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 realizing 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 enamored with MMOs when it launched—and now that I’ve come back to it, I’ve realized 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 follow, starting with the neighborhood editor. Unlike the tightly controlled neighborhoods with pre-planned lots in the latest game, allows you to place new lots in various sizes around the neighborhood, 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.