In The Sims 3, they expanded on the world-building that a lot of people had to resort to hackery to carry out in The Sims 2, and often impossible in that first game. You could now edit the world with a world editor (which I'm looking for to host for download here on this website so it's never lost), as well as within the game. Sims had far more details you could edit down to jewelry, muscle mass, and **ahem**....uh assets of sorts *cought1tscough* so you could do a whole heck of a lot more in game than you used to be able to do.

The Sims 3, like all things in life, was like a trade-off. When I got it, the plusses were being able to design your Sims on a far more "macro" level, especially the clothing, and materials, and accessories, tattoo placement, what-have-you. Also, being able to make a multi-level house, or a house that's more than one basement (allowing me to create my shut-in's paradise of a multi-floor basement posing as a phone booth) deep without resorting to cheat codes. The downside was now most content creators were going to be selling objects through in-game points in an EA Sanctioned store rather than through independant websites with many items for free. This meant that my rampant expansion and building home-brew movie sets was out of the question, and most of the hairstyles and what-have-you were things I could not find. So I had to compromise for my Sims in a lot of cases, and that irked me somewhat.

Honestly, I think The Sims 3 was the start of the decline for The Sims, because The Sims 2 was far more useful beyond just it's gaming capabilities, especially with all the free objects I could accumulate that made my houses look real. I'm a bit of a weirdo when it comes to The Sims, I prefer to make almost realistic buildings, including abandoned factories full of holes, hanging out rebar, strange pieces of metal, ducts, fans, all that weird stuff. The Sims 3 restricted that sort of creativity, but not as much as The SIms 1 did, where all the cars were just useless decorations. It also sucked that they followed the lamestream andbasically removed "rock" music from the options for the game, leading me to give all my Sims "custom" music for their preference since a lot of my characters are, well, Rockers. Also, having to be forced to only have an Acoustic guitar was irritating because my Sim was supposed to play an ELECTRIC. But it's fun to mess around in, and dabble around in.

So it's not my favorite (that honor goes to 2), but it's fun otherwise. It also seems, the map editing and terrain editor was far more restrictive as well, and I had to spend simoleans to get a area that I wanted in game.