Lazy Gamers Jungle Adventures Review Is Up

"happygurl;c-16357729" wrote:

"Sk8rblaze;c-16357721" wrote:

"fullspiral;c-16357621" wrote:
How did this turn in to a discussion about rabbit holes?

The facts of the mater are this:

In sims 3, I spent a good long while watching my sim drive TO the restaurant so that I could watch them disappear in to it and hear something simulating a restaurant environment.

In sims 4, my sims disappear during the travel TO, but once they are there, I get to be there IN the restaurant with them. I prefer that much more.

In sims 2, my sims on vacation disappeared on a helicopter trip. And I played the chance cards that came up that affected their moods when they finally appeared back on the pavement after the trip.

In sims 4, my sim has a couple of choices to affect his mood as he moves in to a new area, but once he gets there, I am THERE with him. I prefer that much more.

Rabbit holes were way worse in Sims 2 and 3 than they are now in sims 4.

It's a discussion about rabbit holes because a good segment of LGR's review covered the text-based adventures.

In Sims 3, we had rabbitholes because the open world was incredibly resource demanding, not only for EA, but for our computers, too. Sims 3 does have restaurants as store content, but, IMHO, they're not as good as TS1, TS2, or TS4's. Sims 4 spent a $20 dollar game pack aiming to flesh out restaurants, and it did alright, but even with the closed world, the horrible simulation lag TS4 possesses causes restaurants to be an all-day affair. It's gotten so horrible that it's content I don't even use because it consumes a whole day due to lag alone.

I love when people try to defend a 2018 release by bringing up an expansion pack released in 2007 for a 2004 base game. Yes, we had chance cards in the form of tours in TS2: Bon Voyage. However, the expansion pack came with a humongous amount of content with such a wide range of focus, that those tours were just a little fun side feature. Chance cards in Jungle Adventure are part of the core gameplay of a $20 dollar pack which focuses entirely on one destination, doing one thing. Not very exciting, at least to me.

I much prefer to explore the game with my Sim, as well. But I do think there could have been far more depth and design put into the jungle compared to relying on text-based adventures. Even in the temple, I would have far preferred actually solving a puzzle myself through my Sim, rather than sit in my chair, watch them write on a notepad, and then click an interaction after a few seconds. Boring.

I don't have any problems going to restaurants, such as lag and things like that. It's not an all day ordeal for me, I don't really know what you're talking about.

This is one of those things I refuse to believe until I uncover video evidence of someone flawlessly eating at a restaurant in under 5 hours. Whether you experience it or not, it's clear this is a game issue and it's frequent enough to not be a user issue, as it affects an unacceptable quota of people.Issues like this need to be addressed, lest they pop up again in future packs. After all, they seem to love recycling content and systems.

I once attempted to complete the collection for experimental foods, and the problem was basically both that the wait staff/cook did not move as efficiently as they could for some reason, and then your sim spends more time oooh'ing and aaah'ing at the plate rather than actually eating it. I think I was even fascinated once because by the time my Sim finished their meal, their hunger need wasn't even maxed out because they took so long to eat it. I explicitly remember having that Sim take vacation days off work just to eat, and often returning home dead tired.

This is a serious problem moving forward too. Jungle Adventures recycles food stalls, merchant tables and many of the core gameplay elements for the puzzles. In it's case, it's just a bit boring to see the same things used over and over. Other cases though, such as the vet career, they readily recycle features that have been broken since their creation. Go look up feedback for Get To Work's Retail, Dine Out and the vet career, and not a single one runs perfectly smooth and not a single one is without serious issues. Dine Out is probably the best of the three since it's flaws are ignorable with random customers just not being served, but Vet and Get To Work both suffer from reports of employees simply not doing anything. They seem eager to recycle content though even IF the content doesn't work.

And I find it absolutely concerning to see packs like Jungle Adventures release and despite the amounts of recycled content, the pack still looks like a dud. If they're recycling content to conserve time to use on other new features, an argument can be made it's worth it. Here though, I have no idea what their focus went into. It seems to be the world itself and the build mode objects, but then I have to wonder how that could be since Vampires also did a great job at providing nice build mode objects and didn't suffer in quality for it. I cannot tell if there's poor planning going on or just a feeling of apathy about the pack by the development team.

Random tangent too, but another thing I find concerning is how animations seem to be getting worse. I happened to see that the laundry pack has a "frame drop" when Sims do laundry. Initially I thought this was a stream issue, but it seems Sims consistently have a poor-quality animation when interacting with laundry machines. I've seen a similar thing now occur when players try to assemble totems. (or use them? I forget) Why are the animations losing quality? Does this game just have a budget of absolute zero? It's very strange too because the new dance animations actually look good and fleshed out. It's rare they provide new animations (presumably due to cost) so on one hand seeing the dance is surprising, but then it's paired with more choppy animations and I sit here wondering what's going on at Maxis.

I digress though, that's a lot of tangents I just went off on. My point is we cannot just sweep past issues under the rug and pretend they don't exist. When we do that, they absolutely resurface. Get To Work's Retail was non-functional, and yes Dine Out and Vet career have similar issues. Laundry day had choppy animations, now Jungle Adventure does too. City Living sold despite recycling base game content and providing minimal new content like food stalls and market tables, lo and behold Pets and Jungle Adventure recycle those to pad their content count as well.

We should not be focusing on the moments when things do work. We should be focusing on when they don't. If you're trying to land a person on Mars and one of your two spaceship launches crashes and burns, you don't sit and dwell on the one that worked, you try to figure out why the other one failed. Focusing on the success doesn't solve the problem, focusing on the failure helps pinpoint the problem. As such - no offense intended - but I don't see the value in saying "my game works fine" when it's clean a non-insignificant amount of the population doesn't have your great fortune.