How do you go about improving a game that’s become, at well over 100,000,000 copies sold, the best-selling PC game franchise of all time? EA Black Box, I’m guessing, began with another question: Why didn’t the other six and a half billion people in the world buy it? If only 10 percent of the world’s population owns a computer, and 60 million of those people just aren’t very much fun, that still leaves half a billion people who objected to some part of the idea of creating, managing, and lording over a little virtual society of simulated people.
Players that don’t want to dedicate an entire week to upgrading their bachelor pad into a spacious family estate can hit the ground running and move into fully-furnished houses, but apprenticing architects will face fewer obstacles, too: when I moved a wall to open up a living room into love nest proportions, the objects on the wall moved with it and the roof adjusted itself, sparing me the embarrassment of a house that comes off looking like a toddler’s papercraft project. You’ll also be able to launch the game and take control of any of the Sims you find next door, down the street, protesting outside City Hall, or grabbing a bite to eat at a sidewalk café. Chalk up another 32,000,000 fans.
