Oh lord, this game is interesting, but also completely full of spectacular fail. I'm going to give a brief run down IMO on the game. A review, I guess.

Pros:

-Updated graphics
-A neighborhood to explore vs. just a home and static locations
-More customization out of the box
-Interesting career update text

Cons:

-Everything else

Basically, hold onto your cash for several months before getting this polished turd. Out of the box, the game has very little to it and several pointless items and options. There are so many bugs that the modders in the community are working overtime trying to fix the buggy piece of crap. A good example is Ultra Speed. It's suposed to be 4x speed, but is identical to 3x and sometimes 2x. No fix has been written for it, but it's a bug the community is addressing.

Another disappointment is the Sim Store, a convient way to extort $275 more from you after you purchase the game to complete it. Everything in the store is something that should have been shipped with the retail version. Instead of having dollar values on the items, you have point values. This is a clever marketing scheme to keep you blind to how much money you are actually spending. You purchase the cards that have the points, you load the points into the game, and there they sit as points... not as a reminder of the cash you spent. The points spend fast and you feel no guilt in spending them because they are points... not cash. Clever, but I see through you EA.

Beware of the genetics in Sims 3 if you are fond of them in Sims 2. The Sims 3, TS3 for short, has completely terrible and seemingly random genetics. If you mother sim has pink hair/blue skin and father sim has yellow hair/green skin, with TS3 genetics (or lack there of) you could have a black haired/pink skinned baby. Some dedicated people did some experiments (bless them for it) and found that there is a 10% chance that colors and physical traits will be random, 36% chance that they will come from the grandparents' genetics, and 54% to come from the parents' genetics. Um, excuse me? I have barely have the chance to have a child that looks like me? And a 10% margin that it will look like nothing in my entire family tree? WTF?!?

However, the personality traits are fun. It's nice having a sim who's a room mate/maid with Neat, Perfectionist, Handy, Natural Cook, and Green Thumb. They cook, clean, repair, and garden better than normal sims. And all you have to do is talk to them, feed them, and give them a bed to sleep in! It sure sets the stage for several politically incorrect settings... speaking of which.

In one of my current games, I have a (this will take up some room, bare with me) gay Native American, ex-Leader of the Free World (think President) smut novelist married to the caucasian ex-Firefighter-gone-Cop (Dynamic DNA Analyist). Takoda is on the verge of being an Elder while Fabian is barely half way to Adult. How creepy this will be very soon to have an old indian butsexing it up with a mid-20s white boy.

If I can find a way to extract Takoda, I'll share him with whomever owns a copy of the game. I spent 6 hours, with the help of my hubby, making him closely resemble Sitting Bull and a very regal nameless Native American chief who showed up in a Google Images search. I tell you, it's difficult as hell to create attractive sims much less ones that look like anyone familiar. The presets suck balls and tweaking the sliders is painful.

If you have any questions or comments, leave them here and I'll do what I can.

Also, I had a baby. She's big.