After a lot of passive tries (maybe 1-2 times each week) after I bought the expansion last month, I have finally succeeded in playing the World Adventures Sims 3 expansion for more than enough time to send my sim(s) on vacation, sit down in the market and play to a cobra before I crashed. Don’t get me wrong, I still crash constantly, and it has required the AwesomeMod auto saving my game every 15 minutes to be able to have any sense of security in-between my random Error 12s, Error 13s, or the unexplained… just random shut down for no reason.
That has to be my biggest complaint with the game. Google any of those errors, and you’ll be slammed with a multitude of forum posts, as I’m certainly not alone. Modded or un-modded, fresh install after Windows 7 (previous Vista), or reinstall… the problems have persisted. It’s a definite frustration, as I’ve loved the Sims series since the beginning… but 3 feels to be the glitchiest of them all. The simple fact you have to essentially “hack” the game just to add any modifications more than houses or fashion is another major frustration. Why it couldn’t be just a simple package drop into the My Documents/EA folder like the previous two games were is completely beyond me.
Now despite all that, World Adventures is a lot of fun. I’ve so far sent my new sim (because my previous legacy families are long gone through the reinstalls), Robert Swarenson, to all three locations (Egypt, China and France). I in fact had him father children in both China and France, but since the French baby momma was already married, he opted to bring his Chinese family home with him. His daughter Yubi has settled in fairly well, despite being a loner and hating how many people are at school. The mother, Adeza has settled into managing the cooking, working on her various skills, and has a part time job at the grocery store. And despite my best attempts, the two never have the option to even date one another pop up, they seem satisfied just living with one another and keeping to romantic interests.
The traveling is a lot more interactive than I thought it’d be, considering I’m going off Sims 1 and 2 vacation expansions as experience. Each location has several tombs to explore, and each tomb reminds me of RPGs. Requires puzzles to navigate, several chests and treasures to loot, traps to avoid, mummies to randomly pop out and frighten (or possibly curse) you. You can pick up “adventures” which are all quests you have to complete… and they vary from just chatting with locals to tomb exploration. From each location you can learn two local songs as well, each quite catchy… They’ll sing these songs while they bathe, cook, or just idle. Under The Hot Desert Sun, and Ping and his Checkers seem to be the two I hear the most. The two Chinese girls also have “asian culture” passive trait, and choose to eat with chopsticks instead of any other utensil. The amount of detail just really quite pleasantly surprises me.
But this is only really my first impressions so far, as I’ve only really been able to get a few days worth of playtime down. For every hour I’m at the PC with Sims running, I’m maybe only actually playing 20 minutes of that in-between the crashes. So many pauses makes for very difficult fluid playing, especially if I crash while saving and lost the last 15 minutes of progression. Being forced to constantly repeat the gameplay is discouraging at best.
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