The Sims 3 [PC]

Meet Tim McDonald. He's a grumpy writer-type with a love of computers and a decent sense of humour. He lives in a house with Tamer Asfahani – an charismatic schmoozer with a love of computers and a highly inappropriate manner  – and Andy Alderson, a kleptomaniac musician with a love of computers.

But not in real life. As you've probably guessed by the title at the top of the page, we're talking about The Sims 3. What better way to test the game to its limits than by recreating the IncGamers editorial team, plonking them in a house, and seeing who murders who first?

The character creation suite is likely one of the first things you'll see upon starting a game, and it's managed to achieve that almost unattainable peak of being incredibly powerful while ridiculously simple to use. You set a character's gender, name, and age (from toddler to elderly) and then proceed with tweaking and adjusting every little thing about them. If you're not too picky, you can choose from a set of pre-generated options for face shape, eyes, nose, mouth, and the like. If you are, another button click away brings you to well-labelled sliders for each section that let you adjust the Sim to your heart's content. Perhaps more incredible is that clothing options aren't set as much as they were – you've got a set of skins, which you can colour to your whim. While you don't have a painting program in there and can't scrawl rude words over their trousers, you've got an RGB colour selector and a silly number of patterns to choose from. On a whim, I spent two minutes one afternoon recreating Andy's shirt. He glanced over at my screen, did a double take, look down at his shirt, looked back at the screen, and said something along the lines of “Bloody hell. That's accurate.”

Personality quirks are next, which tie into the personalities I listed in the first paragraph. Each has a fairly serious impact on the character. Tim has “grumpy,” which means that it's much easier for his mood to drop. Tamer, with “inappropriate,” has a lot of incredibly random options during conversation, and will quite happily perform them if left to his own devices. Andy the kleptomaniac, on the other hand, often gets wishes (the little desires that started in Sims 2, which can be fulfilled to boost your Sims mood) to steal things. You can also choose lifetime wishes. This is a desire the Sim has that doesn't change throughout their life, and will usually take their entire life to attain. Andy wanted to become a master guitarist. I wanted to become a journalist. Tamer wanted to become “Leader of the Free World,” which is probably the scariest thing I've ever heard. Slightly disappointing is the lack of hairstyles (how am I suppose to accurately recreate Tamer without an afro?) and I imagine these will crop up as paid DLC in the future, but it's not too big a problem.

So the IncGamers team ended up in an empty lot with a bit of cash to spare. Before I could even start constructing the house, Tim had wandered over to Tamer and berated him for being inappropriate. My Sim is me, clearly.

Before long, they had a pad to call their own, and jobs. That evening, Tim wanted something to eat, and so wandered into the kitchen, where he promptly set the stove on fire. Some might claim this unrealistic, but, I nearly set a real-life microwave on fire recently, which I figure is pretty good going. The fire department was duly called. Insurance paid us back a little for the stove, but not nearly enough. Worse still, this had squandered food. It was time to go shopping.