Make one character, choose any appearance you like, and apply any pattern to the clothing. Do you want a playboy who wears purple leopard print? You can have one. Shy bookworm cutie that is more adept in the kitchen than the social scene? You can have one. The game has many interesting traits to combine and play with to create whacky perfectly adjusted or perfectly maladjusted characters.

Currently I have played the game probably well over 24 hours, and given that I read the Prima guide I feel like I know it well enough. When I made my first Sim, Elizabeth, I became quickly attached to her, even clapping for all her successes and sighing for all her woes (and there were more of the latter than the former). Her dream of rock stardom crashed and burned with her marriage and the birth of her son, while her husband essentially mooched off her to pull himself through his culinary career. There is so much realism in that scenario that I began to emphasize with Elizabeth. I began to see a real life parallel between Elizabeth and real women in similar situations.

Moving on, I want to talk about the biggest change from earlier games. Load times are vastly improved over the previous Sims games. Furthermore, the seamless neighborhood with no load time between lots makes all the difference; suddenly the world is open for you to explore and discover. Hanging out with buds at the park and then taking the party home is seamless, quick, and realistic.

I liked the alternative lifestyles open to my Sims in the game. Besides living the day-to-day 9-to-5 grind, there are many other ways to make money. You can be an outdoorsy nut who fishes so much and gets so good that money is caught at the end of your fishing line. If fishing is not your thing however, you can be a farmer who grows vast quantities of his/her own stuff.

In a decent size household, having a farm IS possible, and by far profitable. Or you can collect stuff, like gems and ore, refine them, and make a decent living off that alone. There is also becoming a professional painter and/or writer; both of those are very lucrative at higher skill levels. It’s very possible for a stay-at-home-mom (or dad) minding three youngsters to be making more money painting than her (or his) spouse who is doing the conventional 9 to 5.

Careers themselves are fun and are very interactive. This is something rather different from previous games. Criminals can sneak around and steal stuff from other people’s houses, and politicians need to wheel and deal and schmooze their way to major funds for their campaigns. Careers also come with perks, Rock Stars are recognized and followed by squealing fans, and High rank army sims get saluted on the streets. I pity all you medics out there with your pagers; you will get called to work at odd hours.

On the technical side, and this is about the only downer. You will need a machine that is a little younger than four years of age. Mine is two and a half, and the game runs fine on medium-low settings but lags a little at large parties. You will need a machine with a lots of power; a six year old machine, as advertised in official videos, will not do unless its a premium machine. For those like me who own ‘boxed’ deals by HP, and know bupkiss of customizing, settings are everything.

Ultimately, if you have a machine that can handle the game, I highly recommend Sims 3 on so many levels. It’s utterly engrossing. My personal tip is, whether you get the Collector Edition (and the USB plumbob memory drive rocks! I have one), you might think of also investing in the strategy guide.

Sims 3 is the kind of game where you will constantly be going back and forth to look up where to find this and that, and unless you have a memory like a steel trap, a guide is handy. For the rest of us who have fallible short memory, the guide comes with a large map of Sunset Valley (the main neighborhood) indicating all the places when you can find collectibles, and there is lots of stuff to collect.

	System:	PC
	Genre:	Simulation
	Experience:	24+ hours

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