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Written by Oltman on Wednesday 17 Nov 2010
Death and taxes…and now Sims expansions. Yes, you can be certain of all three. But now with its third full-on expansion (no, I don’t count those extra goodie packs as expansions) just how much is left for the series? How innovative can you get? What will make young teens buy yet another add-on? Easy, just add some vampires.
The Sims 3: Night Life (SNL for short, and that is more than a Freudian slip) focuses on expanding your Sim’s nightly escapades. To start you get a brand new neighbourhood named Bridgeport. For the first time you now get skyscrapers in your town and, if you have the money, you can buy the penthouse suite and really live it up. The town is split into three distinct zones: the skyscraper city that has a Manhattan feel to it; a rich neighborhood in the hills with huge mansions; and the docks district where you live if you have no money and no aspirations.
You can move one of your existing Sims families into the new neighborhood, or create a new one. During the creation phase you will notice two new additions to your customization screen. The first is a muscle definition slider, allowing your Sim to be rippling with muscles, or as smooth as a baby. The second addition allows you to change the breast size of you Sim, allowing a Dolly Parton look to be back in fashion.
The neighbourhoods contain new lots to move into and build your dream house. To make these houses even more special than before you also have a whole range of new items to place in your house, most of which are related to your Sims night life (hence the title, I assume). Things like hot tubs where they can skinny dip in are the flavour of the week.
A few careers are also added, and some current careers have more branching paths you can take to be more appropriate to the whole night life theme. As a musician you can now start a band and jam with fellow band members. Alternatively you can create groups of friends and invite them all out together. When you leave a pub or club, the rest of the group will follow until you break up the gang.
As your careers progress you gain popularity in the form of celebrity stars. The more celebrity stars you have, the bigger chance you have of being recognized on the streets. This in turn causes the paparazzi to follow you around and be annoying. Of course you can choose to be the paparazzi and annoy the celebs instead. One of the perks of being a celebrity is that celebrities get discounts at shops. As if the world was not unfair enough, the rich get discounts!
Another perk of the rich and the famous is a live-in butler to replace those unprofessional cleaning staff. The butler will cook food and leave it in the fridge for you, clean up after you, let your guests in if they ring the doorbell, and even be a friend to those celebs who have no real friends. However, you need to fire a butler before you can have any sort of relationship past friendship with them. See, don’t mix business with pleasure!
Celebrities are very vein and befriending them is harder than normal Sims - they are only really impressed with your wealth. In the early game you will not have many celebrity friends due to your lack of funds. As your riches and notoriety grows, so will your friends list. Throwing parties are now truly epic, with celebs and paparazzi showing up at your doorstep. Keeping them all entertained is a tough job and the butler helps greatly to serve their needs.
Finally, another staple of the Night Life theme is vampires. Yes, you can now befriend vampires, and ask them nicely to turn you. They will bite you, and your hunger meter will change to a thirst meter. Your diet will now consist of blood, which can handily be drunk from bottles and boxes, or from a friend. You can turn your friends into vampires if you wish, although I could not be bothered to see how many I could turn to the dark side.
It’s obviously not a Blade type of vampire character, but rather more a Twilight saga vampire. You can walk around during the day, and rather than die, you simply get your mood down. Thankfully you don’t glitter in the sun or I would have uninstalled the game on the spot.
The addition of celebrities adds a nice twist to the game, but celebrities and night life spells bad behaviour. Skinny dipping, promiscuity and other bad behaviour, coupled with the enlarged breast size (amazingly all celebrities had huge breasts…) makes this less of a child friendly game than it used to be. The ease with which it is to “woohoo” with somebody does not encourage good moral values.
Yes, we have another Sims expansion that adds less to the game than previous iterations, but is still fun to play. By now the amount of content is getting so much that you probably won’t use half of it. But then a true Sims fan will never have enough, and EA will be ready to provide us with our next fix. The bad behaviour is not encouraging for parents looking to get this for their kids, but for the naughty adult there could be something there.
The good: Become a celebrity and live the good life.
The bad: Become a celebrity and live the bad life.
The ugly: Dolly Parton should have registered a trademark look and she would be rich by now!
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