I love The Sims
Undeniably inspired by Giant Bomb’s “13 Deadly Sims” segment, a while ago I felt the need to hunt down wherever we’d packed The Sims 3 Pets for PS3. I understand that the PS3 is a bit dated now, but I still totally recommend it. There aren’t horses and stuff in this version, but the cats and dogs are still more than enough to keep you occupied.
This probably won’t qualify as much of a review, but basically, I want to show you some of the stuff that I got up to on here recently. It’s harder to get screenshots from the PS3, so I did things the easy way and just took photos on my phone. This, however, makes the colours and quality somewhat off. If you are considering this game but are put off by the images, fear not, they look much better than I’ve made them out to be here.
We had an old game save on this back in 2011 or 12, but eventually life got in the way and we stopped playing it. I originally intended to load-up that same save again, but when I did, I had no idea what I was doing. It had been too long, so I couldn’t remember what any of our aims and goals were with our Sims. Also, we’d managed to fill the fire meter all the way up on our lot, and even deleting things wouldn’t let us buy anything new.
So, we just made a new game, with updated Sim depictions of us. I did make Freya again, but I named her Buttface (something I call her a lot) and also a cat named Bonkers, which is itself a reference to an auto-generated name for a cat in The Sims 2.
After a while I figured out how to use the unlimited money cheat on the PS3, so that I could try to build our dream house without saving up for a billion years.
Everything on The Sims is done with a grid of squares. The squares don’t look to be an entire metre, so in the first house I made, I did 2 large squares for each metre. This resulted in a GIANT HOUSE. For the second attempt on another lot, Will looked up how much real space a square is meant to represent in feet, and then converted it to metres for me so I could make the rooms look more realistic.
Especially the minus signs when someone said a bad thing. But the positive ones would also be handy!
Wolf spiders are pretty much the outdoor version of of the gigantea and nooooooo thank youuuuuuuu to that.
I had to briefly take Sims and Pets off the “Immortal” setting in order for them to age-up. But I remembered to put it back on afterwards!
I’m going to leave things where they are now that Will and me are proper adults, our pets are adults, and our kid is a young adult.
I was surprisingly traumatised when our house experienced a burglary. Austin stayed asleep on our path and did bugger all about it, and Buttface was asleep next door in Austin’s kennel, so missed the whole thing. My Sim, for some reason, would not apprehend the burglar despite being a cop. I had to wait for a different cop!
I’ve since thought (too deeply) about it and wondered if, because my Sim was on level 7 of the Law Enforcement career at the time, which means being undercover, she didn’t arrest the burglar because it would have outed her in the criminal circles. But that’s way too intricate for The Sims, it was probably just a bug.
Anyway, I not only stuck up a bunch of extra burglar alarms, we also adopted another pet, a corgi (as close to one as you can get on The Sims) named Naboo. I’m trying to get him to build up the Aggressive trait (which involves a lot of chasing the postman) so that he will run after burglars of his own accord.
It’s hard to pinpoint what I love about The Sims, but I think a lot of it lies in the sheer absurdity of the human interaction. When our family first moved into the lot, neighbours came by to introduce themselves, and one of them just pulled out a guitar and started playing, to which Will’s Sim responded by angrily shouting “Eeeeeeeee!”
The only thing I majorly dislike about this version, is that it doesn’t have the option to make the Sim run around and click on things directly with the controller joystick, like the Sims 2 Pets game on the PS2 does. I prefer to control characters that way, rather than the sort of point-and-click thing going on in this version.
But, the definite plus of this version is that you can control the pets’ actions themselves, rather than just observe them.
Overall, you should let the joy of The Sims into your life.
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