Salutations, traveler of The Internets! Welcome to William's Bloody Hell, so named after our founder, Sir Bloody William.
He is seen in the likeness above in a rare, 19th century woodcut. This
image was rumoured to have been
commissioned after a bout of unpleasantness
in the White Chapel district of London. Do enjoy your stay and peruse our many, varied offerings, much of which cannot be found elsewhere!
:: The Sims 3 ::
by William the Bloody
Okay, The Sims. For those of you who don't know about the Sims games, I'll attempt to describe it. Basically, you create a little person, or "Sim". You design how they look, their hair face, eyes, body type, clothes style, all that. But you also decide on five personality traits for them which can range from having a green thumb, to being friendly, or a kleptomaniac, or artistic. Then based on these traits you can select a life long dream for this Sim which can range from being a grand master at chess to being an acclaimed author or a sports champion. Once you have your Sim (or Sims, up to eight of them can live together) created, you are given an allotment of money with which you can either buy an existing house or you can buy an empty lot and build your own. Once you have your Sim(s) in their house, you can then get them a job, any in a range of fields, in order to earn more money to keep your Sim in food and to pay the bills which get delivered regularly. Your Sims can build skill sets which can make them better at their jobs or hobbies and also make them closer to fulfilling their life's dream. Every so often, you Sim will have a "wish" pop up that they'd like to complete. If you select it and they do indeed complete it, they will be awarded points (fulfilling a life's dream awards a great amount of these points) which can be used to purchase rare, interesting, and useful additional traits or items. You could make your painter "extra creative" which makes their paintings turn out nicer. But, your Sim needs you to tell it to complete tasks in order to get anything productive done. Your Sim won't get up from bed in time for work unless you tell it to, they won't cook dinner unless directed by you, or learn to improve its skill sets without you indicating it to study or practice the skill, and so on. Your Sims come with six meters to tell you their "mood": hunger, social, hygiene, fun, bladder, and energy. If your Sim is doing well, its meters will be green, getting low is a yellow-ish, getting bad is orange, and REAL bad is red. For example, if a Sim's bladder meter were yellow, you should have it use the toilet, because if you don't your Sim would likely pee its pants. Likewise, a Sim with a red energy bar will likely collapse asleep in the middle of whatever it is doing unless told to go to bed during an orange meter. Your Sims can interact with each other and the computer generated Sims within the game. Your Sims live in a little town, so they have next door neighbours, coworkers, et cetera, which they can become friends, enemies, or a romantic interest with if you decide to do so. Your Sims will naturally age, and when they get elderly, will die of natural causes, which will make the Grim Reaper appear. After your Sims dies, a gravestone shows up which if you leave it out, will allow your dead Sim's ghost to haunt the immediate vicinity at night, but no longer under your control.
The Good: The level to which you can personalize your Sim is pretty impressive. Every physical facial trait has a list you pick from but each of these items will allow you to get up close and make major adjustments if you want. And this goes for eyes, eyebrows, jawline, ears, nose, and everything. For body type you can slide on a scale in between fat and thin and also a second scale weak and strong, which creates a variety of looks. You can even adjust what you want your Sim's voice to sound like! There is a decent selection of prefabricated clothes, but you can modify just about anything in this game, not just clothes, but also furniture and wall paper and floors, etc, to be virtually any texture or colour in the game. So if I wanted a shirt with a woodgrain texture but coloured blue, I could have it. If I wanted curtains with green bricks, I got it. I have to give them props for allowing colour selection in three ways: off of a swatch chart, a colour wheel and with hexidecimal codes! I have to tell you, the hex codes come in REAL handy if you want to perfectly colour coordinate an outfit or a bedroom! It's a petty cool feature that most of the skills you have your Sims learn are not only helpful, but profitable, too! Say your Sim takes up gardening, well you could grow food to eat which save you grocery money, but if you grow MORE than you can eat, you can sell the rest for a tidy profit! When guitar playing Sims get good at it, they can play for tips in public areas and earn money while having fun! It is worth mentioning that you can have a game of The Sims 3 continue ad infinitum if want by raising Sim babies. You can either adopt a baby or your Sims can have romantic relationships and birth their own babies "the old fashioned way." If as your Sims get older you keep on having them have babies, your game will keep on going, generation after generation. I like how "easy" they make parts of this game like how if you don't feel like going to the grocery store, the ingredients you need to cook will automatically be available to use (for a small fee), and transportation anywhere isn't too bad as taxi's are automatic and free, and also every character (child and up) has its own mobile phone. And I love that Sims can learn useful things by watching television!
The Bad: I have so far refused to use any cheat codes, and man I have to say there are some things I wish the game would do without needing them (the "place object in" cheat looks so practical, I'm so close to rethinking my avid "no cheat" policy)! It's too bad that most of the home decor items are not modifiable. I would love to be able to adjust the colours on picture frames or what colour the flowers in a vase are, but I can't. Every so often, your Sims will be presented with "opportunities" which if you accept them and them complete them in a timely manner will give your Sim various boosts. I like the idea of these, but I WISH they gave you ALL of the details when they present it to you. Like certain opportunities can only be done at certain times on certain days, but they don't tell you this up front, so you see it and agree to it and then find out you can only do it on Thursday between 2 and 3 pm and there's a good chance you will have forgotten about it by then or that's when your Sim has to work, or whatever. I also wish friendships weren't so difficult to maintain. If you make a friend, you have to call them or hang out with them every couple of days or they stop being your friend. I understand the idea behind that, but the charisma skill is dependent upon creating a large number of friends in order to get better at it, so having to call so many people all the time can get tough. I would have liked a little more variety in the music skill. Right now, the only instrument available in the whole game is the acoustic guitar. I like guitar music just fine, but I would've liked the option to choose from like three options or something. When creating a Sim's appearance, it would be nice to able to adjust HEIGHT as well as body type! Oh, and every once in a while my Sims don't obey what I set out for them to do and it really gets my goat when they don't mind me!
Overall, it may sound like an odd game, but once you give it a good try, it can quickly turn into one of the most addicting games you've ever played. It is really one of the ultimate escape tools: micromanaging the lives of a Sim family. I am presently several generations in on my Sim family and it's STILL fun, only now the family has been around for so long they are stinking rich and THAT sure is fun. Even as I'm writing this I'm thinking about playing it some more...
A+
