I got so bored at the weekend I decided to (legally) download The Sims 3 and it took nearly the whole day so that will probably be the last time I do that! Anyway, when the game was first released, I was a bit wary of it since the Sims themselves looked awful. In fact, they are known as puddings in the fandom which is so funny. The main reason I put it off though was because I was a bit wary it wouldn’t play very well on my MBP despite meeting the requirements. I’ve been playing The Sims 2 a lot recently and it totally crashed on me again so I decided enough was enough.

Version 3 seems to be playing fine although Fan Control cranks up the fans something fierce and they are very noisy during play. I guess they are doing their job and it’s better than my poor wee MBP frying itself. I checked the temps after playing one day and the temp is actually lower than the spikes caused by the games on Facebook. I don’t play it for hours on end though so it shouldn’t be a problem. The graphics are not 100% with a few jagged edges here and there but it is no worse than TS2. I get a very slight lag when there’s a lot going on but I tend to avoid those situations anyway. Moving between houses and community lots is also fairly quick so no complaints, especially since it used to take forever in TS2.

The game itself is actually very similiar but there are quite a few changes in it. I know one of the biggest complaints from some players is if you stop playing a particular family, they get on with their lives without you so it would cause a lot of problems for those who like to have total control. You can turn story progression off though. At the moment, I’m sticking with one of the pre-made families and learning all the new ways of playing with them. You can also have more than one game saved so you can create multiple families and have them in their own separate versions of that neighbourhood.

One of the things I found the most annoying in TS2 was playing with a family, having teens fall in love and after they aged into adults, I would have to go into the love interest’s family and age the teen up so the lovebirds could be together. In TS3, that doesn’t happen. The neighbourhood families progress without your input and that means kids should hopefully age at the same rate.

There isn’t a lot of custom content out there yet, but I’m determined not to have as much installed in TS3 anyway because I used to spend more time searching for content than playing the damn game.