Sims News

I've been geeking out lately with Doctor Who and Torchwood. I didn't have inspiration to create items in Spore for a long time. But yesterday after watching Doctor Who, I finally got back into Spore and created TARDIS (Time And Relative Dimensions In Space) as a space ship and as a city hall for my first game since I installed Galactic Adventures. Today I continued making items for my series. A TARDIS factory, house and entertainment building have now been completed and added to my new TARDIS Sporecast, click here to view it!

Ben jij ook zo gek van Sims 3 Goodies? Deze zomer liggen ze letterlijk voor het oprapen! De komende week zullen er kriskras door Nederland unieke "De Sims 3"-pakketten worden verstopt. De pakketten bevatten limited edition gadgets - deze verschillen per pakket. Zo hebben sommigen een USB-stick in de vorm van een diamant, of een kalender, of een diadeem, of een sleutelhanger, of stickers en zelfs Sims snoep! Maar bovenal bevat elk pakket de game "De Sims 3"!

Waar en wanneer?
Op het Sims 3 forum geven we steeds een dag van te voren een hint waar en wanneer je het pakket kan vinden. De hints moet je wel ontcijferen...dus succes!

"Travel the world, explore tombs, get cursed, and more," says IGN in their first look preview.

Read the full article

GC 2009: The Sims 3: World Adventures First Look

by Jason Ocampo

Travel the world, explore tombs, get cursed, and more.

We've had a lot of fun with The Sims 3 since it shipped in early June, and we're not the only ones. According to EA, there have been 3.7 million copies sold since then. The Sims 3 did a bang-up job of widening the scope of the game, giving us the ability to explore entire towns without a single loading screen. That did bring up an interesting question as to how EA would then expand the game, and we got a first look at the newly-revealed The Sims 3: World Adventures to see the expansion pack strategy.

It's sort of difficult to add whole new regions of the existing towns of Sunset Valley and Riverview since they're already so large, so the idea is to create places where your sims can travel to and visit for days or even weeks at a time. (Don't worry, because sims lifetimes are so limited, the designers are making it so your sims essentially don't age while on vacation.) They won't be able to build homes in these new areas (simified versions of Egypt, France, and China), but they will be able to pursue adventures that seem like a further evolution of the franchise. These adventures feature puzzle elements that, upon completion, unlock bigger adventures and more.

The very first trailer for World Adventures.

Here's how it works. The example we were shown was Egypt, which, as expected, is a desert environment that's filled with simified versions of the Great Pyramids, the Sphinx, and other famous Egyptian landmarks. When your sims go on vacation they are limited in the amount of time they can stay in a region by their visa level; at the earliest levels your visa might last a few days, while at the higher levels it might last a couple of weeks. A high visa level will even let you build a vacation home to stay in, because at the low visa levels you'll be staying in a base camp that's essentially a small tent lot. (Tents will also be in available in Sunset Valley and Riverside, which may means good news to those who like homeless sims.)

At the base camp is a job board that has adventures, which are beefed up versions of the opportunity missions you found in The Sims 3; the more complex adventures might consist of a dozen or more tasks chained together. Completion of these adventures unlocks more challenging adventures, raises your visa level, and so on. An example of these adventures might be exploring tombs, of which there are many in Egypt. These tombs might have diabolical traps that must be circumnavigated or be dealt with. For example, fire traps can be tackled by dousing your sim in water (say by jumping into a small pool) before entering them; the soaked nature of your clothes will protect you. Or you might need to move objects around to activate pressure plates in order to open a secret door. Your sims might dig in rubble for artifacts that can help unlock other doors. Or, you might find all the parts to a rare item and reassemble it, thus giving you a nice trophy for that shelf back home.

Typical, you're making out and someone's mummy interrupts.

You'll also have to search for triggers to reveal hidden doors or stairwells, and this is something that can be used in the regular game when designing houses. That could potentially create all sorts of new adventures in Sunset Valley or Riverview as you could download user-made houses with all sorts of secrets to uncover. Another piece of good news for house designers is a brand-new basement tool that will finally make basement making about a billion times easier than it is currently. With it, you can create basements up to four stories deep that cover the entire breadth of a lot.

Other travel regions will have their own themes. In France it's nectar making, which is the equivalent of wine for The Sims. This involves learning how to cultivate up to eight different kinds of grapes, stomping them into wine, and more. In China, it's martial arts, and there have been all sorts of improvements to the animation system so that the fighting movements are fluid and natural.

While you can't live in these new areas permanently there are many ways you can take them back to Sunset Vally or Riverview. Of course, you might meet foreign sims and marry them. Or there are a new skills and abilities that you can bring back with you, such as nectar making (the sims version of wine). And you might see foreign tourists wandering around your home town taking pictures. That's another new thing, as your sims can now take pictures that you can then mount on your walls, much like the paintings they create.

Cha-Ching!

And this wouldn't be a Sims expansion without a nice, supernatural element. This time around it's mummies from Egypt. These guys (and gals) might come out of a sarcophagus and chase after you. You can get cursed by the mummies, in which you must go to the Sphinx and perform a ritual or else your sim is doomed. You can also become a mummy; the downside to that being that you move very slowly.

World Adventures is still deep in development, but EA says it'll ship on November 17.

Check out GameSpot's exclusive first look at The Sims 3 World Adventures!

Read the Review

The Sims 3 World Adventures Impressions - Exclusive First Look

By Andrew Park

We get the first look at this massive expansion for The Sims 3.

The Sims 3 was released earlier this year, and it added new depth to the pastime of controlling the lives of little computer people as they lived, loved, aspired to lofty ambitions, and got into hilarious catfights. The first expansion for the game, World Adventures, will add three new huge areas to explore (China, France, and Egypt), along with intriguing new puzzle-based gameplay. It will also include tons of new environments, character clothing, moneymaking options, and character traits. And we got the first look.

International adventure and romance await in World Adventures.

World Adventures will let you trot the globe to three different worldwide locations, either on a simple vacation (which you can take at any time if you've got the simoleons to afford a plane ticket) or as part of an "adventure" (which is an expanded version of the opportunity system that would randomly pop up at certain points in the careers of your sims). These adventures will have you go to one of these three nations to take on quests to explore and plunder trap-filled ruins on behalf of a greedy corporation, though once you've fully explored one locale's ruins, you can decide whether you prefer to side with the company (who would prefer to bulldoze them) or with the locals (who would prefer to keep their landmarks safe).

This kind of quest- and choice-based gameplay is a first for the Sims series and makes World Adventures a lot more like a role-playing game than previous games in the series. You'll have an extensive adventure journal that will keep track of a huge number of statistics and achievements, including how many relics (a new type of collectible item) you've gathered, how many puzzles you've solved, different areas you've visited, and your sim's "visa points" (which determine how long you can stay abroad). Stats are very important to the World Adventures team--and apparently to the Sims community--and there will be a ton of them. There will also be tons of new collectible items, including new plants, seeds, and catchable fish for all the pack rats out there.

We watched a demonstration of a sim exploring a tomb in Egypt, which was filled with rubble that needed to be cleared away (and can be cleared faster with athletic skills). Behind the rubble lay a switch that opened up a stairway to a lower level, though the pyramid also had several other adjoining chambers that were obscured by a fog of war. Different chambers may contain treasure caches in urns with valuable relics, dangerous traps or, worse, threats.

We watched our explorer try to navigate a fire trap that belched flames up out of the floor, but he failed miserably. He ended up catching on fire, making a panicky run to the nearest pool of water, and diving in with a cowardly leap. However, after getting dunked, our sim was affected by the "soaked" moodlet (minor conditions in The Sims 3 that can positively or negatively affect your character), which also made him immune to fire, so he was able to safely cross. He moved on to a treasure room full of urns containing items, but he didn't realize that there was a sarcophagus at the other end of the room from which a hideous mummy emerged.

You can recover priceless relics, but you must escape the mummy's curse.

Mummies will attack your sims and drag them into a fistfight, and unless your sim is a master of the martial arts skill (which is new to World Adventures), you'll end up with the mummy's curse. This will kill you in two weeks' worth of game time unless you pay a visit to the Sphinx, which is also in the area, and plead your case. Of course, if you prefer to be adventurous, you can actually spend the night inside a cursed sarcophagus and become a mummy yourself, which will cause you to move much more slowly and die should you catch on fire. But, it will also increase your strength and limit your personal needs (so unlike regular sims, you won't need to sleep or take bathroom breaks) and otherwise make you live much longer. You'll also get new, unique mummy social interaction options. (Though if you die as a mummy, you can come back as a ghost-mummy. Yes, a ghost-mummy.)

While you begin your adventures on location at a base camp, all three international locations have their own businesses and amenities, as well as locals whom you can meet, interact with, and even fall in love with and marry, then bring home to Sunset Valley (the original Sims 3 neighborhood). Sims from these different regions are being designed to look like they belong to those regions and will have various behaviors added to their personalities under the hood that will serve the purpose of modeling their different cultures. Should your sims decide to marry someone from abroad, their children will evince these behaviors.

Along with new behaviors come new traits, skills, and side activities that can be used to generate a handsome income on the side. The three new traits each enhance the expansion's three new skills. The first new skill is martial arts, which is first learned in China; it can be practiced with a training dummy item and advanced to compete in a special martial arts tournament in that country. The second new skill is photography, which can be advanced through various skill levels to take on new styles (such as panoramic shots or sepia-tone photos), and the expansion will offer a series of photography challenges to fill an album collection. These include simpler stuff like grabbing a photo of a new father carrying a baby to esoteric, secret photo setups that will be much harder to nab.

The final new skill is "nectar making," which originates in France and involves using grapes to make non-alcoholic "nectar." If made properly, the nectar will give its imbibers a "good meal" moodlet that will make them much happier, but if made poorly, it will make its drinkers spit out the swill and bring their moods down for a while. Skilled nectar vintners can age their bottles in a nectar rack and sell aged bottles for a pretty penny, and having an advanced gardening skill (to grow good grapes) will help considerably in this profession.

Dig your way to adventure this November when World Adventures ships.

In addition to all this other stuff, World Adventures will add the three new areas to explore, each of which will be comparable in size to Sunset Valley, along with a huge number of brand-new clothing outfits. There will also be tons of scenery items, which can be used by industrious players to build out their own trap-filled ruins to explore, filled with hidden switches, buttons, staircases, traps, and treasures. There will definitely be a ton of interesting new stuff to play in an expansion that will go in a new direction for Sims expansion packs. World Adventures will be released later this year.