The Problem With Sims & Spore Expansions

Ever since I saw the first expansion pack for Sims 3 this has been bothering me. What the hell is wrong with EA today? They keep creating expansions and spin-offs for Sims 3 and Spore alike that make no goddamn sense. Sure Spore Galactic Adventures worked out for what it was, but that doesn’t mean it’s appropriate to essentially take that same game and apply it to The Sims.

Yeah! The first Sims 3 expansion is basically Vacation meets Galactic Adventures. Send your Sims to Egypt or some other exotic locale and then proceed to fill it with fog, make booby traps and then direct your clearly ethnocentric Sim to rob a foreign country of its ancient artifacts. WHY? The Sims is not built for this kind of malarky. I could perhaps see this as a 5th or 15th expansion pack (you know when they’ve run out of ideas) but how about we start with the ability to build businesses and actually go inside of them, EA?

Like most people half the time I only buy expansions for the more minor extra gameplay and content anyway. With Sims 2 I didn’t buy University to send my Sims to college, it was long and tedious and basically gave you two whole neighborhoods to keep track of at once, I got it for the expanded furniture and clothing. I didn’t buy Open for Business to have my Sims run businesses, which was also long and tedious and more trouble than it was worth, I primarily wanted it so I could finally build working restaurants downtown.

The Sims should stay simple. You have a Sim, or Sim family, and you have them live their lives in an exaggerated, cartoony and often hilarious manner. You focus on their interactions with each other, advancing their careers etc. So instead of over-complicating the gameplay like this can’t we just enhance what’s already there? More traits. More objects to interact with. More careers. That’s all we need.

As for Spore, it’s not the expansions so much but the endless retarded spin-offs that no one in their right mind could think would make money. It’s sort of an open secret that Spore was dumbed down from what it was intended to be in order to be more marketable, but even the way they’re trying to market it now is all kinds of stupid. So you destroyed my dreams of a next-gen version of SimEarth so that you could try to turn an amusing but dumbed down game about alien monsters into a franchise empire. Thanks, EA.

First there was the Spore Comic Book Creator. Even the Spore website is too embarrassed to list this one. What possible use does this have? Oh? Take your Spore screenshots and turn them into comic books? Because you couldn’t possibly do that with a number of other cheap comic book making software or even I dunno, say, Gimp or Photoshop? Why the hell would you want to make a Spore comic book in the first place?

On top of that after the first DS game failed they’re gonna go ahead and make another one anyway, not to mention one for the Wii as well. The Wii one might work out, but I assume alot of these spinoffs are going to be like the PS2 Sims games, they’re just not as good as the PC version.

And even Galactic Adventures didn’t make that much sense as an expansion pack. Like I said, it works for what it is, and it’s cool they clearly took suggestions from the suggestion thread in the Spore forums (though mostly from the “we should have GUNS! Pew pew!” crowd and less from the “here’s how you can make the existing game better” crowd.) Galactic Adventures is more like a separate entity, the main game only serves as a portal to it, but it isn’t part of and doesn’t add anything to the existing gameplay.

And like I said in my Galactic Adventures review, the level building is a great aspect but it’s also extremely cumbersome. I’d rather see them improve on the Creature, Tribal and Civ stages really, add more things to do, add more options than just being kill-everyone-carnivore, hippy-herbivore and buy-your-way-out-of-trouble-omnivore. The Tribal stage especially has the potential to be great, but as it stands right now is the one I always cheat through just to get it over with, mainly because it’s boring.

I hope with Activision as the new big bad of the gaming world and EA learning its lesson as of late now that its sales and customer loyalty have suffered we’ll see expansion packs that are created more out of necessity and creativity than some out-of-touch cynical marketer’s warped idea of what the unwashed masses will blindly rush out to buy. But I’m not holding my breath.

Related Posts

1. Spore Galactic Adventures
2. The Sims 3
3. Dante’s Vs Darksiders
4. Spore
5. My 5 Top Year-End Games (With Bonus Rant)