Customer Reviews

Career Creator Pro Add-On for The Sims

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

I was a little leary about purchasing Career Creator Pro since it wasn't from Electronic Arts, but I decided to go ahead. I love it!
If you have ever despaired because your Sim couldn't seem to make enough friends or advance in skills in order to advance in their career, this is for you. The add-on comes with some extra careers as well as enabling you to create your own careers. You decide everything from the career track to what skills are needed for each advancement to how much money they make and how many hours they work. In other words, just about everything. You can also fine tune careers after you think you have finished.
The only instructions that come with this are the instructions for installing the software. This worried me at first until I started looking around. It is very user friendly. Everything is fairly self-explanitory, but if you run into problems, help is easy to find.
You can make as many careers as you want, but you can only play a certain number in the game. You have to deactivate careers before you can insert the ones you have made.
All in all, this is a great addition to the Sims. If you have ever wished for more variety in the career choices for your Sims, you have to get Career Creator Pro.

I tried the free online version of this, and it crashed my game, but the paid-for "pro" version works fine for me. You can create new career tracks, setting job requirements, salary, hours, and so forth. I've made some "real" jobs, which made the game interesting again after I'd played it to death. I've also made a Gambler track where they only work an hour a day but bring home lots of money, for when I want my characters to concentrate on training the dog or forming social relationships. More fun than "rosebud," and characters get the status of having a job.

Should've known better. If this program were any good, wouldn't Maxis itself be making even more money out of it?

Sure, it's a great idea, in fact, so good I--I who am usually a better consumer--ordered it right away without even reading the reviews.

The creating a career part works fine, but none of the other features seem to work. You can't test your career if you have Unleashed or above. If you can actually initialize your game, you might find the requirements you set for each job are all mixed up. And apparently every time you get a new expansion pack (which is, what? Every day now?), you have to restore the defaults and uninstall if you expect it to work (that's a hoot).

But the worst effect is, of course, the fact that now my game crashes during loading and dumps me back to the desktop, even after going to the scanty promo page Abacus calls home and downloading the Unleashed patch. If you're an avid Sims player, you'll certainly not envy my next task now: wading through Maxis's own nightmare help system, and inevitably trying several user suggestions before finally just winding up uninstalling this stupid program and losing all the joy I had in creating my stupid little career.

Oh, and read through the other reviews--apparently this program is to be had for free if you're good at searching. Not that getting it free is a good idea, it just would have hurt less than paying all this money, waiting for it to arrive, and then this hassle.

Beware! Beware!

I have used the original version of Career Creator and I think Career Creator Pro is a brilliant add-on for those of us you like to customize our games.
With this program you can change every aspect of a Sim's working life, salary, hours, workwear (skins) - even the car that picks them up in the morning can be changed to something more glamorous! You can even exchange careers with friends and import their careers into your game - give your Sims the dream career that you've always wanted.

Avoid this like the plague. We have been playing Sims for over 2 years and had all the expansions. Needless to say, we had many well developed families in 15 neighborhoods and many downloaded skins, walls and floors, etc. We got this to add in a few careers that we thought were "missing" from the game. As soon as we installed this, our game went kerflooey! The bus didn't show up, the car pool didn't show. Every Sim became unemployed and kids had no school grades. You couldn't find a new job with either computer or newspaper. We had to uninstall and reinstall all the games, lost all our families, pictures, downloads, EVERYTHING! Not only was this a waste of money, it really ruined our whole Sim experience. It is disheartening to have to start over with all new families and houses after developing such a long "history" with our families.

Do NOT buy this add-on, as you can find free Sims add-ons that do the exact same thing out on Sims-fan-sites.

I bought this after reading the box where it stated you can create "UNLIMITED custom careers" - of course, once you open and install it you'll see that there is still a finite number of careers for your Sims (21 is the max, I believe) and all this program does is edit existing careers, or create new careers that you have switch out with existing careers. In other words, it's NOT "unlimited" - it's still just 21 careers. Guess they have a different definition of "unlimited" than Webster, eh?

Furthermore, when I try and use some of the other features like automatically placing a Sim into a career (rather than "searching for a job" within the game) - it doesn't work. I get an error message dialog box, which, by the way, NEVER closes - I keep clicking "OK" when I see the error message and it pops up endlessly, so I have to use CTL+ALT+DELETE to get rid of it. Happens on my Win 2k machine and my husband's XP machine.

Stay away - misleading marketing, a program that does what many free add-ons do better and it apparently doesn't work with Windows 2k or XP very well. Very disappointing.

May I point out that I have an earlier edition of Career Creator, (version 3) that does exactly the same things?

It modifies anything the Pro version can, AND I got it FREE, that's not a free trial, from a site, which I cannot include, I found through a search engine. With the Pro edition, you will probably be charged more for the fact that it is user-friendly. Version 3 comes complete with a full tutorial, and you can get editing within minutes, all still free.

All in all, this may not be the best use of one's time, money and anticipation of it arriving, when downloading the 950kb WinZip file is a lot quicker and free.

Yes, it is true that you can find the non "pro" version on line. However, it is not as nice as this and the online version really never worked on my game. This is easy to use even though there is not an instruction manual included. Creating new careers is fun and it also lets you override the old careers like paranormal or slacker.

...The reason we rate games is to give others an idea of what the program is actually like....I gave it three stars for its thoughtfulness, not its price. Too expensive for a program that basically alters a few letters and numbers.

Is this game compatible with the Sims 2 version?