docwhat's blogSims 3: Yay!
The Sims 3 for the Mac (and I guess Windows too, but who uses that?) and the iPod Touch (and I guess the iPhone too, but who uses that?) was released yesterday.
I got my copy of The Sims 3 (Collector’s Edition) yesterday and spent a happy evening playing it.
The game is much better than The Sims 2; you have a real sense that you’re part of a larger world. You can drive, jog or bike places. You can visit people in the park, go read a book at the library, or go shopping. Everything is connected.
The install took forever and I wasn’t amused to find an update waiting immediately but that’s just a one-time cost; I’ll live.
The collector’s edition came with a cute Plumbob USB drive. It’s shiny and
green: what’s not to like? I put photos on flickr for the curious.
The biggest change is the way the whole “buy downloadable content” is now integrated much more tightly into the product. It is very obvious that they are expecting to make money with lots of micro-payments. They have a store and an exchange for user uploaded elements.
I haven’t figured out how to make custom elements, but I’m sure something will be revealed soon.
The copy protection requires the DVD to be in the tray at all times which I hate. I will probably download a no-cd hack when one becomes available. It’s possible I won’t need one since it runs in a Transgaming windows environment and mostly likely is not talking to the hardware directly.
As a Mac user the fallout from SecureRom in SPORE wasn’t that big a deal, though some of the initial limitations were not nice.
I also went and got The Sims 3 for the iPhone as well. It seems to be much more stripped down that the full version but still seems pretty capable. I haven’t played enough yet to tell, though.
Unrelated to EA is that I went to buy the strategy guide PDF from PrimaGuides using the 25% coupon included in the game. I thought I’d see if using an electronic copy was better or worse than a paper copy.
The stupid website wouldn’t accept the discount code and it kept adding on this bogus “Extended Download Service” which was just a way of saying, “if you lose your PDF we’ll let you download it again for up to 2 years.” What bullshit.