By Pentadact

Clever creative type roBurky has just put up the significant first chunk of an in-game diary/experiment/story he’s been working on: Alice and Kev. He’s made a father and daughter in the Sims 3 mismatched, homeless and destitute, then tried to manage their sad lives as best he can.

He’s updating it pretty rapidly, so subscribe to mainline it through your RSS vein.

Naturally it’s funny. But the grim honesty with which the Sims 3 ends up modelling the self-perpetuating consequences of being dispossessed in a dysfunctional family is actually quite affecting. That’s not something you often get in a game diary, and Robin’s quiet observational tone brings it out well.

Also pants.

A few things to say about this:

• As delightful as the game’s squishy look is, I’d still love it if the artwork was mediocre. But without the magnificent, booming, haunting, spacious music, this would have been a very different game, and a much less exciting one.
   
• Free, downloadable, and with full versions of tracks you hear only parts of in-game – this is the way to do it. A commercial disc priced to squeeze a tiny trickle of money out of your most devoted customers, lacking the tracks people are likely to buy it for because of licensing restrictions – this is not. Soundtracks are promos. The people who already have the game can just rip the music from its files, even if you’ve tried to stop them.
   
• There are lots of highlights, but my favourite track in the game is still the music to the Red Carpet level (pictured). I had the chance to ask Kyle about the music a few weeks back, and I said this one sounded like a bad dance track slowed down, which somehow made it majestic. He explained that it is a bad dance track slowed down, written as a joke on the awfulness of nineties music, and the full version on this soundtrack includes sections played at normal speed. Witness the shift from glorious to obnoxious and back again:

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  According to the liner notes, the vocalist is “an astrophysicist named Jessica. I gave a her a chainsaw for her wedding and we never spoke again. The end.” I thought she was a keyboard sample.

My guide to surviving a zombie apocalypse over at the PC Gamer blog.