The Sims 3 to follow the same glorious trail blazed by SimCity Societies

Parsimonious has posted a review on The Sims 3, a collection of articles based on what one of the site's contributors noted during a visit to a "Creator's Camp" hosted by Maxis. I have to admit that the idea of a new Sims game so soon doesn't really excite me, as I am still playing around and discovering features in my current install of The Sims 2. Frankly, I could have years worth of replay value from that game making a new version more annoying than anything else (especially as video games don't follow the pattern of, for example: word processing software, in allowing older version files to be imported into new version software).

What is even more discouraging, however, is that EA seems bent on taking the Sims franchise down the same path as they did the SimCity franchise: dumb it down to sell more copies to the people who aren't really interested in simulation and storytelling games. For me, the best SimCity remains SimCity 4 and EA has no subsequent offerings which improve on that (Monte Cristo's Cities XL looks very promising, however). It would seem that The Sims 2 will remain the definitive version of the game as the sequel seems to have too many features I like either removed or altered into a state where they are barely recognisable. The few offers that The Sims 3 does have that I would like are no enough to offset this.