One of the two new touted features of Sims 3, besides on the fly customization, is the ability to explore the entire town with no load times. This is completely accurate and incredibly pleasing. When the game starts, there is only an initial load time, with everything else being synced with the main home lot. This allows you to zoom out, go to a community lot such as the park to see what is going on, then come right back to the home lot without any loading screens. The community lots and other houses are also synced together, so the entire town runs on the same clock, which is a minor but incredibly necessary change for the series.

The new community lots include parks, businesses, and workplaces. There is not much change in the variety of lots available for the sim to visit, but you would hardly notice. Actions within community buildings are restricted to menus rather than actual interaction, which is a disappointment, but you can still interact with anything on the lot outside the building. For example, you can go into a diner, order a meal, then sit outside and eat it, governing the interactions with passers-by. You can also own businesses as well, which gives you part of the revenue directly into your household funds like a job.

As an extension of this, you can now govern your sim at work through a drop-down menu of possible actions, with the effects being instantly noticeable upon your job performance and needs. Oh, and job performance is now gradual instead of instantaneous, which is also a gladly recieved improvement. Career paths also have branching trees, depending on your skills and traits, and even after reaching the highest tier in a career you can continue to earn raises and commendations for your hard work. There is one baffling thing, though. How can your boss be ranked lower on the ladder than you? In one case, my sim was a star reporter, and his boss was an anonymous source handler.

Some disappointments include the lack of any sort of built-in model editor (which would have been easy, given the Spore tools) or item creator, the lack of interaction inside community lot buildings, and the limited number of items for some of the more defining tasks, such as playing music. Want to buy a piano instead of a guitar? Too bad! Guitar only. The lack of an item creator is the biggest letdown, as EA showed with Spore that they had the ability to create an editor for players to mold unique, gameplay-affecting objects that still retained game balance. The in-game style customization alleviates this heavy burden upon the heart, but does not dissipate it complete.

It almost seems hard to believe, but Sims 3, in its vanilla state, is better than The Sims or Sims 2 with every expansion pack. If you've never played a Sims game, this is the perfect entry point into the series, thanks to vast improvements in the gameplay, an excellent interface, and an incredible amount of customization. If you're a huge fan of the series, or even just a casual one, you will enjoy the tweaks made while still retaining that essential sandbox flavor. In short, this is the best Sims game to date, and is a must own for any PC gamer.