IokFromTheCrypt

The Sims games are based on a simple concept: create virtual people then influence their lives. As they develop, so they express new needs, start relationships, develop skills and provide a unique experience, part dollhouse, part soap opera.

Now The Sims 3 takes all that and improves on it in every single way in a game that's the best of the series so far.

Previously Sims were restricted to living within the boundaries of a single lot and could only visit another location by taking a taxi ride (interrupted by a loading screen) at which point they were locked in another lot until they decided to return home. Not so now - your Sim is free to explore the entire city without restrictions. And what's more, life goes on throughout the city, with other households growing, evolving and changing. It's an amazingly deep, immersive world your Sims now inhabit.

Core gameplay remains relatively similar, but EA has streamlined a lot of the problems in the earlier games. Sims eat less, need fewer bathroom breaks, pathing is improved and the game focuses less on micromanagement and more on play.

One new feature is the "Moodlet." Your Sims' experiences may give them negative or positive "power-ups" that effect their mood. Eat a good meal or walk into a well-decorated room and your Sim gains positive moodlets. But in a room filled with dirty plates their mood sinks. It's a superb,quick way to gain an insight into your Sim's wellbeing.

Although it still revolves around watching the clock speed past, work has been overhauled, with new careers and paths and even a new "work attitude" option - push yourself for the raise or chill-out with co-workers being just two options open to your working Sims. Although still not perfect it's a more engaging experience than that found in The Sims 2.

Skills have been refined. Writer Sims can pen their own novels, choosing a variety of genres to work in (and even giving it a title). When your book is finished, you'll receive royalties and a complementary copy in the mail, which you can then place in your home. You can plant seeds and grow your vegetables, then use them in your recipes. The depth within the skill set is superb and rewards gamers willing to put the effort into exploring the new system.

Create A Style is a new tool that allows players to modify the colour/pattern of virtually any item in the game, from furniture to clothing and building surfaces. The power of this tool is incredible and offers a vast range of style options for the custom-content creators.

Visually the game is impressive. The Sims themselves - although stylised - are well-animated, with a "solid" feel to them and the environments really shine: trees shake in the wind, waves crash upon the beach, water droplets stick to your Sim's skin.

But perhaps what's most impressive is the sheer depth and immersive nature of The Sims 3. EA have cracked that "just one last thing" gameplay that keeps you hooked for hours on end.

Finally, it's impossible to discuss The Sims 3 without touching upon the negative reception the game has - unfairly - been given by a minority of very vocal players. There are complaints of crash-bugs, that EA didn't include all the content of The Sims 2's expansions and that EA are attempting to rob players with an unfinished/incomplete game.

All I can say is that having played on a Pentium 4 2.8/Nvidia 7600GT and a dual core 2.6/Nvidia 8800GT, the game never crashed, showed no graphical glitches and Time Advance works just fine (EDIT: a patch from EA has since improved Time Advance further, so now there's no excuse for not playing it!)

What I have experienced is people complaining about the "broken" state of The Sims 3 playing on machines that don't meet the minimum requirements. Perhaps they should also complain that their CD Walkman won't play Blu-Ray movies.

As for the "missing" content: even EA would struggle to release 18 DVD's worth of updates on time for under £300. Expansion packs - as they did for the previous games - will be appearing to introduce new content to The Sims 3, so why this is a problem for these people is baffling.

For those willing to accept this new evolution I'd strongly urge giving The Sims 3 a whirl, as it's without a doubt the best game in the series so far. For those unwilling to accept change, then I'm sure EA will continue to support The Sims 2 for another few years yet. However, during that time you'll be missing-out on some amazing experiences.

The launch of a Massive Multiplayer game is always problematic. Coping with the sheer number of players, server load, different configurations and humans doing what we do best - namely the unexpected - can cause serious problems for any game.

However, two months after release, Age of Conan is still an unplayable shambles of a game that's riddled with bugs, broken content and elements that simply don't work. I'm not talking about trivial bugs like miss-spelt names or items being the wrong colour. No, what we have here is a "game" that physically refuses to work. It's currently impossible to play for more than 30 minutes before a recurrent memory leak causes your entire system to lock-up. That's not good.

So what are Funcom doing to address this? Not a lot. Instead of fixing such major issues, they're instead playing around with the character balance, boosting some classes to the point of being God-like whilst lowering the abilities of others to make them as effective as a wet tissue. Not that any of this matters, of course, because it's impossible to play this mess of a "game" anyway.

Then there's the fact that the game was billed as a Direct X10 title. Not true. It's an unoptimised, flabby mess of a game that struggles on even the lowest of settings on a reasonable games machine. Be prepared to spend most of your time watching a 2 frames per second slide show if you crank your graphics up beyond even the most basic of settings. Even on high-end machines, the game still suffers from some terrible pop-in, poor frame rates and generally bad performance.

Credit where credit's due, the game looks pretty amazing. And the combat system is interesting. But beyond that, this is a perfect example of how not to launch an MMO: from the lack of content to the ineptitude of the Live Team to introduce fixes without breaking the game, to the lack of anything to actually do except kill creatures ad infinitum.

Put simply, don't waste your money.

As a pretty experienced player of Massive Multiplayer Online games, I was shocked when I realised LOTRO had slipped under my radar. After the bitter disappointment of Age of Conan, I found myself looking for another game and - finding the game at a knock-down price - decided to give it a go.

Fans of the genre will be very impressed with LOTRO. Developers Turbine have learnt from World of Warcraft's accessibility and quick-fix play but have not forgotten that a game also needs depth AND breadth.

What you have here is a game that gives players the opportunity to have their hack and slash fun but also backs it up with a strong community spirit, namely with a whole host of "trivial stuff" to entertain players. In what seems a throwback to older games, for example, players may own houses, something the WoW team looked at but dismissed. This may seem like a pointless exercise but here Turbine have gone back to the MMO roots and realised that for some people, Status Items are a big draw. Similarly, the title/deeds system - which is effectively LOTRO's take on Xbox Achievements - gives a further opportunity for bragging rights.

There's also an element of intelligence required in quests. Unlike other MMOs where quests involve going from one blip to another on your map, LOTRO leaves it up to the player to figure out the finite details. Don't worry if that sounds sloppy - it's not. It simply means that the game requires you to give consideration to your quests and effectively turns them from simple blip-chasing karaoke into something that actually engages you.

Then there's the Epic Quest line. Very cleverly the developers have integrated the events of the books into the storyline, with the player assisting the journey of the Ring and the defence against the Enemy, but in a very subtle manner that compliments the original in a well thought-out manner.

As for gameplay, it's pretty much as you'd expect - combat is based around auto attacks with a queued special move system, loot can be taken from creatures and used/sold and various characters give you quests to complete. There's nothing particularly revolutionary there but that's not a negative comment, as what is there is done very well.

Quests are well thought-out, interesting and suited to the setting. For example, a frontiersman may ask you to defend his homestead against attacking bandits, whereas a Hobbit farmer may ask you to help him woo his neighbour. Although these quests are really only based around a few basic concepts - kill X number of creatures, collect X number of items, go talk to X - the difference in LOTRO compared to other games is that they're very well-balanced.

Unlike many games, playing isn't a chore and you don't feel yourself battling constantly to advance. Instead, the quests are pitched just at that right level of being challenging but not impossible (I find the comments about "forced grouping" to be rather strange here, as that's not my experience of the game at all...) Visually, the game is very impressive and the engine rattles along at a cracking pace. There's very little slowdown and the game looks great, even on the lower settings. Not that you'll need to lower them (unless your PC is really out of date) as the engine is capable of rendering multiple characters without any slowdown (unlike some other MMOs I could mention) and even the massive task of drawing the cities barely causes the engine to sweat. It's a great achievement.

Sound-wise the game also excels, with great ambient audio. The only downside is that the ambient music is VERY ambient, being little more than a slow guitar strumming or low -rumble. It works, but it lacks the oomph of World of Warcraft's or Age of Conan's choral pieces.

Overall, LOTRO delivers on what it promises: great visuals, fun gameplay, depth and a lot of systems in place to keep you playing for a long time. It's also one of the most polished, professional MMOs yet.

And if you want proof of how good this game is, I've cancelled my World of Warcraft account! Yes, it's THAT good.