Jack, one of our readers, was kind enough to compose a preview in his own words for this site. Knowing that it’s way better than what I could ever do, I’m posting it up here for him. So I’d like to thank Jack for what he has done and I appreciate his efforts. Read his preview below!

The Sims 3 Report
By Jack Griffiths

This is a short report, with some of the new things from The Sims 3…

Parties and the Party Planner
First off, the Party Planner. This feature allows us to customise our parties further, such as choosing the type of party (with 3 new party types; Wedding Party; Funeral and Campaign Fundraising), choosing the start time (which was a major letdown in the Sims 2, as they all came at times at which I wasn’t ready. There is also the dress code planner, which can tell your recipients to come as a certain ‘thing’. The only thing that hasn’t been changed is the number of party people. It stays at 8.

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Object Customization
A new feature here, the Texture Picker. This tool allows us to fully customise our objects and scenery to an extent that nobody else will have came up with the same design as you. You can customise the fabric of the object, the colour (RGB, which means there is over 16 million possible colours; takers for working out 256x256x256 :D). Plus, you can also download custom swatches to use, which is extending your possibilities to over 100 Million – and seen the scrollbar? That means that there is a lot of pre-set presents. And that’s only on 1 section.

If you take a look at the table, you can even make your walls look like your table, uh, amazing…

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Create a Sim
Since the CAS screen is so complex, we will take the time to tell you about each individual part.

Firstly, there is the basic Name and Gender options –we know about them, so let us move on to the Age. The age function has been extended by 1 option –young adult. This age group featured in The Sims 2 University, and has came back –current details on Universities have not been released. So we don’t know if they’ll be whisked off to university straight away.

Skin tone has been a talking point, since we’ve been given the option to extend the skin tones of our Sims. The sliders certainly take a good part in The Sims 3, since the Skin tone is based on three swatches, which are under the drop down arrow, and you have the option to slide the arrow along to get your perfect skin tone.

Body Modifiers are also an awesome new feature – this is where unique Sims starts, you can make them abnormally skinny, or insanely fat, or just in between – I worked out that there is almost 5 million combinations.

The nose, mouth, jaws and other facial features have ‘nodes’. Nodes are them circle things that appear on the nose, to the right. You simply click them, and sliders appear, you then adjust the sliders to get the nose, mouth, jaw etc… that you want.

The slider to the left is for eye colour. The RGB colour picker plays a part here, so, again, there is EXACTLY 16,777,216 million eye colours, but then there is the lightness and darkness option, which can multiply that figure by as much as 100.

Sadly, you can’t enter a hexadecimal code, which can create even more colour possibilities.

With the eye tool, I reckon you can make a Sim have cat eyes! =)

I thought the hair feature on the Sims 2 was lacking something. I think it has been rejuvenated here – with the Hair Colour tool. You can choose the colour of each individual hair (not really, lol) but you can choose the colour of different parts of your Sims hair, such as the base, highlights etc… Again, you can choose the RGB colour of your Sims hair, so you can make your Sim have bright blue hair, white hair when they’re an adult etc…

Now here’s what The Sims 2 was lacking – it was covered in the Sims 1, but was left redundant in the sequel. Luckily, Maxis have brought it back!

The Shoe option. You can now choose your Sims shoes, but the RGB colour chooser has not played role here.

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Traits

Now for traits. Traits can truly make your Sim unique, with over 70 traits, there is over a billion combinations for your Sim. Well done Maxis! You can choose up to 5 traits for an adult, 4 for teenager/young adult 3 for a child and 2 for a toddler/baby. Just as an example:
You could have a Neurotic, Virtuoso, Day-dreamer Workaholic, which, I personally think, isn’t a good combination.

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Rewards
Lifetime Rewards were introduced in FreeTime, and, I personally think, were a waste of time. However, EA have brought it back and extended it, a lot. We now know of some new LifeTime rewards such as:

– Discount Diner; getting money off diners
– Super Green Thumb; presumably having good socio-economic skills.

Maxis have kept quiet about how to get the points – but we’ll find out, soon enough.

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Objects

I never like the objects maxis give us. They’re horrid. And it looks like they’ve done something about it – change the icons for the object catalog. The icons for the categories appear at the top of the HUD, but haven’t changed. Although, we now have a view of a possible room – with a radio floating in mid-air, and that lighting has now been joined with a group – the electronics.

And it looks like Cars have their own section now – I wonder how many cars you can get by default.,, I hope there is a wide selection.

Thanks for reading!