Yeah, in fact Microsoft basically fucking pioneered the timed exclusive.

It's kind of an interesting move from the developers, and dovetails with the vanilla-ization of off-grid object placement, which was only available in The Sims 3 via the debug console.

Someone claiming to be a dev in this thread from a month ago in the Sims reddit said it is an "official shipping cheat," left in the game on purpose by the developers. As I imagined, the intended use is for decorative objects, and the developer acknowledges that it can have wonky side-effects if it's used on…

I'm pretty sure that object resizing is a build-mode feature they purposely included in the game. If it were a cheat, you'd have to turn it on from the debug console, as in previous versions.

I don't think anybody is personally offended by your decision not to buy Sony gaming products anymore.

You're not the only one. I was actually looking forward to the game, and was surprised when I saw the Kotaku post about games coming out this week (Danganronpa 2, baby!) and it was on the list. I guess I had just forgotten the date, or figured it was still some ways off in this quarter.

The problem with this view, though, is that forgets that all of these things have to actually be implemented. I know a lot of people will look at the emotion/interaction system of Sims 4 and be like "Pshaw! That couldn't have been so hard to toss together! Why not give us everything?" But we're talking about a…

I was playing last night, and I think you can change to Sims 3 camera controls by pressing Ctrl + Shift + Tab. That's what the tutorial told me anyway.

I agree with much of what you're saying. It's not a matter of it being better/worse than The Sims 3. It's just the game taken in a different direction, with a different focus. Sims 3 was all about the granular customizability of houses and the open world around you, and the "things you could do" in that sandbox. The…

The Sims 4 Metacritic page is a cesspit of pointless user reviews right now, so yeah, I'd steer clear until some genuine professional reviews go up.

I'm pretty sure that pools were a casualty of the overhaul to and simplification of the building system. I can't say for sure, but I'd bet that the developers prioritized the on-the-fly editing of room sizes and foundation heights over trying to solve any of the problems that might have arisen with pools added to the…

This is a real new Sims game. It may look familiar, but quite different from any previous entry in the series.

Worlds are split up into neighborhoods. In a given neighborhood, you can walk between lots in real time. But if you go to a different world (you can visit other worlds on the fly now, without having to save to the library and start a new game), or a different neighborhood within the current world, you'll hit a brief…

I haven't done a lot of extensive work with the build tools in 4 yet, but the main difference, from what I gather thus far, is that they've stripped away the granular pattern customizability that Create-A-Style offered, and decided to focus in more on tactile manipulation of what you've already built. No more…

In The Sims 3, your "mood" didn't really affect your interactions with others. At least not nearly as comprehensively as it does in 4. You could get different interactions based on traits that you'd chosen, and in certain situations, new social options would open up as you became better acquainted with another Sim.…

You could always use Bootcamp to install Windows on your Mac. If you can spare the space on your drive, that is.

I'm using a non-SSD drive, 7200rpm. Loading the main game is much, much faster than The Sims 3 (which was almost torture sometimes, depending on how much custom content you had and so on). And loading when traveling between neighborhoods/worlds is about 5-10 seconds for me.

Traveling across the map was the equivalent of a loading screen, except far more wasteful of computing resources, because things were always sort of "preloaded" in extremely low-res versions. I'm not sure if you've played Sims 4 yet, but we're not talking about the sort of loading times you could expect when loading…

Like you, I can't yet conjure up an overall verdict on the game, but I have to say that, so far, I've found it to be quite promising.

I think being into the characters was a big part of it for a lot of people. Also, the humor, and just the twistedness of the overall plot. The only thing that frustrated me was when the mechanics, not bad sleuthing on my part, would prevent me from getting something right during the class trial, and then I'd have to…