Honestly..... How the heck did the Sims 3 get all these good reviews. There near perfect. Some even gave this game better reviews then The Sims 2. Something has to be up. I do however believe that some reviewers are not true Sim Fan but come on. The Sims 2 on Meta Critic got a ton of grades. Some of the big names didn't think TS2 was amazingly awesome but somehow there opinions changed hugely for TS3.

One other detail. There were two reviews on Wal-Mart.com and Bestbuy.com telling us how awesome the game was. The reviews were seen and dated back about a week prior to there original Feb release.

Thank you for letting me blow some steam. Hopefully Ive made a somewhat reasonable case.

Do you know how movie reviews work?

It goes like this...

Movie critics needs to see the film before release so that we the readers can find out if it sucks or not. The only way the critic can see the film is if the studio which made it gives him/her free passes. Sometimes movies are bad...and the critic feels the need to tell us about it.

BUT if they gives bad reviews too often to one studio's films or another's...the free passes stop flowing in. SO, this creates a system where critics become increasingly less critical.

My guess is EA is being stingy with the free copies...because they're afraid of pirates, bad reviews, and therefore craptastic sales.

PS...We also have the problem of people reviewing the game who are NOT a part of the Sim community.

The story progression toggle not working.
Parthenogenetic babies.
Broken time (slow real time on "Fast Speed" and different game time to accomplish identical actions under different game speeds).

These are three major issues that the many individuals in the community discovered within a few hours of play. I don't recall seeing any of them mentioned in a major review—the sort that would be written from a review copy. Did the reviewers not actually play the game?

Those reviewing the game did not play it the way we play it.

Thank you CleoTheMuse lol I'm always welcome to support and that makes perfect sense.

Honestly you shouldn't go by reviewers but honestly its kinda odd. The issues we are all finding, they just are blind to.

I think we're on the same side here, but I'm curious what play style would have let them not see some of these things. I can see EA reassuring reviewers that certain issues would be fixed by launch, but surely a reviewer should still note they had a problem and that EA promised it would be different in the shipping version.

Well, for example, my nephew. He plays the Sim games to create a world of chaos and slap-stick humor. His Sims run around doing mean things to others, destroying their lives one rude joke at a time.

When I play, each Sim is important. I take time naming them (my nephew picks names like "Turd Ferguson"). I want them to be fruitful and multiply (my nephew wants to see if the babies can die in a fire). I'm in it for the long haul...anything less than seven generations is ezmode (my nephew plays for an hour and then runs off to WoW).

The problem with the those who reviewed TS3 is that they were playing it for laughs...For us, here on MTS, Simming is cereal bidness.

I'll buy half of that. If I played like your nephew, I wouldn't notice the bizarre placement of babies. I would still notice the clock troubles. Would it hurt my enjoyment of that style of play? Probably not. Would I mention it in my review? Yes. It was odd behaviour noted during play.

I am quite disappointed too.

However, I think honestly the critics/reviewers don't play it like alot of us. I will admit, I do experiments (Like my awesome HYBRID), but I actually take time to play the games. That, and of course whaty Cleo mentioned, they have to cut some opinions out and all that.

Then what use are reviewers to us? I don't mean that entirely as a rhetorical question, nor am I just being a smart ass.

Reviewers make their living by writing information articles on something or other and selling advertisers access to our eyeballs or ears when we consume those articles. If those articles don't contain accurate information, why would we go to the site/read the magazine/watch the show and be present to be sold to the advertisers? The whole system breaks down if the reviewers are disingenuous. Demanding only good reviews has never benefited any studio. Once the movie/game/whatever is in general release, people will know the real story. If it doesn't match the approved version, the reviewers look stupid. Or, if the reviewers are revealed to be sock puppets, the studio looks stupid.

Take Roger Ebert on movies. I always read his reviews. I don't always agree with him, but he gives me enough information in his review (without giving away the plot) that I can reliably predict whether I will enjoy a film or not independently of whether he enjoyed it or not. A lot of reviewers today (and I'm sure in the past, as well) seem to subscribe to the "It's good because I liked it./It's bad because I didn't like it." school of criticism rather than the "I liked it because it's good (for these reasons)./I didn't like it for these reasons." school. (Note: Roger Ebert has been denied previews of films because the studios know he won't like it and will say so. There have been enough public tiffs over this, that if Roger Ebert isn't allowed to see a film, you can be pretty sure it stinks. So pre-empting a negative review achieves nothing.)

A good rule of thumb is to see if Game X has purchased an expensive full page ad in the same publication as the review. If the answer is yes, the review is likely to be biased as a trade-off for the advertising revenue.

Not really. They liked it, and you didn't. Simple as that.
Though it did confuse me as well. Most of the reviews completely ignored the problems this game has. Rabbit holes, lack of content, etc. But publishers paying off reviewers is incredibly rare. And most cases of it are just rumors started by people who disagreed with the review.

PC Zone UK had a preview of the game I don't know when, but I saw it last month. So they have this beautiful positive review, and it's the same review they will publish in JULY. You can check on metacritic.com. They actually have a review from the future there. How could this not be paid off by EA?

Umkay, I see it like this . . . if you own a company and want to print up reviews of your product, which ones would you choose - the good ones or the negative ones???

Lol! I'm sure they've seen both, they just wanted to use the ones that make them look good. That's what I would do!

I think since many of the reviewers were general game players and not simmers, they would not have noticed the story progression toggle not working. I also think that they only played the game for a few hours. With the time bug, well not everyone's time is broken.

I don't believe the reviewers were paid off and I don't think the bugs are worth mentioning. Every single computer game has bugs in the beginning. If a reviewer bases their negative side on the bugs and then 2 weeks later the company releases a patch and fixes all those bugs mentioned, doesn't that make their review obsolete? Why would they mention the bugs when they are going to get fixed eventually. I'm not saying it's okay to release a game with bugs, but it happens, and it's really hard to make a perfect game considering everyone is using a different computer.

But reviews are supposed to give potential buyers an idea about a product and help consumers make a decision. And you always buy the unpatched game in the store. There are still people who are unaware of the concept of updates and patches. Parents who buy games for their children judging by the covers, for example.

I do think that one review per website or magazine about a game is a stupid idea. As the game evolves, or as reviewers have spent more time playing the game after release, they can easily write an article and change their mind, revising their opinions and judgements of games.

Besides, there's never a guarantee that a patch is released. EA could go bankrupt any time and there's nothing in the EULA about continuing support guarantees like in other software contracts.

A friend of mine did some research on this for a marketing class he was taking, using EA's Red Alert 3 (he'd bought the game after reading rave reviews and was badly disapointed, so it made a good starting point) and found that places where EA had heavy advertising, provided great reviews.

I used to be an avid reader of PC Gamer and they had a standing policy of reviewing games almost brutally--if there were bugs, it counted against the rating and were reported so buyers didn't end up getting burned. Some game companies openly protested this, but they were honest in their reviews; not sure if it still holds, as I haven't read it in a while, but I wouldn't be surprised if the policy has sold out in print as well as on the web.

Frankly anymore I pay attention to user reviews on sites like Amazon.com before buying, and count up the number of explained negatives (people who point out flaws rather than "this game sucked!" and no explanation) against the high praise ones, as game companies DO have their employees post positive reviews to many sites (not exactly a secret, product manufacturers have done it for years); if negative outruns positive, I stand clear. This is a great way to decide if a flawed game might still be something you could get into (maybe some features you could care less about, for example.)

I can say without reading reviews, no Sims 3 for me. The graphics alone killed that (man, those Sims scare me.) I'll just stick to my Sims 2 heavily modded goodness.

I couldn't understand why so many people were down on what the new sims look like. Stock sims from both games are in the same family of abstraction. Then I looked at the sims pictures thread which is for both TS2 and TS3. Ah…many people's Sims 2 sims don't look like Sims 2 sims.

(I'm still disappointed that one cutie from the "group dancing" TS2 promotional video never made it into the game. But she probably never existed. The sims in that video were of varying heights and that's never been a feature of sims.)

It got a good review becuase its a GOOD GAME.

Yes, it is. I would even say it's a very good game. A very good game with one major bug that destroys game play for a great many people and a couple of very annoying behaviours that may be bugs or may be lazy programming. None of which I saw mentioned in any pre-release review. I think that is what people are annoyed about. They are being surprised by nasty game behaviour the reviewers should have noticed.