The latest feature announced for EA’s surefire hit The Sims 3 is proving to be a whole lot of fun!  The feature is called “Neighborhood Mapping” and I’m enjoying it a great deal (I received an advance demo of the game at CES in January!).  Hit the jump to read all about it!

The idea with “Neighborhood Mapping” is to give you the ability to take pictures of your surroundings and import them into The Sims 3.  This gives you the ability to truly recreate your house and all of your neighbors houses as well!

When I played with my digital camera I had a blast!  My house is now perfectly represented in the game from posters on my walls all the way down to my refrigerator magnets.  I even snapped a picture of my wife and children and was pleasantly surprised to find out that I can make characters using those pictures!  It makes the game feel extremely realistic.

I wanted to have my entire neighborhood represented in game so I asked my neighbors to let me snap pictures of their walls. (I’m good friends with everyone).  The only picture that was tough to get was inside my next door neighbors locked bedroom.  He told me that it was messy and his wife would kill him if I was allowed in.

I knew that I needed some pictures of that room to make their house complete!  So that night I climbed up the tree outside their bedroom to snap some photos.  Luckily for me, their bathroom light was on, which provided just enough light for me to be able to get a clear shot of the walls.

As I used my awesome zoom to get a clear shot of the bathroom I heard police sirens screaming around the corner of our street.  I was certain that they were zooming by trying to catch someone that wouldn’t pull over but to my surprise to stopped right next to the house I was photographing!  I quickly snapped the rest of the pictures of the bathroom.

I couldn’t believe all the ruckus that was caused by little ol’ me simply taking pictures for a video game!  They locked me up overnight (which was fine by me, because now I have an AWESOME jail mapped into my copy of The Sims 3).

In the morning they released me and I headed home.  I immediately wanted to see how the pictures of my friends bathroom turned out.  I uploaded them into my game and was disappointed to see that the bathroom in the game was extremely fuzzy.  It looked like there was a lot of moisture in the air…like steam from a shower or something.  Not sure if I was out of focus or what, but I’ll be returning to the tree tonight at the same time to reshoot my pictures.

There was an upside to the fuzzy photos however!  With those pictures, I was able to map my friends wife into the game…She looks good too….really, really good.

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