Silkroad Online Forums

For most of the past decade, The Sims franchise has maintained a permanent presence on the Top 10 sales charts of PC games. Often, it occupied multiple slots on those charts. That's because for every hardcore gamer who scoffs at The Sims, there are many more non-traditional gamers who love the series. Yes, many of those people are female. That makes it easy for some to simply describe The Sims as the equivalent of a virtual dollhouse, but that oversimplifies things. The Sims, like almost any game, is about living a different life than your own. Some people escape reality by diving into MMOs. Others jump straight into shooters. It turns out that whole bunches of people turn to The Sims. And in this regard, The Sims 3 won't disappoint. With the third chapter in the series, EA has introduced some overdue growth and made some bold changes, yet much of this brave new world's potential remains relatively untapped.

I've been a fan of The Sims since the very beginning; Will Wright's idea of letting you control virtual people in their everyday lives taps that desire that we all have to be ruler of the world and tell everyone else where to stuff it. The Sims is the closest that many of us will ever get to Ed Harris' character in The Truman Show; that's the movie where he plays the director who gets to "cue the sun" and manipulate events around the unsuspecting Truman Burbank, played by Jim Carrey. The thing is, Truman doesn't realize that the quaint, coastal town that he lives in is in fact a carefully staged set and that his every move is caught on camera and beamed to the outside world. The Truman Show is an apt description for The Sims 3, because it too takes place in a quaint, coastal town that your sims can go out and explore. Yet wherever they go, you'll be carefully watching.




As you've probably heard, the big change in The Sims 3 is the fact that it no longer revolves around a single household lot at a time. Your sims can go anywhere in town at any time without pause. This is a very welcome change, because the gameplay doesn't feel claustrophobic anymore; you're no longer spending 95-percent of your time looking at the same house and then having to sit through lengthy loading screens for those moments when you send your sims out into the world. This freedom is pretty liberating; I spent quite a bit of time at first just switching between my characters just to watch the camera pull back on the town and then zoom in on the location of the next character. It doesn't take too long before you get used to the change, and it's hard to imagine how we played The Sims before. Now it seems totally natural to send one sim to the park, while another goes shopping downtown, while another stays at home; you can switch between all three effortlessly and almost instantly. Lives feel more naturally lived this way. You don't even need to worry much if you neglect your sims because they default with a high level of free will; leave them alone and they'll take care of themselves and keep themselves amused. It can be fun just to let go of the mouse, sit back, and watch what they do on their own.

There's also a much greater sense of a living, breathing world. You see other sims going about their daily lives; sims still age and die, and after a while new sims show up, giving a sense that people are coming and going. The sims themselves are now powered by much more sophisticated psychological systems than found in earlier games; they might be party animals or childish, flirty or brave, neurotic or clumsy, and more. You might see maids who are secretly kleptomaniacs (never a good combination) or health nuts constantly working out. I like watching the neighborhood at night and seeing the cat burglars skulk around the houses and night owls going about their thing.

It's easy to visit other sims' homes and see what they're up to.
Life on the home front is also much improved. Your sims no longer have to constantly run to the bathroom like in the old games; now you can send them about once per day, and there are ways to reduce that even more. That gives you more time to play with, and at its heart The Sims is very much a time management game where you juggle daily and lifelong goals. There's the short-term need to keep them fed, social, and happy, but then there are long-term needs that require them to improve their skills in order to gain a promotion, work out to get into shape, read a cookbook learn a new recipe, tend to an elaborate garden, or maintain friendships before they fray. There's never enough time in the day, so you must learn to set and prioritize goals.

This all translates into a more elegant gameplay experience, one that doesn't feel as constrained or confined as before. Yet if there's one complaint, it's that The Sims 3 doesn't really explore what all this freedom can offer. In many ways, you're still doing the same tasks as before. For example, when your sims race off for work you now have the luxury of being able to follow them all the way to their workplace before they disappear for hours at a time. Imagine if EA could make everyday work as interesting as everyday life in The Sims? You could experience challenges trying to earn a paycheck. Or perhaps the designers could embed adventures and mysteries within the world for you to uncover? Maybe there could be some MMO-style quests that NPCs could grant? The potential is here to create a much grander and richer experience, and it'll be interesting to see what route EA takes with the expansions going forward.

Code: Select all

Aren't you glad Team Fortress 2 didn't wind up looking like this? Valve has created quite a game with the long-awaited Team Fortress sequel, bearing many similarities to its predecessor, though incorporating enough changes to make it feel fresh. The most obvious aspect, which you may have noticed from any of the screens and video posted, is the visual style. Even after getting sucked into probably too many hours of play in the beta over the past few weeks, we're still amazed at the art design, both in how it looks and how it animates.

But let's not get too carried away with the graphics. It's a game, after all, and the most important factor is how it plays and if it's entertaining. It's interesting to see both Team Fortress 2, which has been in development on and off for some seven years now, and Splash Damage's Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, which has seen its own share of setbacks and delays, finally come out right around the same time. Their nearly simultaneous retail release presents and interesting situation for you, the consumer, as to how to spend your cash. You may fondly remember your days in Return to Castle Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, dropping air strikes on hapless attackers and eagerly charging into bunkers to spout forth deadly plumes of flamethrower fuel. Yet you can't forget your days with Team Fortress Classic, or even further back with the original Team Fortress Quake mod, with its now painfully dated character models but compelling team-focused online play.


There's really no right answer in this case as to which game is ultimately better. It's merely personal preference. Quake Wars is assuredly the more complicated game. For those uninitiated in the ways of Enemy Territory, the scope, dynamic objectives, speed at which the tide of battle can turn and the number of things you need to quickly consider when that happens, and user interface can be rather daunting. After learning the ins and outs it's clearly an excellent product, but it lacks that immediate, irresistible appeal so prominent in Valve's Team Fortress 2. And accessibility may very well be the deciding factor in determining which product users prefer. Regardless, it's an excellent time to be a gamer, since as tough as it may be to pick one or the other, making either choice rewards you with a well designed and highly entertaining title.

Like in Team Fortress Classic (TFC), Team Fortress 2 has nine character classes: Spy, Pyro, Soldier, Heavy, Medic, Sniper, Demoman, Scout and Engineer. Each class' abilities on the battlefield have been streamlined, which, along with the graphics, is what makes Team Fortress 2 so much more accessible than TFC. No longer do you have Engineers running around with railguns and EMP grenades. Medics can't "infect" the other team, Spies don't have tranquilizer darts, and none of the classes have hand grenades.

In TF2, each class has roughly three main ways of attacking - a primary weapon (the Heavy's minigun, Pyro's flamethrower, Engineer's sentry gun, etc.) and secondary (various classes have shotguns, others pistols, while the Demoman has a highly effective mine thrower) and melee weapons (the Scout's bat, the Medic's bonesaw, and so on). Though classes now possess fewer means of attacking, the resulting gameplay feels much more focused. Each class has a very clearly defined role and the means to ensure they perform successfully. The only limiting factor is, of course, how effectively your team meshes together.


If your Engineers aren't guarding their structures, Spies can wipe them out in seconds with a few sapper charges. If your team is full of Heavies and Soldiers but lacks Medics, you're not going to get very far. If you're playing a capture point map without any Scouts on your team, you might as well just leave the server or start berating your squadmates until a few switch classes. The Medic, though, seems to be the hinge on which all gameplay balance swivels. For TF2 they've been given a health hose, which blasts out a restorative stream at friendlies within range and "sticks" to them as long as you keep the fire button depressed. As you heal injured teammates, or "overheal" to 150 percent health, an ubercharge meter builds in the bottom right of the screen. Unleashing this renders both target and Medic invulnerable for a few seconds, which is sometimes the only way to break through chokepoints populated with Heavies, Medics, and multiple tier three sentry guns.

Even though Medics may be the most vital to a team's success, the other classes remain useful. Scouts, who are now rather deadly, are far and away the fastest, and their ability to double-jump and change direction in mid-air makes then all the more difficult to hit. Spies, in addition to being able to one-hit kill backstab the enemy, cause general chaos among enemy ranks. If your opponents know a spy is running around, they'll waste time and lose focus by shooting at their own teammates to try and reveal a disguised culprit.

Pyros tend to be the most effective spy detectors, and can be frequently seen doing fiery pirouettes in 2Fort matches all over the beta servers, as a spy incognito will betray his cover by bursting into flames upon contact with the burning spray.In a September 26 Steam update, friendly fire was removed from TF2, which was definitely a good move. Friendly fire ruins much of the game considering the close-quarters maps combined with the wide area of effect attacks of Heavies, Pyros, Demomen, and Soldiers. Without FF, teammates are free to shoot each other, since if they bleed health, they're a spy.

Read more: http://pc.ign.com/articles/826/826080p1 ... z11bMxnqJh