The up-to-date story of Alice and Kev: http://aliceandkev.wordpress.com/
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My Take on the Game
I liked the first Sims pretty well, but it really boiled down to meeting your sim's mundane needs well enough to get to the top of the career ladder, buy better stuff, and have lots of friends. I didn't play Sims 2, so I don't know what changed there.
With the Sims 3, there are a lot more ways to play. Having the entire town available makes big difference in how the game plays, too. It makes the game more engaging and alive.
My current guy has no job. He grows his food and sells the extra to the grocery store. He made enough to buy a partnership in the business, which gives him a nice income once a week. He married a widow, who turned out to be a neurotic perfectionist; she's really amusing. She goes to the stove several times a day and touches the top to make sure it's turned off; sometimes she brushes her teeth repeatedly; occasionally she'll freak out. She writes novels and collects royalties.
My guy paints; one nice thing about Sims 3 is that he enjoys painting, so he can do that to have fun instead of having to stop after a couple of hours to watch TV like in the original. He's improved to the point where he can use his cellphone to "memorize scene" of anything in the game and then go to his easel and "paint from memory," and that scene from the game is on the canvas when he finishes.
If you really hated the first one, you probably won't like this one. But they have done a good job of expanding past the initial "build-shop-work-chat" formula.