I’ve installed this game for the second time and I’m wondering why.
You see my damn person gets smelly, needs the toilet, needs to eat, has no job, a shitty house, people keep coming round and demanding attention.
Playing this game is like looking after an extremely needy person.
Do things get better? Surely they do if this game is so popular.
An extremely needy person that you can set on fire (and not get in trouble for doing so). 
…I dunno, I got nuthin’. I only play Sim City if I can abuse cheats to make insane amounts of money, and then build to my heart’s content. Or just run the various disaster scenarios.
Ya know, I had the Sims 1 way back when the first expansions came out. I recreated my apartment and most of my furniture. Had a bad moment when I couldn’t find my kitchen table, the only one they had that looked similar was square, not round. But I did some digging around and downloaded a round kitchen table. Once I had the whole apartment down, I recreated myself as closely as possible and plopped him down. I had to kill him after 2-3 days though.
He got a better job than me, replaced his stuff with nicer stuff than I had, and was making out with TWO hot chicks from down the street. :smack:
Moral of the story: Don’t recreate yourself in the Sims.
Seriously, I guess the appeal of the series was always in the “dollhouse” gameplay. There are sites with literally thousands and thousands of wallpapers, objects, etc. There’s even naked Sim skins, famous people skins, etc. So if you can imagine it, you can probably download it and put it in the game. I would say, just from hearing other people talk about the game, that a lot of people don’t play the game as intended. They tend to cheat past all the boring stuff and make up their own stories. Bizarre, disturbing stories.
Yeah, it’s definitely like playing dolls. I typically make Sims that look like really hot guys and then act out weird gay soap operas.
And then I kill them randomly.
My favorite was when I made Jake and Tamir, two college roommates. Jake was a Family Sim and Tamir was a Knowledge Sim. They started flirting and fell in love, though they hadn’t even kissed yet before some guy in a cow suit came over and hit on Jake, sending Tamir into a jealous rage. Eventually, they made up, but then it was just too much fun to torture them both by repeatedly having Jake cheat. Finally they grew up, got a house together, and were getting married.
Naturally, I invited all of Jake’s former flames over for a good old fashioned wedding brawl.
I lost interest playing them after they had four kids (using a cheat, I was getting the boys pregnant and they kept having twins) and then had a nasty breakup that left the kids sobbing all the time. That was a little too depressing.
First, I like to build houses. Really cool, ultra-awesome houses that every sim just loves as soon as they see them.
Second, I like to hurt my sims. Remove doors. Remove the toilet. Put a pool in the middle of the room and remove the ladder when they get in. Remove all sources of light. Give them fire, but retard their cooking skills.
Then they burn.
Well duh. What else is there to do?
One of the versions of Sim City II had the cheat code as PORNTIPSGUZZARDO*. I haven’t played that game in what feels like a decade, yet I still remember the code.
The best scenario was Flint - the city’s “disaster” was chronic unemployment. A blank slate, just waiting to burn! Or flood. Or be invaded by aliens.**
*A good Scrabble word, trust me.
**Who am I kidding? All of the above.
I think that’s the first thing all players do. I did that myself when I wanted to understand what all the fuss was about.
Made a decent recreation of my place, then plopped in a Sim looking just like me and having the same general psych traits.
When strangers came over to welcome him to the neighborhood, he played chess with them, then got angry when he lost. When random people barged in, he was very upset by the intrusion and threw them out. Eventually they stopped coming. He kept right on working, eating, shitting, sleeping, not cleaning, playing computer games, writing a novella and stargazing. Then he got old, and then he died. Alone. And a virgin.
Well fuck you too, Maxis 
I did this a little, but not very much. I always tried to make my Sims extremely rich and successful, with great kids who went to college and got married and had more kids and so on; I loved the life cycle aspect and trying to make my old Sims die in “Platinium mood”, their highest possible aspiration level (the ultimate life goals, which were really hard to achieve, made this easier). I also built really extravagant houses and didn’t usually cheat at all. Plus the vampires were fun to play with. The only thing that bugged me was weird things that messed up my Sims’ lives, since I’m quite a perfectionist in games like this (could you tell? ;)). I thought it was a very fun game—it got old after a while, but long after most games do. I can’t wait until they make the Sims 3 (I don’t think it’s on the radar, but still). I hope the next version lets you follow them around all day, not just at home and when they go on dates; possibly having a more personal focus on an individual Sim. I definitely like the life sim aspect more than it just being a dollhouse, although the interior design was fun and satisfying when you made a nice house that your Sims earned through hard work.
Valete,
Vox Imperatoris
ETA: I hated the first Sims game, since your Sims never got older, including kids.
PS: Posting that makes me want to play it again; I loved my little Sim dynasties!
Oh my God! It is coming out, and next month, at that! I’m going to *have *to buy it. I wish there were another game like it, though, so I didn’t have to put up with EA Games and their intentional holding back of features so that they can sell them later in expansion packs, ugh. But Sims 3, though! Awesome, awesome, awesome!
Wooo!
Vox Imperatoris
ETA: The Sims 2 had good music, too (all in nonsense words; Very Very Rich Town was the best). I hope Sims 3 is similar.
Upon looking more at the Sims 3, it’s not *exactly *the directly I’d like it taken in, and the graphics engine looks exactly the same as the one from The Sims 2, but it still looks great! Finally, everyone ages at the same time; no more having to balance out different families.
Valete,
Vox Imperatoris
Sims3 looked liked sims2 with a ‘3’ on it to me. The guy in the video is describing ‘all these cool features of this game’ and I’m thinking “He’s describing sims 2 here”
The main revolution in gameplay will be the entire neighborhood operating at the same time; that will really change things up. Other nice features will be better Sim customization, better social interaction, better implementation of Sims’ life goals, etc. For example, instead of designing personalities based on 5 sliders, you now get to pick 5 out of 70 possible traits (and you know this will be expanded) that will let you better model Sims after real people.
And they always put a lot of work into the little things, like designing really interesting families for the neighborhoods (although this one will just have one absolutely huge neighborhood) and in the descriptions for the various items the Sims can buy, which are quite funny. Another thing it will be good for is a “reset”: with all the expansion packs, they tend to start cramming more stuff in there than a Sim can possibly do in one day, so they’ve now rebalanced the time scale.
Valete,
Vox Imperatoris
I think I like making the people more than anything. I’ll spend hours and hours just making more and more sims, most of whom I’ll drop into a house and never play with. (A lot of this is due to the fact that the interior decorating of a single house takes me hours, because I’m OCD about it to the point that I don’t enjoy it.) I also compulsively re-engineer the townies to be attractive, because most of them are repulsively fugly and undeserving of my hot sims’ attentions.
So now I’ve got two neighborhoods full of hot swingin’ singles and a mod that makes them autonomously slutty, and I find I have no interest in playing anymore. 
I go in cycles, though. Once I’m done with my staggering backlog of console games, I’ll probably drift back to the good ol’ Sims (2).
ETA: I forgot to mention, I’m a cheater. I try to keep up with all their needs manually, but at some point it just becomes tedious, so I’ll just use the Make All Happy cheat and go on about creating whatever story I want to create. shrug The whole point is to have fun, right?
I have been playing the Sims since the dawn of the game. I still play. S2, but my most enjoyable time is had building houses and finishing challenges. (Google Sims 2 Challenges to find, they are quite numerous). I also like creating Sims, with new looks and shapes. I am looking forward to S3, but am on the fence whether I will buy.
For me it’s the design. I love to create bigger, better, and more intricate houses and businesses for my Sims 2 neighborhood. I don’t use any cheats, so the money has to come from my Sims earning it. To maximize their earning power, I have to drive them pretty hard. I’ve also found that selective breeding creates Sims that are easier to mold into steady earners.
So basically, slavery and eugenics.
Yeah, the eugenics is always nice.
Valete,
Vox Imperatoris
Long ago, I had the early Sim City. No matter what, the people eventually complained, even if you’d given them lovely railways and clean (sic) energy. Well, fuck 'em. What’s the point? Instead, I’d run the Boston nuclear disaster scenario and, instead of trying to make anything better, I’d just bulldoze the bridge to Cambridge.
It’s fun if you don’t control them…
(I can’t log in there any more for some reason, otherwise I would’ve continued that series, it was fun. :()
Never played Sims 2, but I tried Sims 1 long ago.
I began some games, but I some point, while my sim was washing the dishes, I looked over to my own sink, with dishes piled in it. I thought :dubious::dubious: what the fuck I’m doing? I’m playing a guy who washes his dishes???
I quit playing, disgusted, and never tried again.