This game consumed my teenage years. The first time I experienced it, I was around 11-12, sleeping over at a friend's house, and she had this game up on her computer. We stayed awake until the early hours of the morning just taking turns making Sims. I don't remember if we ever even progressed into the actual game part of it; I was just having the time of my life creating little people.

I went home the next day set on getting this game for myself so I would be able to play it more in-depth than waiting my turn to make a Sim, but all I remembered was that "it was a game with diamonds on the cover, and all of the diamonds had people in them". My sister, godsend that she is, tracked it down and found it for me, and I did NOT look back.

Sure, the loading times were so slow that I still remember the wait for them years later, but - cars! Interesting and engaging and varied career tracks (the criminal career!) Expansion packs that gave you actual value for money - cats and dogs and horses and foxes and rodents all coming with Pets, and vampires, werewolves, witches, and fairies all coming with Supernatural! More than 3 traits per Sim!

It pains me that it's difficult to go back to graphically now, because compared to Sims 3, Sims 4 is just so soulless and hollow. Maybe I'll give this another try with some immense modding and CC-ing and see if I can bring the Sims' appearance a little up to modern standards. If I can manage that, I doubt I'll ever open Sims 4 again.

This one I remember blew the mind of my ex as her old PC couldn't play more modern games (for the time) but my laptop could! So they build upon the previous game, however, at this point in history EA were starting to get greedier and the amount of additions were dizzying!

The options for traits to make your character unique were always a major selling point and that was still true with this game, just not the next one coming up. However, the idea that you could fulfil all kinds of aspirations and become your ideal self!

The many hours I spent in this game cannot be measured and I believe this was during the time they were forcing you to use EA's "Origin" platform which, as of typing this review, has simply been called EA because they probably realised too many people took offense of the company wearing the flayed skin of one of their kills (Origin Systems), as a bit too tasteless.

I think I bought this with the special Plum bulb thumb drive, however, no idea where that is today! Could be anywhere. Regardless, lots more memories and customisation that was pushing the boundaries and improving the game greatly.

I did just look over it and remembered the disgusting "Simpoints" where you pay real currency for this "Freemium" kind of cash to purchase all kinds of items to unlock for your game. The existence of this system certainly soured my taste for this game and my experience of it too.

The people claiming that this is a better game than The Sims 4 are smoking crack cocaine. There were some great ideas being put into the foundation of this game that were so ahead of their time that they could never be implemented correctly for when it came out.

The UI and Sims look atrocious, on top of the fact that most people couldn't even run this game on accessible hardware, and still can't. I wish to God that they would have just fixed the game or built on these ideas, but they never did. It costs 2 quantimillion dollars to access the full arsenal of DLC this game comes with and the more you download, the worse it runs.

I have great memories with this game of course, but there are unpatched bugs and lackluster story progression that requires mods to function properly.

I will always love The Sims dearly, but I am also not legally blind. This game gets booted up when I want maximum chaos in ruining my Sims lives for the worse, but it's not my choice of Sims game to play normally.

I might only have a few minutes of Sims 3 on Steam, but that's just because I bought the base game to get the rest of the EPs I was missing in Origin at a lower price.

I started to play this game sometime after its release, I spent hours and hours playing it and buying EPs and Accessory Packs with time. I still play this game sometimes, but only through Origin since I have all the EPs there. It was the best The Sims ever made with its large possibilities, even with all the bugs. The Sims 4 was a pure disaster.