I got the game last night at midnight and all I've been able to do so far is check out the CAS and Buy/build mode and Twinbrook.

UPDATE -
Added pics of most of the new hairs including the childrens and the hairs only found from the Makeover stations

http://s128.photobucket.com/albums/...reenshot-59.jpg

My Thoughts-

CAS - Lots of new hair. Probably some of the the best hair EA has made so far. There is more new hair in game that has not been shown in preview pics. The guy hair is very very nice. Ladies is OK IMO. Several of the ladies styles are very similiar. Only complaint is there is not more variety in the ladies styles introduced. But what is there is good. Most of the styles I had not seen in any preveiw pics were of styles you can only get through the stylist makeover station. There is also a couple new hairs for children. A boys skater/bowl cut that I just LOVE and a very short pigtail style for girls. Plus a couple of the adult hair styles are for children too.
Clothing was a bit of a dissapointment. Not many new styles at all for any age. No new jewerly or accessories. But all the new hair kindof makes up for that. Makeup opaqueness sliders apply to all types of make up, lipstick, blush, eyeshadow ect. VERY cool feature.

Build/Buy. Again here I was a bit dissapointed. Not alot of new furniture as alot of new items were career related. There was only one new furniture style introduced and that was the Federal style. The furniture is very nice looking.. basic stuff that can be used in alot of ways, just not alot of it. Lots of little deco items which I liked alot. And there is now a new tab in the Deco catagory. Statues. Most of the statues and fountains are now shown under that catagory. The rest is still listed under Misc.

The build stuff is very nice but again not alot. There are two new very nice fireplaces - a very short one and a very tall ornate one. Some colums can now be 2 or 3 stores which is very cool.
Only one new fence/gate that I saw. Some new doors and windows that I really like. Lots of new trees. The trees are really cool.

The one thing that surprised me was the amount of new patterns and wallpapers. There are a TON of new patterns under the Wood and Fabric catagories. Some new stuff under Stone too. Very Very nice paterns in all styles. New Wall papers too, lots and lots of them.

Another surprise is the large amount of houses and lots in the bin that you can place in other towns. There was maybe 10ish residential lots in the bin that can be placed. I wasn't able to check them all out but they are there. And in the community bin, there are all the new lot types, Tatoo parlor, junkyard, firestations ect.. so that it should be easy to put them in existing games.

Unfortunatly I was not able to really PLAY the game as I had to sleep and spent all my time checking out the new items/cas.

Have to go to work now. Sorry for any spelling/typos.. I wrote this very fast.

Pictures to go with this review, would be even more helpful. Hopefully, someone will do one of those. But thanks for the info, Pandora.

Nice review Pan, I still don't see $40 worth of expansion though. I think I'll pick up the Dragon Age expansion instead

Here's where we squee and whine and everything in between about Ambitions, the second expansion pack for The Sims 3. If you have an opinion about how mediocre, great, disappointing, or amazing this EP is, post right here, right now!

Omigodomigodomigodomigod... KIDS CAN INVENT!!!! Or at least they can use the inventor's workbench, build up the skill and scour the neighborhood for scrap! Oh yeah, I'm LOVING this, just LOVING this, now my Sim can really be an inventor from his child years in.
So far I've only done the fireman stuff, really exciting, pretty fun. The new male hairstyles are really cute. REALLY CUTE!!
I love this expansion pack so far.
Did I mention CHILD INVENTORS yet??? :D

Haha, wow! Now we can have some real 'child prodigies', so to speak. :D

My review on ambitions

I love this game I can't say that enough. This won't be long because it's lightning in my area so I need to unhook my pc. Anyway The townies are a lot more attractive and I have found several attractive female sims. My sim went to the firedepartment and got a job and one of his coworkers a female started flirting with him. Their already friends and they went out to the bistro to eat together so who knows.

The townies are very friendly. Several came up to my sim and started talking especially the males. One male walked up to my sim and started dancing with him in the bar. A female child come up to him and wanted him to play catch and they did. The teens look a lot more attractive.

I did see a bug and I hope this is fixed. For some reason you can't set hair per outfit anymore. You can but it works for all outfits even thou you set it for one outfit.

I have plenty of pictures I will upload later. The fireman job is fun.

The carpool still comes. A firetruck come to pick up my sim. Your sim however takes his vehicle home. In my case his motorcycle. You can still click on the vehicle and go to work early if you don't want the car pool to come.

When you go in the parlor you have the choice to give yourself a makeover and tattoo or get one of the sims to do it for you. One sim was a tattoo artist the other a makeup stylest. If you go in there after midnight as in the consignment shop there is no one there but you can hang out.

Most of the new buildings have a second floor like the bar,consignment shop,laundrymat etc but there is nothing up there. You can place stuff I assume if you want to maybe make a nice apatment on the second floor.

The two new radio stations sound great. One is roots and the other Is soul. There is no rock and country station.

I only tried it briefly. Sadly my new inventor set their butt on fire while inventing. Apparently inventing is very dangerous to your hind quarters. Sadly she did not survive the experience.



For some reason my pic came out dark and had to be lightened just to post. The look of the new town is actually better than my pic shows.

So my review so far is that there is danger in Twinbrooks. Danger I say. Flaming balls of danger.

I've only played for like 10 minutes and am so impressed. Did everybody notice that we have TONS of new lighting? And finally, a proper desk lamp!

I used a tattoo chair, and it was really neat, up until the end, when I realized the animation shows them tattooing the right arm, regardless of where the tattoo actually goes. But I can forgive that. And all I can say is OUCH! If they dragged the tattoo gun that fast when I got a tattoo, I would have wound up in the hospital!

On the trampoline, they just jump up and down. Does anyone know if using the trampoline is like dancing? What I mean is, after using it for awhile, they gain new animations. Has anyone gotten that far?

^ That is the best freaking opinion I have ever seen on any Sims game, anywhere.

The game is awesome! I <3 it. And for the new CC thingy, my CC is still in program files and it works fine. Anyway, here is my sim Amy



I LOVE the new lighting

LOL We shall mourn together. And then medicate as needed.

Thankfully for me, there was a perfect replica of my sim sitting in the bin. This time I saved before inventing. And put in a smoke detector.

I'm enjoying the inventor. Although the sparkles on the junk piles will have to eventually be eliminated.

Here's the digger that you can invent (it looks great in game):





You can dig for a while before you finish the hole. Then you can either name or fill in the hole. I got several gems, some scrap, a table and a dishwasher from the hole. Apparently I live on an old dump of some sort. The digger is reusable.

Detonating objects doesn't seem worth it cost wise. Perhaps I'm blowing up the wrong items. But it costs to detonate the item (explosives aren't free) and I only got a few pieces of scrap. But what it lacks in value it makes up for in fun. Imagine a technophobe going around town and blowing up any techie. I'll have to check to see if I can blow up things on community lots.

Making items after you have invented them and then selling at the consignment seems profitable. Used 10 scrap to make the hygienator (55 simolies) and then sold it for around 250 (minues 25 for consignment fee).

The look of everything has been great. And I've barely scratched the surface of inventing much less everything else that is included. Gotta say that so far, I'm really happy that I bought it.

I Lov Ambitions!!!

There's death, destruction, and a really grungy Louisianan vibe. Love it, love the alligator neon sign on the bar, love the creepy townies, love it all. Worth every penny.

Doth mine eyes and ears deceive me?!?!?! We're actually praising this game just out of the start gate and not Whining?? WOW!! I haven't got mine yet but I'm chomping at the bit to have it in my hot little hands. Roll on Friday!!

So far I'm loving it. I've gotten a solid 5 hours of gameplay in since coming home from work (sounds sad, but whatever!) and have BARELY scratched the surface.

I've been playing with mostly the architect career. Half of the fun is seeing all the different houses in the neighborhood (LOTS of rich people with nice houses!). Also I love that you can go into build mode - it doesn't lock you into buy mode like in apartment life. You could completely change the entire house if you wanted to. Some drawbacks so far are the confusion of where exactly to build these rooms these people want - there's no directions about how many people live there, what's okay to move around or get rid of. (I guess it doesn't really matter since you're not playing the house, but still). There's not a lot of direction about how to get great or perfect reviews, either. Lots of trial and error with this one.

As far as the tattoos go, I'm not super fond of the placements and how you can't have a full sleeve. Also the tattoo images themselves are kind of lame (but not terrible). CC tattoo skins are better look-wise, but it's so cute to have your sims go to the tattoo parlor with their best friend and get some. So the gameplay is worth the trade-off of the looks.

What else...New furniture/clothes/hair/etc. like Pandora said, not a lot, but what's there is great.

Overall it feels like a totally new game. I haven't really been sold on TS3 yet, but I feel like it's hitting its stride with this expansion. If they keep putting out solid expansions like this, TS3 could become a breathtaking game. I recommend this much more than WA. There's so much to explore and something for everyone.

ETA: Oh, I just noticed that sims who are in a relationship (boyfriend/girlfriend, girlfriends, boyfriends), there's a line connecting them in the family panel. I wonder if they adopt a kid (talking about gay folks here) while they're just dating if the child will have both of them as their parents. I know before only the person who made the call to adopt was the parent, then if they got married later, the other parent was a step-parent.

omg, i got my expansion a little over 24 hrs ago and i feel like i've still bearly scratched the surface. your sim now throws his or her dirty laundry on the floor when she changes clothes (once you buy a washer)! I've been playing an inventor, but i tried some stuff with the detective too (unfortunatly i saved over my inventor and had to restart her >.<) but sometimes when you detonate things, they end up blowing up in your sims face. funny to watch her run around the junkyard singed and only wearing her skivvies. and as for the miner mentioned earlier, my sim managed to hit an underground cave system and went on an adventure. loving the new short hair for guys, have been crying about their lack up until now. i'm just hoping that someone will figure out how to add new tatoos to the design system soon (like they did with patterns and hair) not only that but this is the first sims game/expansion EVER that mad my husband say "you know, i might have to give that a try" lol have fun well worth the money

The lack of capitalisation on this thread's title is blowing my mind in a bad way.

Capitalized for you, kiwi_tea. You now owe us one opinion or review on Ambitions.

Well, there was no way I was not going to love this, so it's almost superfluous to post I really got the bug bad and swallowed up every shred of info I could find on it on a daily basis, as those who have suffered through my board spam will have noticed. But I gotta say, it is definitely meeting expectations so far

I'm playing an architectural designer, and I haven't gotten very far, since I spend a lot of time poring over every room I have to redecorate, but I'm having a ton of fun with it. The cool thing is that you aren't limited at all in what you do to the house, so you can ninja-redecorate stuff you were not hired to do at all, provided you meet all the requirements

She's slowly fixing up her own swamp shack in a run-down-but-trendy way as she rakes in the simoleons from her various jobs. And she's making friends easily from chatting up clients. One of these days she may relax enough to go on a date.

As I posted elsewhere, the HARD part of the job is remembering to make sure all the walls you add are painted, and don't forget the roof!

Is the granny underwear set new? (It's a lacey support bra and very high briefs.) I don't remember it at all. It doesn't have a tag for CC or any EP/SP, but I wonder if it was installed with the patch. There's also a polo shirt with pants and an apron, also for elder females, again, no labeling.

I haven't gotten to play around with the jobs yet.. I've just been setting things up, nuking redundant CC, and looking at random things. It makes me miss awesomemod a lot though, just for simple silly things like switching households easily so I can poke around more. I was getting a lot of crashes earlier from.. something in the misc category under decor. I think it was CC, but I'm not sure. Deleting a lot of stuff made it stop though.

I also messed around with a couple of the families (The old maids on the hill, and the creepy red guy by the scrapyard.) The detail in the new houses amazes me. I was expecting a repeat of France in housing. I really liked how that pool was made to look like it had flooded the yard.

Edit: The outfit I noticed for Elder females is also available for Adult females. Not YA though.

I like/love it so far. There could be a few more appliances besides the washer/dryer, but it's good. Also, there really aren't that many toys, and no new electronics that I saw. But the other stuff seem to make up for it. Also, what new toys there are, there are just 'view' interactions for them (unless I missed something). There is a cow toy that's really cute and I have a pic on my blog page. Also I have 41 in game screenshots (and some descriptions) of the EP on my blog, if anyone wants to take a look.


http://jenssims.wordpress.com/tramp...-time-machines/


I love the time machine. And I think the fog effect is one of my favorites.

I'm jealous. I've got the game already but no time to play it. Don't you just hate it when the real life inteferes with your gaming obsession?

Anyway, I've just had two hours to have a look at the Twinbrook.

The town looks great, especially the swampy areas, I suspect most of my Sims will live there. I "visited" just three houses and I was surprised because they didn't suck. In fact, all three houses were playable, I didn't feel the instant need to completely redecorate it. But then, I like the old, ruined and dark places, more stylish Simmers might not share my enthusiasm in this case.

There don't seem to be too many new objects in the buy and build mode but the good thing is, I don't remember seeing a single thing that would make me think "WTH?" which is quite unusual for EA creations. In fact, I LOVE the new double bed (the one without canopy) and the new coffeetables.

The tattoo system was a slight disappointment. Sometimes, even on the larger scale, the tattoo doesn't look the right size, for example the wings on the back even on the largest scale still seem to be too small, at least to me. There's no sleeve tattoo and if I remember correctly (correct me if I'm wrong), ankles are the only place you can put tattoos on legs. And even for the ankles, the placement is weird. But I still hope there's some function that would allow me to reposition the tattoo, I just haven't found it yet...

Anyway, is it just me being blind or did the WA Egyptian makeup disappear?

I get extremely jealous by reading this, I don't get mine until tomorrow. And I plan on blowing off my plans with a friend just to play (how lame is that, self?), because I've been so excited the past two weeks waiting for Ambitions, I don't even. Reading all this just makes it worse having to wait until tomorrow! So excited!

Oh yeah, the ankle placement is killing me. NOBODY gets ankle tattoos across the front of their leg. They go on the side. It's so dumb. I hope you're right, and there's a repositioning function hidden somewhere.

The Egyptian makeup is still there. You're blind. No worries.