No, I have not bought The Sims 3.  What I have done is given the game a try on someone else's computer.

As an owner of the previous two Sims (though not all their expansions) I can certainly appreciate the draw the games have and what makes them so engaging.  I have to say that from the previews and the pre-release media I wasn't all that impressed.  The graphics looked like they'd improved, but weren't anything spectacularly different or exciting.  There were some cool changes being talked about, but again nothing that sounded amazing.  In short, I was expecting the same experience with a new coat of paint.

I was pleasantly surprised.

No, it's not a grand departure of the established formula, but what The Sims 3 is is what the franchise should have been all along.  The ability to instantly zoom out from the house and zoom in anywhere in town and send your sim there changes everything.  No longer does it feel like I'm stuck in the house, constrained by loading screens and wait times if I want to visit anywhere else.  Now it's a simple matter of zooming out and back in and I can send my sims anywhere at any time for any reason.  It's an amount of freedom that has been sorely needed.  The ability to go anywhere really ties the experience together and makes the town you're playing in feel like a real place rather than a bunch of disjointed buildings.

Adding to the experience are some nice new features like the ability to custom design just about any piece of furniture or clothing in the game, add traits to your sims, and tell your sims how to work and when to come home.  While The Sims 3 feels very similar to its predecessors it certainly seems to finally bring all the aspects of the game together into a complete whole.  It's a fun, creative experience that's quite liberating for anyone familiar with the previous iterations.  Will I get it?  I'm still waiting for a price drop.  And if they add it to Steam like they did with Spore that would also be a big plus.  It's definitely a tempting purchase, and perhaps sometime in the future the price will be right for me to add this new Sims to my collection.

Well, I thought I had committed myself to keeping this a gaming blog, but for this I'm willing to break my rule.

If you have not seen it, go see Star Trek.  Go now.  Do not wait.  Go see it.

I've always been a fan of Star Trek, though I wouldn't consider myself a Trekkie, and I was not disappointed.  Sure there will be some Star Trek purists out there who will quibble over details and the comparative lack of scientific minutia that was previously a part of Trek, but I wouldn't mind them.  While I do hope that over time some of those cool details re-enter the universe, for now, the new Star Trek is incredible.

As a former Star Wars fanatic, I have this to say to George Lucas:
"George, the new Star Trek beats all the new Star Wars crap that has been released since 1999 hands down.  Seriously, put up any single Star Wars production from the last decade and compare it with the new Trek and Trek will win.  Heck, consider the entire body of Star Wars releases from the past decade together and as a whole they still don't compare to this one new Trek movie.  This was the kind of movie Star Wars fans were waiting for and after a decade of letdowns the fans of your original trilogy finally have something worth converting to."

So again, trust my word as a former Star Wars nut, the kind of nut who can literally recite to you the entire original trilogy from memory including music cues and sound effects and who has an extensive knowlege of the extended Star Wars universe  - Trek is now better than Star Wars.  If you're still reading this blog post you've waited too long to get up and go see it.  You're late.  Go. See. It. Now.

It was inevitable.  This is, of course, SimTropolis where everything is SimCity 4 all the time.  I cannot resist the urge any further and will be starting a new region in the near future.  So, while my previous request for game suggestions went unheeded, perhaps the incredibly vast and knowlegable SimTropolis community can help me out with this question:

Aside from the NAM, the RHW and all the awesome stuff from SimPeg (I love the ponds, waterfalls and marina stuff), what other additions would everyone recommend I make to improve my SC4 experience?  And remember, the easier it is for me to install the stuff and the fewer dependencies the better (though I'm fine with having to grab a big dependency pack or two, so long as it's not a bunch of little ones).

My gaming habits seem to follow a cyclical pattern that repeats every 1 to 1.5 years.  Though this pattern has existed since I started gaming about 20 years ago (thank you, Commodore 64 and Nintendo) I hadn't realized it until recently.  Now, however, I think I've identified the four specific stages I go through...

[More]

I have to admit I've been a bit of a demo junkie lately.  It's not like me to jump from game to game trying things out, looking to see what's out there.  Normally I find a game, obsess about it for a few months to a year, then find another game and obsess again.

In my perusal of the currently available demos I went ahead and took a look at Plants vs. Zombies.  I'd heard good things so I figured I might as well check out this 25mb game from PopCap.  I've gotta say that all those good things are true...

[More]

VALVe made Left 4 Dead freely available for anyone to try for all of yesterday and through until about 1:00 PM EST today.  Because I'm a fan of VALVe and their work I finally decided that I couldn't really lose with a free trial, so I went ahead and gave it a go.

L4D is a fantastic game (at least the co-op stuff that I played).  I started just playing at normal difficulty, but after a few rounds of that I was actually not feeling much of a challenge at all, so I ramped it up to Advanced.  Advanced difficulty really is a challenge.  Running away from your teammates and going all vigilante is a big no-no.  You will die.  Horribly...

[More]

Once again I've found myself pondering what I consider to be the single most neglected genre of game, the Base-Builder.

Over the decades there have been surprisingly few games that I would consider to be true Base-Builders.  SimCity is more along the lines of a building simulation.  Majesty and the upcoming Majesty 2 are both closer, but they also seem to fit more into the city-building and management niches.  No, what I'm talking about are games like Dungeon Keeper, Startopia and Evil Genius.  These are the true Base-Building games...

[More]

Recently I heard about a server-side mod for Team Fortress 2 that's been created called "One vs. All".  The mod was created by some folks over at PwnShop Gaming for use on their servers.  Now, I've never been a big fan of many of the mods that've been created for TF2.  Except for non-game-changing mods and sometimes the increased player counts I really think TF2 ought to be played as VALVe has designed it.  However, every now and then it's fun to kick back and go a little crazy...

[More]