As far as console versions go, I liked sims base game better than Pets, mostly due to the fact that the colours were weird in Pets, no matter what you did to the settings in the game, or your TV, you could never get the colours right. Stuff that showed as black in CAS would end up this strange shade of grey. I also had a lot of problems with saved games in Pets, I'd get frequent freezes that would wipe my saved games (even after I resorted to making multiple saves, it would wipe them all).
I know here in Australia it's still pretty easy to get Sims 3 for console, but like you said, the game is quite old now (by gaming standards) but it's still not cheap (but then neither is the PC version, even when Sims 4 is on the horizon)