Across the country this, gajillions of gamers are moving into Sunset Valley. Really, I love the idea that many of them are using our guide as a way to make the move not just a bit easier, but also discover many of the secrets that wait around every corner. If you haven’t picked up the guide yet, let me tantalize you with a few choice features. Imagine your friends trying to figure out how to get a promotion at City Hall while you have rocketed to the top of the profession and are pulling in buckets of cash. While other players are wandering from lake to lake, hoping to uncover the best fishing spots, you are poised at Stoney Falls with rod in hand to land a great catch. You have uncovered the best spots to capture valuable Rainbow butterflies while other gamers are combing through wooded areas, looking for flashes of fluttering colors.

In other words, we truly give you the keys to the city.

It was a true pleasure to write this guide. And that’s not just me spouting platitudes — something my friends wish I did more of naturally. One of the best parts of writing guides is the ability to play games early. There are times I really do sit there and think, I can’t believe I get to play this game before everybody else! That was how I felt when poking around Simhenge high in the hills above Sunset Valley, stumbling upon a rare rock for the first time. It was genuine excitement because I knew that my little celebrating was hardly going to be unique. There would soon be many, many players having similar moments of fun discovery across. Maybe it wouldn’t be when they found gold in them thar hills. Maybe it would be the first time they styled a couch in the object catalog so it looked like something they remembered from grandma’s house. Or the first time they noticed a beetle skittered in the bushes behind the warehouse and realized that was something they could collect and decorate their house with. There are going to be a lot of cool “first times” when people play this game — and I’m not just talking about the first session of WooHoo.

Happy Simming, gamers. I look forward to seeing where else this new chapter in the series goes. And I hope I’m there with you along for the ride.

Being able to reconstruct yourself in a videogame is not exactly a new thing. For some time now, gamers have twiddled with knobs and dials to change hair color and pick a favorite shirt color for an in-game character. Previous The Sims games have let you recreate yourself with a greater degree of accuracy, too. However, after experimenting with the Create-a-Sim area of The Sims 3, I assure you this is the most advanced cloning lab you can buy without raising some serious ethics concerns with the FDA.

I was able to pick out my hairstyle and eye color as well as select a few choice outfits, like some pre-faded jeans that would have set me back some serious coin in the real world. That was good. But what I like about the Create-a-Sim toolkit is the meter you don’t actually see on the screen: honesty. There’s making the idealized version of yourself that has the frame of somebody that gets up at 7AM every morning to run three miles, and then there’s crafting the real you that batters your alarm clock with a wild fist and rolls over for another hour of sleep because you stayed up way too late the night before watching episodes of BSG you’ve already seen. With the number of tweaks and adjustments possible in The Sims 3, something in me felt inclined to put away vanity and really try to make a Sim in my own image.

That meant that while I got to keep the jeans, I had to admit the size I would buy them in. That meant pulling my ears a little outward to where they really are when I step out of the shower, before I hide them behind my hair. That meant the start of some grooves on my face that I’ve been told are the onset of looking distinguished, but to me look like somebody who spent way too much of her life feigning mock surprise at friends who were just behaving in ways I wish I had. (Instinctively furrowing my brow while reading books doesn’t help much either.)

After tugging and tucking, I dug into the traits selection. You can select five traits that flesh out your Sim’s personality. At first, I loaded myself up with honestly, industriousness, a sense of humor, kitchen skills and luck. Oh, I was a real extrovert that was the life of the party and the kind of employee that rockets up the career ladder on the wings of spunk and vivaciousness. But then I took the same kind of honesty I applied to my Sim’s physical appearance and used it to work on her personality. I kept the sense of humor and luck because those are real. But in remaining slots, my clicks turned into confessions. I am at times lazy. The stack of dishes in my sink sometimes reveals my week’s eating habits much like strata in rocks tells a geologist about the fossil record and volcanic activity. Those kitchen skills? Gone. Mama Browne makes mac-and-cheese from scratch. I struggle with the boxed kind.

When it was all over and I saved my Sim, the one chiseled out of pixels with honesty instead of idealism, I felt proud. What kind of growth comes with just making perfect little princesses?

I don’t think anybody’s had as much fun making me since my parents.