Sims 3 strikes me as the game Sims 2 should have been.

I just started playing Sims 2 at the beginning of this year.  I never played Sims 1.

When I first started playing, I was absolutely shocked to see that I was forced to play a single lot, and that I could not access the rest of the community.  I wondered, where is the rest of the neighborhood.  After a while, it did not bug me as much.  Now we have a whole world to play in.

The load times were ridiculous.  Typically, I go off and do something else, like watch a DVD while waiting for Sims 2 to load.

And the Sims 2 was pretty buggy.  Just look at all of the mods it takes to fix the thing.  Of course, once it is modded up, it is a pretty good game.  But the game as originally released is pretty lame.

A lot of the aspects of Sims 2 were not all that realistic or interesting.  Pleasantview hardly seems like a town at all -- more like a subdivision that a developer threw together.  Sims 3 actually has a town square, a townhall, a central business district.  In fact, it reminds me a lot of a Southern California town (surprise, surprise)  It also has things which were missing from Sims 2, like a school, a hospital, a cemetery, a theater.  Now I would like to see more businesses, like one would find in a real town.