That’s what including Emo haircuts in the game does for you: I created several large households of young weirdos in the town with the specific purpose of becoming romantic entanglement fodder for my single player-sims. I decided to experiment with an entire town populated by young metallers and alternative types. On the other hand, ageing in the Sims 3, with its new mechanic of autonomous and active Sims even when you’re not playing their household, unearths some really weird quirks in the design.

Time for a little spirituality in Riverview perhaps? Will I be able to build a church or Temple or Synagogue in the Sims 4?Īnyway, I digress. Life in the Sims is so empty sometimes that I wonder if the Sims 4 will have an afterlife Simulator beyond the basic haunting experience already included. On the one hand it can become immensely tedious to play the same poor schmuck day after day, knowing that ultimately there isn’t really any point in what you’re doing, and that eventually you will have learned every skill, bought every item (try singing that to the tune of “Climb Every Mountain”) and woohooed with every single inhabitant of your town (or is that just me?). I’ve always had a love/hate relationship with autonomy in the Sims, especially ageing. This time it’s the concept of autonomy in player controlled games, which in the Sims, includes ageing, childcare and someur moralising on the part of the game designers.

At the risk of turning this blog into some kind of Sims-centric experience (I do play other games too, I promise), I have again come across a gameplay mechanic in the Sims 3 that has taken me by surprise.

Sims 3 large address aware