Star Trek: Online beta
Dragon Age: Origins (when not playing STO)

:Puts on his best set of nerd glasses!!

SPOKE?!?!? You sir deserve to be phasered it's Spock

Seriously though nice job now I can have my own Sylar in the hood... err my girlfriend can have I mean 

You know what Thomas Tusser wrote- "A fool and his money are soon parted". So long as gamers support micro transactions like the DLC of fallout3 and oblivion or like the upcoming content for the sims3 store companies will see us as cash cows and keep following that business model.

Ok coming off my soapbox now cause it's darn slippery up here all alone.

Has anyone considered the fact that EA themselves might have leaked it. With all the negative backlash their use of DRM has gotten them what better way to vindicate themselves than to be able to point at the "Pirated" Sims 3 and cry victim!!!

Then they can start pushing for even more restrictive DRM and take their horrible "Victimized" selves to court during the DRM suits and point to the "pirated" Sims3 and say "See this is why we used such brutal copy protection judge, we are not evil people"

It's the retail, what you see is what is hitting the stores, so yea god help us all. Just goes to show ya that sometimes the older games are still the best and the newer is just shelf space filler.

Very true!

I think I will wait until I am old and blind to start enjoying this installment...at that time it will not matter to me how crappy the Sim characters look 

EA have been boasting for a while now no DRM, that is a laugh. What do you call that calling home to verify. Oh wait I think EA just lied again who would have "thunk" it 

Crappy graphics- Check
Form of DRM- Check

I do think I shall be sticking with Sims2 for a long time- er I mean my wife will 

I have watched the development of Sims 3 since it's announcement and the graphics direction they have taken. I do believe the less "realistic" graphics on the Sims themselves are not artistic so much as intentional for several reasons but one of which is mod content. It is no secret EA is very unhappy with the abilities of the modding community when it comes to the creation of adult content mods found in Sims2 (Ie: realistic body mods among others). My speculation is that the move to less realistic human looking Sims in Sims3 was done in part to curtail those kind of mods or at the very least make them less desirable.

This is of course my opinion as to why the move to more cartoon looking Sims.