the way from the gym on the bluff to the Stone Troll fishing hole without needing to wait for a single loading screen! Incidentally, I worked out that there's about half a mile of road between those two locations. Jogging in Newcrest? Ha! Get bottled, idiot! You're a hamster in a cage! Certainly they couldn't do this with The Sims 2 back in 2004, but to go from the freedom of The Sims 3 to that is just inhumane.
So, how to celebrate 15 years of The Sims 3? I don't know. What do you think would be appropriate?
--2 June 2024--