"......you will be able to have loads of fun with it for a LONG time before considering venturing out to create your own or download more"

Sorry, not so. I've had the game for less than a week and have only had the opportunity to play one full day and sneak in a couple hours here and there, but I am already wanting different patterns.

Unfortunately, there are more things that I don't like about the game than like. First, there is the building a character mode. I find it much harder to customize a face. There is no option for adjusting the forehead, and very little adjustments can be made with the eyebrows, and I don't like any of the eyebrows in the menu...I want to be able to tweak their shapes a bit, but it just isn't possible. Also, there are no pointy elf ears available. When making my Sims in S2, I would start off with the elf face and customize the shape so that all my Sims had pointy elf ears...I really like pointy ears, and it also helped me tell the difference between my created sims in public places from npcs.
Facial hair is really bad too...there is no option for just a really light 5 0'clock shadow and all the facial hair looks crudely painted...I've seen better facial hair from amateur custom content designers...so far, none of the male sims I have made have any facial hair because the options are so poor. The hair styles are very limited and pretty lame, too. It is nice that the colors can be customized, but it would be great if there was an option of toning down the intensity of the colors. I have tried making a red-headed sim as a gentle strawberry blonde, but it all comes out too intense, not natural at all.

Customizing music...mebbe I haven't learned how to do it right yet, but so far, I have found that custom music can only be put into one radio station. In S2, I was able to put my own music into every radio station and turn off the sim muzak. I loved having my own classical music in the classical station, my own pop in the pop station, country, etc... I listen to a wide variety of music, and would love to be able to have different stations with my own music of different genres in it. This new game is really geared towards young folk, but I am an old fogey and don't want to hear sim hip hop or any sim muzak when I play.

I also don't like the fact that sims can't go into stores anymore. A lot of socialization took place with my Sims2 peeps while they were browsing inside different shops. I also really liked creating my own shops....something I can't do anymore. :(

Things that are missing that should not have been excluded: hot tubs, the cow plant, and alien abductions. As a matter of fact, all fantasy type creatures are gone...no alien abductions, no vampires, nada.....perhaps they are planning an ep around fantasy characters? I hope so...I don't play this game to exactly duplicate the real world...I want some fantasy stirred in, thankyouverymuch.

And I am really, really hoping that the first ep is going to be weather. It was the best thing that ever happened in Sims2 and I really miss it.

One thing I do like is the expanded social interactions, but sometimes there can be too many options...it's hard to find the exact expression or action that I want my sim to convey. I also like the fact that the pregnancies take less time, but I found out that if you want to name your Sim baby, you'd darned well better be playing that household until the baby's born or else they get a game generated name.

All in all, I am hoping that the game will improve with future eps, but I'm just glad I haven't taken sims2 out of my pc yet. The game is okay, but not as great as I had hoped it would be.

:D