Setting the record straight

One of the plagues of the Internet is that anyone can be an expert on anything. Some sites are better at vetting their content than others. Unfortunately, "about.com" is not one of them. Oh, there are good articles on the site. If you trawl through enough trash, you will almost always find something valuable. As my readers have probably guessed, it is part of that 'trash' that irks me today.

I'm here to set the record straight.

The article purported to be a review of the computer game Sims 3, written by someone who seems to have played the game for all of ten minutes and may not have even had a legal copy. That's a serious charge to make, I am aware. Why would I make it? The review was dated in December of 2010 and gave the game a low score for world customization. The reviewer claimed that the game did not even give you the object placement options of Sims 2. He (or she, as the case may be) did acknowledge that there is a tool on the Sims 3 website called "Create-A-World", but he had never touched it, so he was not including it in his review.

Something that sets Sims 3 apart from previous Sims games is its updating feature. Other Sims games did deliver patches and updates, but none of the updates ever included any new content. They largely addressed bugs and issues. In Sims 3, however, if all you purchase and own is the vanilla game, the updates will give you a few of the new abilities included in the expansion packs. The update that came out with Sims 3 World Adventures allowed you to build basements, even if you did not purchase adventures. The update for Ambitions gave your sim a few extra personality traits, such as "Vehicle Enthusiast", which gives your sim extra happiness if his car is a particularly nice one. Now here is the important part when dealing with the faulty review: Sims 3 Late Night was released in late October, and its corresponding update allowed us to add and delete lots and objects. In other words, it gave us the exact same functionality as we had in Sims 2, and anyone who had installed and registered/updated a genuine copy of the vanilla game in December of 2010 would have seen it.

Secondly, it was a really bad move to give Sims 3 a low score for world customization without even looking at the Create-A-World tool, especially if the writer is going to complain about the worlds being less customizable than in Sims 2. He should have either included the tool in his review or not commented on the world creation features. In Sims 2, there was no Create-A-World tool. Instead, you were able to work with the terrain and road placement only if you owned a copy of Simcity 4, and your custom neighborhood only imported properly if you followed exactly a rather capricious set of rules. The "city" had to be of a certain size, and anything in it had to follow certain rules of placement. Of course, Simcity 4 was not free, meaning that any neighborhood customization aside from placing trees and lots required you to spend an extra $30-50.

Sims 3 Create-A-World, on the other hand, is a free tool downloaded from the website. It is designed to work with Sims 3, so it is very good at vetting its worlds and ensuring that they will import easily and accurately. It also is a true world-builder, in which you can start with either a height map or a plain stretch of land and add every single thing included in any proper Sims 3 world. It provides you with terrain sculpting, painting, routing information, object placement, road placement, lot placement, and even collectible object spawners. It runs a streamlined version of Sims 3 in which you can do lot-building that remains in the world, allowing you to release something just as complete and sophisticated as the worlds that come with the game, minus the actual Sim families residing in the actual houses.

Basically, with Sims 3 Create-A-World, Sims 3 worlds become far more customizable than Sims 2 ever had, and with the late October update, even the vanilla Sims 3 game provides you with the customizing capability of Sims 2.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to make my own world... let's have a mountain here and a beachfront over here...