Product Description

The Sims are on the adventure of their lifetime in The Sims 3 World Adventures, the first expansion pack to the #1 best-selling PC and MAC game in June 2009, The Sims 3.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #78 in Computer & Video Games
• Brand: Electronic Arts
• Released on: 2009-11-20
• Platforms: Windows Vista, Windows XP, Mac OS X
• Format: DVD-ROM
• Dimensions: .26 pounds

Manufacturer's Description
Send your little computer people on a holiday they'll never forget - or perhaps even survive. The first ever expansion pack for the smash hit The Sims 3 allows your sims to travel abroad to discover new cultures and visit famous landmarks.

Take in the sights, sounds and souvenirs of Egypt

Are your sims brave enough for a spot of tomb raiding?

Take a ride on the new scooter as you explore France

Learn a martial art or just enjoy the local cuisine

This isn't just a sight-seeing tour though, your sims can learn new skills and gain new life goals from their visit, as well as a suitcase full of exotic items and treasures. Whether it's learning martial arts in China, "nectar"-making in France or tomb-raiding in Egypt there's much more to do on these virtual holidays than just laze around on the beach.

Foreign sims have unique personality traits and if your sims get on with them they can invite them back home - although you may want to upgrade your house first with the new building and customisation tools. It all adds up to a dream holiday that neither you nor your sims will forget.

Key Features

• Holiday of a lifetime: Don't just send your sims on holiday, send them on a globe-trotting adventure in China, France and Egypt.
• Landmark sights: Visit real world location from the Eiffel Tower to the Sphinx and the Great Pyramids.
• Souvenir shop: Take home brand new items: from ancient Egyptian artefacts to Chinese fireworks. Or decorate your home with exotic furniture and décor.
• Vocational trip: Learn new skills like photography, martial arts and nectar-making - plus give your sims new personality traits like "adventurous" and "photographer's eye".
• Lingua franca: Amazing soundtrack includes Nelly Furtado, LeAnn Rimes, Pixie Lott, Fefe Dobson, Matt + Kim and Young Punx - all singing in the Simlish language.

About the Developer: The Sims Studio
It's more than 20 years since Will Wright created SimCity and his development company Maxis. A lot has changed in that time, including the rise of The Sims as the studio's biggest game, but after being bought by EA elements of the team still work on the series and new titles such as Spore.

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Customer Reviews

Bugs aside...
As so many reviews have focused on the bugs the game has, I will try to focus my review on the gameplay itself, as the bugs will eventually be resolved through patches.

World Adventures is an attempt to take the Sims series in a new direction. It adds a puzzle element to the gameplay. Sims go abroad and whilst there can go on 'adventures' which include collecting objects, visiting places, befriending locals and perhaps most significantly exploring tombs. The tombs are a series of rooms filled with hidden doors, rock falls, traps, secret levers and treasure. The puzzles you need to solve in order to explore the tombs are generally quite simple- pushing statues onto pressure panels, 'inspecting' suspicious wall panels and so on. They may challenge younger children, but teens and adults will have no problems with even the more advanced tombs (which are longer, but not really any more difficult).

Though there seem to be a large number of tombs, they are not randomised, so once you have solved them once working through them with a different Sim family becomes a slightly dull exercise in just clicking in the right spots. This leads to limited replay value for this expansion pack, however with the possibility to download user-made tombs, this should keep the interest going.

In order to travel your Sim must pay a fairly large amount of money, and can only stay in the destination for a few days. Later trips can last longer once you have earned enough points for a higher level of visa, but this does lead to some frustration when your Sim gets sent home half way through a tomb. Many people have complained that travel is too expensive, however Sims come home with large amounts of treasure which can be sold and will easily cover the cost of the next trip. There is also a compulsory two-day wait between trips which prevents you working through the expansion pack too quickly.

Sims do not age whilst on holiday, so Sims cannot live in the holiday worlds and babies, toddlers and visibly pregnant Sims cannot travel. Sims needs still have to be met, and you can purchase dried food and a tent to use inside tombs to avoid having to go all the way back to base camp in the middle of a level. Friends and relationships can be made, and if you wish your Sim can invite a 'foreign visitor' to stay at their house for a few days.

As you would expect from an expansion pack, the game also adds in some new wants and lifetime goals, a few new skills (such as martial arts) some extra personality traits and some new objects and building equipment.

All in all, not a bad little pack which adds a decent amount of content, but nothing so exciting that I would recommend it to someone who isn't already a Sims fan.

Great Concept, badly executed
The holiday expansion is great fun, with varied Adventures to suit all of the different Sims personality types: the green-thumbed can learn nectar making; adventurous ones can explore Egyptian tombs; arty-types can learn photography; as well as shops full of interesting recipes and rivers with new fish. It also opens up the possibility for a huge future market in add-on adventures. It feels fresh and new, though some of the adventuring (such as tackling fire traps and gathering ancient coins) is definitely retro.

Unfortunately, with a few hours of game-play you will come across plenty of frayed edges. The SIMS forum already has hundreds of posts about the bugs found and problems encountered. If you haven't already bought it, my advice is to wait until a couple of updates come out and the beta testing has been done.

Great game shame about the install problems
This WA Exp pack is great and adds a new dimension to a mega game. I did have issues installing though with it saying that the disc was region locked (another EA install issue!!) I got around it by changing a setting (search google for "wrong region sims 3") Also I experience long loading times between destinations and a couple of other minor bugs
Anyway this is a top game that allows you to waste your life way in the real world More please !!!