Somewhere in the Sim equivalent of Louisiana, in a small town in the swamps, where most of the roads are dirt roads and most days are foggy days, lives an eccentric inventor in a small shack. He lives off his garden, makes vegetarian food, uses his legs instead of a car, scrounges parts from the junkyard for his newest inventions, and tries to live a sustainable life for the planet.

No other personal computer game has created a legacy quite like The Sims. The original game in 2000 was quickly followed by numerous expansion pack, before The Sims 2 in 2005 made a big leap in both world detail and realism, and again was followed by expansion packs each spring and fall that greatly deepened the gameplay.  The Sims 3 in 2009 was less of a dramatic shift, but preserved many of the favorite activities from its predecessor, and contained a surprising level of detail in gameplay. Still, there were many white spots on the gameplay map, and it was expected that there would once again come many expansion packs.  Sims 3: Ambitions is the second major expansion to this game.

To be honest, I did not buy the previous expansion, The Sims 3: World Adventures. I bought the vacation expansions for The Sims and The Sims 2, and I found both of them forgettable.  I had two sims go on vacation once in The Sims 2, I may have had two or three vacations in the original game. Following the same trend, I would have had zero vacations in this game, and that was how I felt when I read about other people’s experience with it too.

Ambitions however is in my native Norwegian named Drømmejobben, meaning The Dream Job. That seems a lot more interesting to me. Your attitude toward vacation and job may vary – actually, it almost certainly does. I avoid vacations like the plague in real life as well, and I have every intention to go to work until I am 70, Light willing.  So there is some pretty heavy bias here…

The expansion actually only provides a fairly small number of new careers, but they really stand out from the old jobs.  In The Sims 3, you could follow your sims to their workplace but then they went in the door and left you outside. You could give them vague guidelines, like “work hard”, “slack off and have fun”, “meet new people”, “suck up to the boss” etc.  But there were just half a dozen or so instructions, and they were quite generic. In this expansion, the old jobs are still the same, except for doctor.  The new jobs however have a different character.  Here you get tasks you can complete to improve your job rating, and they are not necessarily in an office or some such.  As a firefighter you will visit homes and try to save your fellow sims from fire.  As a ghost hunter you will try to clean out haunted houses. As a detective you will also spend a lot of time in the field. As an architect you will mess around with other people’s homes, and as a stylist you will change their looks.  So it is a completely different gameplay.

In fact, it reminds me a bit of Sims 2: Open for Business, which was probably my favorite expansion in that generation, closely followed by Sims 2: FreeTime. As a matter of fact, Ambitions also has a couple more hobbies as well: Sculpture and invention. In addition, you can now register your hobbies as a profession, and sell your works at a local consignment store.  Not just sculptures and inventions, but also paintings or produce, from the hobbies that were included in the original Sims 3.

So far I have only had the opportunity to test one of the new hobbies, invention. My sim will dig through piles in the junkyards for parts, then make inventions at the workbench at home.  I am not sure if there are public workbenches. Probably, but I have not seen them yet. Most will probably want it at home anyway, if for no other reason than to have a shower nearby when your inventor’s clothes catch fire.  Also, if you have a painter in the family, you can decorate your home with masterworks and get quite powerful bonus moodlets from the beauty.

While you have enough scrap in your inventory, your workbench will have an “invent” option. Using this will improve your new Invention skill, and occasionally pop out a new invention. At first these are frequent but not particularly valuable, small toys and widgets. At higher levels, inventions are few and far between, but each is more substantial. The miner can dig up metals, gems and old objects from your lawn, and may even open a hole to an underground realm where your sim may have adventures. Or that is what my sim wishes to use it for, at least. I have not actually tried this. The time machine… well, we’ll come to that. And the robot is supposedly the final fruit of your invention, much as it was in Open for Business.

One difference from Open for Business is that the workbench is not fun. In the previous generation of the game, crafting was one of the greatest sources of fun around, but very tiring.  Now, it is neither.  It is just work.  I suppose this makes some sense since invention is now a profession and an alternative to clocking in at the office.

You can also read books on invention, and even improve your skill by getting an opportunity (random quest). However, this will not actually create the inventions. You will still need to use the Invent option, but it will take shorter time if you already have the skill.

So, the time machine. I recommend saving before you use any high-end invention, by the way. First my sim went into the past. After watching the teaser video, I had expected my sim actually loading a different landscape and going on some adventure like in the previous expansion, World Adventures. However, there was only a string of text messages.  One of these was how my sim rescued a child, and then a child popped out of the time machine ahead of my sim. It looked very much like my sim would have done as a grade schooler, but had a different personality. And then the game crashed, and my computer spent a couple minutes with just the background picture while recovering. Your computer may vary – mine is pretty fast. When I loaded the game and did it again, a completely different story unfolded, and my sim came back having lost some stuff but gained a lifefruit. It seems you can have a number of adventures in the past and future, and I look forward to it.

I assumed that learning about robots was one of those adventures, because even after having maxed his invention skill and made one of every invention, my sim still does not have that option. However, it seems instead that the Palladium opportunity arc may be the trigger, judging from some of the text there.  I have no idea whether my frequent time travels were necessary to get that started, but probably not.

Before closing this “first look”, I want to mention that there are a couple new personality traits. My sim is Eccentric and Eco-Friendly.  Eccentric sims make discoveries faster, both the discovery and the actual product. It is basically the career-boosting skill for inventors, much like Artistic is for painters and Green Thumb for gardeners etc  in the unexpanded Sims 3.  In contrast, Eco-Friendly is a genuinely new personality type. They get negative mood from driving alone, but positive mood from carpooling or biking. They take short showers and eat organic food. And they feel good when they can use a clothesline instead of a dryer.

Oh, that’s right. Sims can now wash their clothes. If there is a washing machine or hamper on the lot, sims will drop their clothes when they go to bed or shower.  Over time these clothes will begin to stink. If you wash and dry them, however, your sims will get bonus mood from clean clothes and fresh bedsheets.  This is mainly of interest if your sims have not already topped their mood meter:  If you have a positive mood, you get more lifetime happiness points, which can be used to buy various objects or upgrades of your sims. If you are already maxed, laundry is just a chore, just like in real life. The sims on the lots you don’t play certainly seems to think so as well, because after a while their floors are covered with stinking heaps of clothes when you visit them.

In all fairness, I am not sure if this is an artifact of the two behavior mods I have installed, the Awesomemod and Twallan’s StoryProgression, but probably not.  Both Pescado and Twallan are quite good at what they do, and it is more likely that they will eventually fix the problem than that they caused it. Awesomemod in particular is pretty much essential if you want to play The Sims 3, since it fixes a wide range of problems. Electronic Arts tends to just dump their games to the market when they decide the bugs are not bad enough for many players to return their games, or so it seems to me.

So, is the expansion worth buying?  It may be early to say, but it does not have any game-stopping bugs that I can see, and it does add some more variation to the game.  If money is really scarce, you may want to think twice about it, and if you rarely have time to play anyway, you may want to wait until you have played most of the content you already have. Otherwise, it seems like a worthy addition to the series.