I got my game delivered on Friday, May 28 and was very excited to get it installed and start playing. This really looked like it would be a ton of fun and it was at first. The new town that you get with this expansion, Twinbrook, is beautiful. The EA Sims team did a wonderful job creating this new town. There are lots of new things to see (I really like the "swampy" area, it's kinda creepy and spooky). They also added several new items with this expansion and I think the new laundry system adds some more realism to the game. I thought it was kind of dumb at first but it is kind of neat to see them do laundry now.
As for the careers, I started off with the new architect career since I love to build houses. It seems more like an interior designer career to me. All of the jobs were to redo some particular room so there was very little building to do. This may change after a while but it got boring doing the same types of rooms over and over so I moved on.
Next, I tried the ghost hunter. Again, this was a lot of fun in the beginning but I soon realized that I get the same types of jobs over and over. There are about 5 different types of jobs for your ghost hunter sim to perform. These range from collecting "casper" looking spirits to investigating paranormal activity inside the rabbit holes around town. This career got boring fast too. You do the same types of jobs over and over and you only get maybe 2 or three jobs each night. I had my sim do these and he was back home way before his job time was supposed to be over. Also, it didn't take me very long to reach the top of the career.
After I had been ghost hunting a while, I got my sim hitched to a sim lady who registered as a self employed sculptor. This is probably my favorite of the careers I have tried so far. She sculpts some pretty cool looking statues after her skill gets high enough. When she first started, she was sculpting chairs, toilets, and other household items and it was pretty humorous to see these. I like that she starts out with a big block of whichever material I choose for her to use (clay, topiary, wood, ice, etc.) and I get a nice surprise when she finishes. If you want a particular sculpture,you can have your sim sulpt it if he or she has already learned to make. After my sim's skill was high enough, the sculptures sell for a high simolean price too. So, between her sculptures and my ghost hunter's salary plus selling spirits to the Science Lab, they got pretty rich rather quickly.
My sculptor's lifetime wish is to maximiaze her painting, sculpting and inventing skills so I also have an inventor's table. Most of the stuff that she has invented is useless crap that you can sit around your house as nothing more than decoration (like a bobbing llama head that drinks). She has invented the digger thing but it woke up everyone in the house when I tried to use it and then the hole only had scrap in it. The digger may prove to be interesting though from what I've seen in videos online.
The only other career I have tried so far is the stylist and I hated it. I created a stylist to be married to my architect. Each time she offers to give a makeover to another sim, it opens a new CAS window where you style the sim however they request (new makeup, new hairstyle, new everyday wear, etc.). At the start of this career, no matter what I chose in CAS, the sim always came out looking horrible. It got on my nerves so I gave up on it very quickly. I don't see the point of doing anything to them if they are just going to come out looking bad.
I haven't tried any of the other careers yet. I did get a simbot and it annoys me. The sim couple had a baby and it would always go get it out of the crib, even if it was sleeping. The baby has been pretty cranky with this thing around. The sim babies have always kind of worked my nerves anyways but they are necessary if you want to play a family but they really are annoying with this thing around unless I watch him and make him leave the kid alone so it can get some sleep. It's handy to have it do the laundry and some cleaning but it keeps breaking stuff in the house when I try to have it do upgrades. It's handiness skill is high but it always breaks whatever it's working on so I hate the thing. It just kind of gets in the way.
One thing that did surprise me and I thought was a nice touch is that as your sims progress in their careers, they will get a notification that the mayor is honoring them at city hall. If they make it there in time, they get medals, commemorative plaques or even keys to the city. My ghost hunter even received something that looks like a small graveyard. It's really kind of cool looking. I forget what it's called though. I do think that the recogonition for outstanding work is pretty cool and it was totally unexpected for me.
All in all, this EP is kind of fun but it is VERY repetitive and I can see it getting old fast. There were not very many new items which adds to the sims everyday lives. There is the laundry system, trampoline and a couple of other things though. Oh, and the "Curly" hair that you get when you register the game is horrid!
If you like the new task oriented sims that it seems we have to live with now, you'll like this. As for me, I really wish they would give us an EP that gives the sims more open activities like some of the EP's of the past (Nightlife, please!). I don't care for this new style of play that the EA Sims team keeps coming up with. I miss the days of the open ended gameplay. Sure, it got repetitive too but I at least controlled more of the sims lives than I do now and that was what I liked about it. I mean the game is called The SIMS, it should focus on SIMS and not a pretty new town or repetitive tasks that are far too easy and get way too boring way too fast. For the way the Sims has now progressed (whether I like it or not) this is a decent expansion. I can have my sims do the painting, sculpting, writing, etc. and register them as self employed and still get some fun out of it though so it's not completely horrible for me either. The Sims 3: Ambitions - Expansion Pack - The Sims 3 - Pc Game - Sims'
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