What keeps The Sims 2 fresh after all these years.

I got The Sims 2 as a Christmas gift when it first came out, which I believe was 2004. I'd already been playing the original (The Sims) on my laptop, but the difference between The Sims and The Sims 2 was HUGE, so I was very happy to upgrade when I got the gift.

I've talked to many adults who had a Sim addiction, and they nearly all say the same thing--they played like mad men and women for a week or two, maybe even a month, but then they were done with the game. My addiction is still going 5 years later, so sometimes I wonder--is that a reflection on my being more juvenile than most folks, or just that I have put more time and energy into keeping the game fresh so that I am continually excited to play it?

Perhaps the answer is a little of both! However, I do think that I have spent a good bit of time and energy continuing to change and try new strategies to keep the game fun and interesting. For example, I went from building just plain old boxes as houses for my Sims to building elaborate multi-level and multi-shaped mansions.

A few years ago, I decided it might be fun to try to hook up people of vastly disparate physical characteristics ('looks') and have them procreate, to see how good the game was at passing on those genetic codes. I created Sims with huge noses and no chin, etc., and then married them to a Sim with a huge chin and tiny nose, to see if it would balance out in the kids. Boy, did I make some ugly babies that way! LOL But it was fun and interesting--to me at least.

I just realized in the past few months that I have nearly always maintained the family unit once a couple was married and had children. That's not to say that people didn't cheat on their spouses with other Sims, but they always stayed married despite the affairs. So my most recent change in gameplay is to break up families, remarrying some "divorced" Sims, have parents living in 2 different houses sharing "custody" of the children (though Sims kids can only LIVE in 1 house at a time), etc.

This has brought me to a very strange (and, what would be terribly awkward in real life) situation. I had a white man named Chad La Mer married to a black woman named Brooke Towers. They had a young son (Brad) and Brooke was pregnant with their second child (Cookie). During her pregnancy, she began an affair with 1 of 5 adopted Beechwood brothers, 3 of whom were named Alec (UGH, that dratted Social Services!). Alec and Brooke's chemistry was much better than Chad and Brooke's, so I decided to break up the marriage so that she could marry Alec. Brooke had the baby, Cookie, and immediately left Chad, taking the baby but leaving her son Brad with Chad. She moved in with and married Alec and had a baby with him.

Chad later rekindled a flirtation he'd had earlier with Alec's gay brother, also named Alec, which lead to THEM getting married and adopting children together. So now we have a family in which 1 brother is married to the ex-wife of the other brother's husband, and both Beechwood brothers are step-fathers to Chad and Brooke's 2 children. Wow, it has been dizzying trying to keep it all straight. To add to the confusion, the youngest Beechwood brother, Alexander, has been dating Cookie La Mer! Yoikes! Talk about your awkward family reunions!

It sure makes for some interesting family trees and keeps me on my toes remembering who is related to who and how, and who is who's child and who is dating who. In the game, the fact that the "husbands" of both couples are brothers doesn't seem to make the children family also! Otherwise, the game wouldn't allow Cookie La Mer and Alexander Beechwood to have romantic feelings toward one another!

So that's how I keep The Sims 2 fresh after five years of daily playing. I just keep dreaming up new experiments to carry out among my hundreds of Sims. Oh, and yes, I do know that The Sims 3 is out now; but, from what I've read, it has such major changes that I'm not sure I'd enjoy playing it as much as I do Sims 2. Maybe you could let me know how you're liking it?

The Sims House Grand Tour

In my last two blog posts, I took you on a tour--via pictures--of a Sims house I'd just built. This time, I thought I'd take you on a tour of another of my new Sims houses through a series of short videos. I apologize in advance for the jerky camera action, but it is difficult to be super precise when you are dealing with narrow hallways and such. So, follow me...

As we approach the house, you can see that it is a 2-story house with dormer window in the front and a porch with black wrought iron fencing. The outside surface is a gray slate, which I find quite dramatic, especially when combined with white windows and doors. Let's go in.

Next, go through the foyer and into the livingroom on the right. I love bold colors--like this livingroom with bold red carpeting--but I tend to do the foyer in a more neutral palette like this pale wood floor, panelling and paint.

Leaving the livingroom, we go out into the back hall and across to the study. The study--or what I call the skills room--is always one of my favorite rooms to build and decorate. I like to make it a room that I could envision myself relaxing and reading in. I usually have bookcases, a piano and a chess board in there--a place where my Sims can work on most of their skills.

After a 360-degree tour of the library, where Mom Jackie is taking a quiet break from the baby with a good book, we head back out into the back hall.

This is a first floor guest bedroom that is being used temporarily as a nursery. When I started building the house, I had every intention to include a first floor nursery (as I nearly always do), but I got so into designing the house--which I think is different than anything I've built before--that I forgot to include a nursery. So when a baby arrived, I had to improvise! Leaving the nursery, we go out onto a lovely private terrace, complete with hot tub.

Leaving the terrace, we go back inside, and down the hall to the kitchen (where Dad Zedrick has just fed the baby--I think he's already fallen asleep! The baby--not Dad! hehe).

Here, we pass through the kitchen (excuse us, Zedrick) and into the dining room. One of my favorite dining room designs is a large bay window with the long white arched windows in it. I guess it is sort of my own fantasy of being able to sit in a room with a lot of light and look out a bay window at the garden while I eat.

If you'll head up the stairs to the second floor, we can take a peek at the not-yet-furnished master suite--a beautiful turquoise room that mimics the bay window design of the dining room which is just below it. As the camera faces the double doors, you will see an archway to the left and right. Those are the bathrooms of the master suite.

Well, that's it. I hope you enjoyed the tour! If there's something else in regard to my Sims or Sims houses that you'd like to see or hear about, please use the comment function to let me know! Thanks for stopping by My Sim-Called Life.

Building a Sim house - Part II

In Part I, I talked about designing the front entrance of the house, laying out the basic structure of the first floor foundation, laying in bathrooms at the front of the house, and creating the first floor master bedroom suite with easy access to the kitchen. In Part II, I continue with the rest of the house and show the finished project.

As shown in Part I, I created a long rectangular foundation with a bay window push out on each side. One bay window area becomes the combined kitchen and dining room as shown here. After this picture was taken, I did add an island between the appliances and the table, to put the served food (and the dishwasher) closer to the diners. I used a very neutral color palette in walls and floor and then used white counters with a deep teal top and lighting to match (pretty close, anyway) as the pops of color.


In the above shot, you can see the entire first floor--small porch, 2 guest bathrooms, combined kitchen & dining room, combined livingroom and skills room, master suite with 2 bathrooms and a back deck with hot tub.


Since there are only 3 people living in the house, and no immediate plans to expand the family, I added only a partial second floor vs. covering the entire space of the first floor with the second. This provides the little mini-roofs on the first floor that you will see in the completed pictures, below. This is the upstairs bedroom and bathrooms (only 1 bathroom is furnished in this pic). The upstairs living space hadn't been furnished yet when this picture was taken.


Here, I've added the roof and the house itself is complete except for the landscaping. As you see, the mini-roofs at the front and sides (and back, which you can't see from this angle) are a result of adding only a partial second floor. The roofing then compensates for the unused space.



Voila! All done. I put in a garden of rosebushes and ground flowers in on both sides of the entrance and added trees on each of the front corners. It isn't as grand as many of the Sim hosues I've built, but I'm pretty happy with it.


I have found, over years of building Sim houses, that it makes sense to build houses to meet the Sims needs and not just to build a house that looks good. For example, if you don't have enough bathrooms, you aren't going to be able to get your Sims to work or school on time. If you have the kitchen too far from the entrance, your Sims may miss their bus or carpool (where they have been eating their breakfast).

Building a Sim house - Part I

I've uploaded quite a few pictures of completed Sims houses that I've built to my Flickr page, and a few pictures of rooms inside that I've decorated, but I've never included pictures of building a Sim house from the ground up. I noticed on my Flickr search results that there are people searching for pictures of how to build a Sims house nearly every day, so that inspired this post.



The first thing I do in building a Sims house is to design the entrance. This is usually an elevated porch with steps. Most of my porches are much larger than this and have multiple sets of steps.


Next, I decide what shape the house will be--sometimes determined by the size of the lot. In this case, the lot is very deep but not very wide, so I began with a long rectangle going back from the front porch, and then added bay windows on each side. In my opinion, this adds floor space without ending up with an over-large or boxy-looking house.


In my experience, Sims usually need to use the bathroom upon returning from work or school, so I have found it most effective to have at least one bathroom right at the front of the house. However, I usually have more of a foyer than this--since this is a narrow and long lot, I didn't have enough space in width to have the bathrooms PLUS the foyer. Instead, the front hallway opens up into the livingroom and an entrance into the kitchen/dining room.


Behind the kitchen/diningroom is the master suite--a nice-sized bedroom and two bathrooms (the first-floor residents are a couple). The door to the right of the loveseat opens directly into the kitchen. The door to the left opens into the livingroom.

Part II will include pictures of the kitchen/dining room, the second floor bedroom/bath, and the completed house with roof from the front and side, before and after landscaping.

A population boom in Beach Valley

The Sim neighborhood that I've been playing is one that I created, called Beach Valley. Unlike the pre-fab neighborhoods that you start the game with, I built Beach Valley from the grass up--it had no pre-existing homes or characters. There are now streets and streets full of Sim homes and families in the town.

Beach Valley seems to be having quite the population boom these days, caused primarily by the high incidence of twins in recent months. I've read ways to increase the chance of twins, but can't use them because I don't have the particular add-on that provides the item needed. What I've discovered on my own is that Sims having woohoo while already pregnant will tend to have a higher incidence of birthing twins. Here are some of Beach Valley's notable babies:



This is Pablo and Tabitha Picasso. They were both single parents with children who married and joined families, then later decided to have their own baby together. Surprise, surprise! It was not just one baby, it was twins. Here, Tabitha has the first twin, and then hands it to Pablo so that she can have the second twin. I just love the happy beam on Pablo's face here.


The Picasso twins.


This is Alon and Marylena O'Reilly with their twin boys, Alonzo and Marlen. The O'Reillys are one of the two biggest families in Beach Valley--or rather, they were, when Alon's parents and most of his siblings were still alive. Alon is one of 10 children; his parents had 5 biological children and then adopted 5 more. Alon is one of the adopted five. One of Alon's few remaining siblings, Peter Lillard, lives with Alon and his family. Marylena is a "built-in"--i.e., a character who comes already built in to the game so that your Sims have someone to befriend.

This is the Heffinger family. Otto was a well-to-do single dad who moved to Beach Valley with his rebellious teenage daughter, Hortense, his twin toddlers, Jonah and Esther, and a rather intense nanny/cook, Frau Maura. While Jonah and Esther were both adorable toddlers, things were very different as they grew up. Jonah grew up unusually handsome, while Esther became frightfully ugly. Hortense grew up to marry Marisa Bendet, another built-in, and they adopted two children.

This is Peter Lillard Beechwood as a baby. Due to a glitch in the game, his parents were unable to feed him or otherwise care for him and he became one of the few of my Sim children ever taken away from their families by Social Services. I was especially sad about this because Patrice, his mother, had waited until late to marry, and Peter was her first-born.

Across town, as noted above, the O'Reillys were adopting five children in a row. As usual, the adopted children were all named with short names like Alon and Alec...until one day, when the Social Worker arrived with a new adoptee, and I noticed that his name was Peter Lillard! Of course, it makes sense that babies taken away from one family will be adopted out to another, but it had just never happened before in all the years I'd been playing the game.

It became my goal to find a way to introduce Peter to his biological family as he grew up. It was like playing the game Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, trying to figure out who in the family knows someone who knows the Beechwoods. Eventually, I was able to get Peter to befriend his biological sister--the child that Patrice had after Peter was taken away--and, via her, his biological parents. Peter remained with the O'Reillys his entire life.

Freakalicious!

Most folks who love playing The Sims never tire of seeing videos and pix of strange and freaky happenings in the game--and Lord knows, there are plenty of them! Some of them are just things that are programmed in and happen regularly (like the car, below), some are things that happen when a certain set of circumstances occur (like stuck baby syndrome) and some happen because the game has been corrupted, the player has used to many cheat codes, there are bugs in the software, etc. When your Sim lives in a cul-de-sac, this is how he gets to work--right into the hill.

Here we have stuck baby syndrome, but not in the classic sense. This poor grandma was taking her grandson to go potty and ended up with him embedded in her chest. Notice how the baby's lower parts are pixelated? That's because he was on the potty--and when you go to potty in the Sims, your nether regions are pixelated for priv-a-cy. :) I've only had this happen this once.

Here, we have classic stuck baby syndrome. The only time when the player can not make a Sim grow up to the next stage of life is when the Sim is an infant. So there is always a family member who comes to help when it is time for the baby to turn into a toddler. But frequently, things go wrong, and both the baby and the helper get stuck. If you delete them from the game (using a cheat), save and exit the game, and come back in, this is how you'll find them--the helper standing on the curb by the mailbox and the baby hanging sideways in the air nearby.

One of the funniest things that ever happened in The Sims for me was when the gardener arrived one day; instead of just ONE gardener getting out of the pickup to trim the hedges and water the flowers, they kept coming and coming (despite the fact that the truck only holds 2 or 3 people). In all, there were about a dozen gardeners. They made themselves at home--watching TV, eating the food, using the hot tub, etc. I laughed myself silly as they kept pouring out of the truck and invading this poor family's home. I used it as an opportunity for making friends. :)

Then we have the category of woohoo freakiness--wow, I've been seeing a LOT of that lately.

Here, while Cynda is frozen in the cuddle position, her beau is melted halfway into the bed, upside down, with his head DOUBLE upside down. That looks like it hurts, dude.

These two ladies were in the hot tub when they got "in the mood"--hence the bathing suits--but Miss Blue Bikini looks like something they found out in the desert on CSI, and Miss Sensible Suit is stuck in a forever embrace--i.e., the cuddler stays locked in that position while the melter has woohoo by themselves. Dang, dude!

This is a similar melting situation as the one above, except with 2 dudes. They both got onto the bed fully clothed but, when the melting begins, the melter loses his clothing somewhere.

Hello, my name is Sheri...

...and I am a Sims addict.

It all started many moons ago when visiting my mother in Ohio. She'd gotten a new computer and it came with SimCity installed. So, while I was checking my email, I saw it and clicked on it. Before long, my mother was sighing in intense annoyance at me from her chair in front of the TV and occasionally saying "Are you going to play with that thing all night?" Subtext: You drove 400 miles to visit me and you are spending too much time playing on the computer.

When I got home, I got SimCity for myself. I loved SimCity, but I didn't have the business and financial smarts at the time to really do well at managing the city and its resources.

When the original The Sims came out, I snapped it up. I could play for hours and hours. My desktop computer was old and slow at that time, so I put The Sims on my laptop. I would come home from work and sit on the couch and play Sims to unwind.

Then, one Christmas, a friend got me The Sims 2. Wow. It was as if those dudes over at EA Games had bugged my livingroom and had been listening to all the stuff I was bitching about on The Sims and the enhancements that I would like to see. Finally, there was genetics involved and every kid didn't look like every other kid--they actually looked like their parents! And there were aspirations that you had to fulfill for your Sims--that part can be hard work!

I can never quite decide whether my addiction is most rooted in house-building-and-decorating or in gameplay-and-social-interaction. I kid with my older brother, a builder, that there are TWO builders in the family--he just happens to build the real houses. I LOVE to build and decorate Sims houses. But I also love to create and grow a family. I love to get my Sims to fall in love, get married and raise a family. Here are some pix from my Sim-called life:

Here's a link to my Sims collection on Flickr:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/sheriava/collections/72157606505823632/