Sims 3 = bugfest

My wife bought the game today and all I can say is I cannot believe it actually made it through QA.

Serious bug where it freezes my computer and mouse clicks just result in a beep. Finally after a bit the whole monitor just shuts off and goes into standby. Come back up and check temps and everything is just fine. Granted it's about 1 or 2 min to come back up but the temps are fine.

After a few of these I go to the forums and you would not believe how many people either cannot install, play, or can only play for an hour or so before it crashes.

Quite annoying.

Well, it looks like you and many others are paying for the privilege of being a Beta tester for them.

Sims isn't by EA Games by any chance is it?

Happy to say that I haven't had any problems with it, so far. Unfortunately, the disadvantage of having a fully working game like this is, now, just a few days after I bought it, I've already sick of it. The series really has gone away from Will Wright's dream to what is now a very female-oriented dollhouse game. The strategy and micromanagement elements have all been taken away and what is left is just a bare dollhouse.

I can't say I didn't expect this and I'm happy to say that I didn't spend a dime on the game itself... fortunately it was all paid for by a long lost gift card that I found when cleaning out some boxes from a year ago.

Yes I've noticed the management side of things is all but absent. I don't think my Sim went to the restroom for at least a day. Maybe they did this to emphasize the social aspect of the game instead of micro-management of your Sim which did get quite annoying.

It seems like new video drivers along with setting my video card fan to run at 85 to 90 percent while in-game fixed the crash. It did not crash after I did this but I was also saving frequently so perhaps that also was part of the reason it did not crash. Who knows? I know nothing about the codeline or the paths each interaction takes so anything I say is just a guess. I have a very hard time believing this game taxes my GTX 260 OC 55 when games like FarCry 2 and FSX run without a hitch.

Also it is very apparent to me where the expansion packs will be. Perhaps they could have made it a little less obvious where their next cash cows are going to be in the game. In Sims 2 you could not tell from the gameworld what areas the packs would address - save for the Pets and all.

And can't they make a Sims game now with Pets already in it? One huge problem I'm beginning to see with the series is they release so many expansion packs for the previous iteration that to release another version of the game without all these amenities makes the player feel like they have taken about 10 steps backwards. However the new seamless city exploration is a definite plus. Half the time in the other games I never went to the city b/c it took so long to load.

The curse of PCs... Zillions of hardware configurations, video, audio and input devices. Push them hard enough and chances are you'll shake out a driver bug.

It's still bad QA.

Makes you wonder if they don't care anymore, and realise that they can simply "patch" after the public has tested it. Which turns out to be cheaper than QA.

Seems they're in it for the cash more than anything :-). From all the guest lecturers from large gaming companies we have at our Uni, it would seem the PC as a gaming platform is just "okay, well we might as well release it for PC too", and they just concentrate on the consoles.

No issues on Windows 7 so far, but Leopard is a different story (not that I expected it to be as good on the mac anyway). It runs alright, but there are no shadows for some reason, and the performance is noticeably worse than on Windows.

*sighs*

Maybe one day, they'll realise that using Cider to "port" a game just isn't acceptable.

Sims my ass! How many of you remember Little Computer People on the Commodore 64? By Activision if I remember right. I could spend all of ten minutes having that little guy play the piano and then eat his dinner and then watch TV and then....well that was it really.