cruser42

This game is very fun, no question about it. It is also quite expensive, and as you will eventually discover, unplayably buggy. On those last two points: 1) Don't pretend that the sims 3 is the $8 that you pay for it on sale. Getting the sims 3 means getting at least half the expansion packs. Think $200. If you're willing to pay that, you'll have a very fun game, if not, play something else. 2) Many of the bugs are known to EA. There are community fixes available for some of them. EA has not implemented any of these fixes, but they have produced lots of expansion packs (with bugs of their own) instead. What this means for you: Your save game WILL become corrupted. It is only a matter of time. If you made many copies, you may be able to go to an earlier backup, and use some of the community tools to delete the bugged object(s) that are making your game crash. (Bills/presents in the mail often make the game crash, unless you use a custom tool to wipe them from your save every so often). The bugs are not minor, they WILL destroy your game and render it unplayable. The loading times are terrible. Expect to spend 5-10 minutes waiting for the game to start/load even with an ssd. EA knows that they are bad.. they even have a minigame you can play while all the loading happens! To contrast, WINDOWS boots and logs in in 15 seconds on the same computer. The problem is that EA wrote the game very poorly. The algorithms used are inefficient. This was not obvious with just 'sims 3', however, every expansion pack adds content that the game needs to sort through. Add enough content (half the expansion packs) and the game will no longer function. Even on the fastest computers. EA can (but won't) fix some of the outstanding bugs easily enough. They can't fix most of them without a full rewrite. Hopefully the sims 4 is that better rewrite.