The Sims 3 Ambitions Expansion Pack - Prima Essential Guide: Prima Official Game Guide (Prima Essential Guides)

I'd like to present a different viewpoint than the two previous reviewers gave. I have played all The Sims games from the very first one (Sims 1) and I have purchased most of the guides. This one is by far the best one. Here's what I like about it:

1) It's a perfect size, very handy to use and to put in a bag or purse to take along with you. It's also a much better size when you're playing the game and you don't want a huge book blocking the screen.
2) It's spiral bound, which is awesome because you can prop it up so you can see a page while you're playing and you don't have to worry about bending the book binding or trying to hold the page with one hand while you play with the other hand.
3) Every single page is in color! If you've purchased previous guides you know that most pages are in black and white, which isn't exactly convenient when you're trying to see what the picture is showing you. Even the charts are in color which make them so much easier to...Read more

This Prima guide for Ambitions, the latest The Sims 3 expansion, is in a new self-proclaimed "Convenient Size". For myself this game guide is a bit of a let down because it appears that "convenient" means "small" to Prima, small format, small typeface and small images. The size is about the width of a paperback book (PBB), the height is about an inch taller than a PBB.

New for Prima is the use of a spiral wire binding on this game guide. This is probably a good thing except that the less than quality positioning of the printed pages means that often parts of the text is lost to the punched holes for the binding.

Pros
1. The printing is in color and the text is crisp
2. The spiral binding means that the guide will lay flat or can even be folded over without causing damage.
3. The contents appears to be reasonably organized with tab-like indexes along the top of the page.

Cons
1. The printing is tiny somewhere between 6...Read more

I am unimpressed with this guide, plain & simple. I've purchased ALL the guides for each expansion from Sims 2 to Sims 3, so I know what to expect from them. This new "smaller more convenient size" feels flimsy and the ultra-thin pages feel like they'll rip from the spiral binding at any turn. The guide is littered with blatant errors and typos. There is no update to new building tools and too much space is used to recap the original base Sims 3 game. Overall, a disappointment, but since there's no alternative version you're pretty much stuck with this one if you prefer to have a guide for the new Ambitions expansion. Note to Prima Game Guides: go back to the old format and fire your current editors.