THE SIMS 3
For some, The Sims series is a wonderful sandbox simulation in which wacky fake people survive a gauntlet of unlikely house fires or where approximations of school crushes become spouses. For me, it’s always been about the building. I’ve removed a few pool ladders in my day, but I’ve rarely given Live Mode the time of day since the original The Sims. It’s always been about the architecture – learning to create floating houses tethered by staircases or designing mansions and realising I don’t know what kinds of rooms mansions have. Piano rooms are a thing, right?
I happened to skip over The Sims 3 – I was leaving for university and was really quite enamoured with MMOs when it launched – and now that I’ve come back to it I’ve realised that I missed out on the best building game in the entire series. The Sims 3 is bliss for a builder like me.
NEW OLD TOOLS
It’s immediately more configurable than its, starting with the neighbourhood editor. Unlike the tightly controlled neighbourhoods with pre-planned lots in the latest game, allows you to place new lots in various sizes around the neighbourhood, in any spot that the terrain allows – and the terrain sure does allow. My very first lot placement was on more of a hill than I had planned for. Building a house perpendicular to a hill wasn’t my intention, but I’m not one to cower from some impractical physics. But even the prebuilt lots in are frankly pretty brave in their choice of terrain.
