So, against my better judgment, I purchased a copy of The Sims 3. Since I am a servant of My Dark Masters, I get copies of the game for ten bones. So why would I not? If it sucks, I’m out the equivalent of two beers.

I think I suck at the Sims.

There’s a lot that’s confusing to me. This may be because I’m not a Sims expert, and really only played the first version in such a manner as to wall my children into small rooms and let them die (c.f., The Cask of Amontillado). I managed to play it for about five hours before kicking in the cheat codes: I wanted a better house.

And I got one! I spent about four hours building some crazy-town style version of the Winchester Mystery House. Multiple floors that shouldn’t actually be viable according to the laws of physics. This was a lot of fun: my Sim (named “Evilla McBadass”) has the craziest house in town. And that’s cool.

The best part of the game is just allowing the Sims to do their own thing. At character creation, you define a bunch of traits and this says how they behave. I picked “genius”, “evil”, “flirty,” “athletic,” and something else I don’t care about. There’s an “Autonomy” scale in the options; set that to full. Watch what happens. Seriously: don’t do shit. The Sim will do all sorts of crazy stuff.

For example, because Ms. McBadass is “evil”, she wanders around town and knocks over trash cans. Since she’s flirty, she picks up on everyone within visible distance. I went to go take a leak and discovered that a) not only was Evilla a lesbian, but that b) she’d chatted up another woman and c) they were making out.

A few hours later and they were gonna get married. Hooray, Sims 3 for being totally down with gay marriage.

(Of course, the first wedding party totally flopped and people didn’t show up. I opted for a second, smaller party and that worked out okay. Then, as luck would have it, some other, unknown woman showed up and totally chatted up both brides, and they were both into it. So who knows. Maybe they’re all gay Mormons.)

(Also, during the wedding party, one of the guests stole one of Evilla’s guitars. /shake fist. If I find out who did that, there will be pain.)

Here’s what I hate:

Man, shit. The time spent “sleeping” and “working” just fucking blows. The game seems to be about 4 minutes of interesting gameplay punctuated by 5 minute periods where I have to sleep and/or go to work. I would like to be able to spend more time “doing shit” rather than sleeping or working.

Maybe that will change now that my Sim is married and I have two of them to play with.

Holyfuck this game is brutal to my machine. Aside from how slow it is during play, my bad-ass laptop turns into liquid puke for fully 20 minutes after I quit the fucking game. This is not a baby computer, either.

It’s stupidly addictive. I absolutely do not recommend it to normal humans for that reason alone.