Sims 3 Ambitions Review

[Earlie Schwoyer]

Thevideogame universe continues to expand, with players facing a dizzying array of choices. In order to help parents and family members who may not be up on the latest videogames, we're beginning a quarterly feature that looks at some of the better-known games. These reviews, which aren't intended to be comprehensive, will evaluate the quality of the game experience and try to help a potential buyer determine how appropriate a videogame might be for various age groups.

Based on the movie franchise, this highly anticipated new version includes all five of the Star Wars movies. You can enter as a rebel or Imperial soldier, a clone, droid, or any other major character in the saga. You can also play in any time period of the film's storyline. The modes are: historical campaign, galactic conquest, or instant action.

In the historical campaign mode, you can live out all the movies. In galactic mode, you are working to conquer all planets on the map. For those who can't get enough of Lucas's worlds, this is an absorbing exploration of the Star Wars universe, but one that can still be played in small bites of time.

For the Game Boy Advance : These two games are by far the most graphically advanced of the series. The game play is easier but with more activities, such as new destinations. More monsters populate these games - 235 to be precise - giving players a whole new world of Pokmon monsters to catch and train. Most of the moves and character abilities from earlier versions are still here, but revisited with better graphics. For parents looking for an entertaining universe without the intense mock-warfare of so many games, the Pokmon world is a good alternative. In order to play, you have to learn and strategize the many abilities and moves of the now-386 Pokmon monsters. Hey, the periodic table of the elements only has 109.

This update to the most popular PC game of all time is a more advanced version of the original game - more ways to tailor your Sim, more neighborhoods, more faces, even more clothes. Game highlights include expanded control over each character, including actions from flirting to getting a job. One of the most noticeable updates involves greater free will for the characters. You don't have to watch them constantly, which is important because it's a fulltime job going through your Sims lives minute by minute. Now they can do basic activities like getting food and going to the bathroom without you having to babysit.

The graphics have taken a huge leap forward as well. Now, you can zoom in on facial expressions. Each face is modeled - you can choose a chin, a nose, a face shape, etc. But you can also maintain the "God" perspective from a distance, again with intense graphic detail.

Next, you can build complex relationships between your characters - including envy, love, etc. And you have the ability to explore much more sophisticated ambitions or aspirations. This time around, the game has much more emotional depth. This is probably the single most significant improvement, because after all, if your Sims can't commit sins, what's the fun of being God?

There a still a few caveats - the game is still very user-intensive, requiring that you stay with your characters and develop them. Also, a technical point: this version requires a huge amount of hard drive space. It is voracious and if you have an old machine, it will run significantly more slowly than the big, new machines for which it has been created. But given the life issues you must tackle while developing your Sim universe, it's hard not to love this as the perfect diversion for a college student.

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The macroeconomic environment was challenging in 2023. There are a few factors worth highlighting in this regard - particularly devaluation of the naira against the US dollar, which was the strongest headwind to our business. Despite these effects, we are encouraged by the solid underlying operational momentum and momentum of the business, as well as progress in key strategic initiatives. We believe we are well positioned to continue delivering on our growth ambitions over the medium term.

The blended inflation rate across our markets remained elevated and averaging 16.7%, from 15.1% in 2022. This put pressure on our customers' spending power, which impacted demand for services. Higher inflation also directly impacted our business by increasing the cost of doing business, as well as higher interest rates - as central banks intervened to curb inflation - which increased our cost of debt (unpacked by the CFO on Q&A with the CFO). Encouragingly, we noted a peak in the inflation cycle in some of our markets, such as South Africa, Ghana and Uganda. We expect slowing inflation to be more supportive of our medium-term outlook.

Compounding the effects of inflation, local currencies were volatile, with limited availability of hard currency, especially in Nigeria. In 2023, the US dollar appreciated by 97% against the naira, resulting in a closing rate of N907/$ at the end of the year (December 2022: N461/$) - as mentioned, this had the biggest impact on our business in the year. This followed the liberalisation of exchange rates in the country in June 2023 and had a material impact on our profit and loss and balance sheet. Despite the short-term volatility and effects we are seeing, we are optimistic that the structural policy changes being implemented in Nigeria will be positive for the country and our business in the medium to longer term. We also navigated a paucity of foreign exchange in some key markets, which made it more challenging to upstream dividends and management fees (refer to Q&A with the CFO).

From a geopolitical standpoint, we saw a rise in tensions globally and within the African continent. In addition to conflicts in Ukraine, the Middle East and parts of West Africa, the crisis in Sudan also deepened, and we extend our deepest sympathy to those impacted by the conflict there. From a business perspective, this precipitated fuel shortages, power outages and disruptions to network availability in Sudan.

Notwithstanding the macro-volatility and challenges, MTN maintained a resilient performance in 2023, with solid underlying operating momentum. Despite the adverse effects of various SIM registration regulations, we expanded the customer base to 295 million across 19 markets.

Active MoMo users increased by 5% to 72.5 million - a quarter of the total customer base. The volume of fintech transactions increased by around a third to 17.6 billion, with the value of transactions up 47.4%* to US$272 billion, driven by the growth of advanced services including payments, BankTech and remittance solutions.

Before delving into our broader strategic progress, it is worth highlighting the notable headway in 2023 made by MTN South Africa on its network resilience. As this was a key focus area of the business to improve network availability in the context of ongoing loadshedding in the country. By year-end, MTN SA had improved the availability of its network to 95% in even the higher stages of loadshedding, with availability up to around 98% on sites where resilience was implemented. We are pleased with this progress, which was ahead of schedule and supported an improvement in the Opco's operational performance in 2023.

In terms of our Group-wide strategic priorities more generally, these are detailed on Our strategic performance dashboard; and among the highlights in 2023 were progress in building the largest and most valuable platforms. In fintech, we are excited about the partnership agreements secured with Mastercard, particularly the commercial agreements, which we expect will support the accelerated growth of the business. Early in 2024, we concluded the definitive agreements for Mastercard to invest up to US$200 million for a minority equity stake in MTN Group Fintech at a valuation of US$5.2 billion.

We also gained traction with the structural separation of the fibre business in 2023, with Bayobab, securing regulatory clearances and new fibre operating licences in markets like Uganda, Cte d'Ivoire and Central African Republic. Bayobab also acquired the fibre network of MTN Zambia in a sale-and-leaseback arrangement, while the work to progress Project East2West was commenced in partnership with infrastructure investment platform Africa50.

What was particularly pleasing in progressing our platform strategy was our ability to leverage partnerships to enable faster scaling of these growth drivers in line with our philosophy (partnerships for progress). We will continue to look for strategic partnerships to accelerate the execution of Ambition 2025.

In our priority to simplify and transform the portfolio, we finalised the sale of MTN Afghanistan, which completed the Group's planned exit of consolidated subsidiaries in the Middle East. We also accepted an unsolicited offer, subject to conditions precedent, including regulatory approvals for MTN's equity interests in MTN Guinea-Bissau and MTN Guinea-Conakry.

We made good progress in advancing key sustainabilityinitiatives and achieving our strategic priority to create sharedvalue (see details on the next page). Overall we believe that thestrides we continued to make in our strategy executionposition the business well to weather the current volatility inthe short term and deliver on our growth ambitions over themedium and long terms.

As mentioned, creating shared value with ESG at the core is critical and is one of our four strategic priorities. On Views from our Chairman, the Chairman covers much of the progress in this regard in 2023, and I also direct readers to a more comprehensive review of our sustainability performance on Our strategic performance, including the improved scores with our focus ESG raters and rankers.

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