Aging

The lifespan of a sim starts of at a small number of sim days when an infant and grows longer and longer as they reach maturity. Depending on the speed a turn is played, a sim day can be anywhere from ten minutes to hours on end. There are definite ups and downs to the aging scheme presented in the game.

While aging, the sims can have children and watch them grow, allowing for several generations and watching the sim DNA in action. Each following generation can continue to live in and fix up the house that their parents bought, eventually allowing for some very elaborate housing. The added feel of realism is nice as well as watching the characters from birth to death, but there’s a big downside.

The sims in the rest of the neighborhood don’t age while yours will. So, if you have a teenaged sim who falls in love with a teenager of the same age, they will grow older while their first love stays the same. There’s a way around this buy going over to that other house and making time pass for them as well, but that’s a whole lot of hassle for something that should be done anyway. There is, of course, the logistics of such a task making things a lot more difficult on a playability level. What happens when you want to play your other family in the same neighborhood? You go click on them and they’re dead because they aged away, but if you don’t include aging in the game what’s the point of having children? Talk about your overpopulation problems.

Other than your characters either dying too fast or at all, the sims aren’t even remotely as needy or dependent now. This, my friends, is a good thing. No more forcing people to go to the bathroom or go to work. In fact, if left alone, the sims will pretty much take care of themselves. Pretty much, but not completely. Sometimes they may still wet themselves and pass out in the yard. In fact, it’s kind of fun to make them wet themselves and pass out in the yard while the kids sit inside crying until social services come and take them away. Well, at least it was to me, but then again I made a character with a really big mullet that lived in the Roswell neighborhood that I was praying would get kidnapped by aliens.


As with the older Sims game, it’s possible to have multiple neighborhoods and a few are included with the ability to make and download more if desired. Included with the game are the original neighborhood and a couple of themed ones such as Romeo and Juliet and Roswell. I suggest the Roswell area if you plan to get impregnated by aliens, which, by the way, is possible. Other than alien probes, there are quite a few interesting events in store for players, but we don’t want to spoil it for everyone.