I am loving this game. Some of the little autonomous interactions are just too funny (and well thought out).
I was eating cereal, with my husband next to me. I stood up, and decided the kitchen was too far to walk, apparently, and put the bowl on the floor. My husband looks at me, looks at the bowl rather :dubious: ly and looks at me again. I kind of give him a “What?” look, look at the bowl and sigh. So I picked up the stinking bowl and stuck it in the sink.
And the fact that our game characters LOVE to play redhands and “punch you punch me” is so us.
The images in my thought bubbles are a little blurry at times. It’s only for the general thoughts, not for the ones where it shows a specific sim or item that’s in the way.
I need SimIntervention. I just tried to scroll down this page by… putting my cursor at the bottom of the screen. I swear that is the absolute, sad and scary truth.
I made a sim and put him in a house that didn’t have anything for entertainment. I left him alone for a while, and when I came back he was slamming the refridgerator door over and over again in a vain attempt to amuse himself.
I am not buying this game for precisely the same reason that I am not going to go downtown and score some crack right now–a blast, I’m sure, but ultimately a road I don’t want to go down if I want to do anything productive in the short-to-intermediate term.
Well, I went out and bought it last night. (Payday!)
I’m impressed. I didn’t buy the original for more or less the same reasons that DoctorJ mentioned–I was going through some tough times and I knew at the time that it would ‘negatively impact’ my productivity.
I have an Athlon XP 2200+ with 512 megs of RAM, a Radeon 9000, and plenty of disk space. I get the impression that the game is close to straining the limits of my machine. During the install, it asked to upgrade my DirectX 9b to 9c (picky, picky!). And I think I may need to update my video driver–a couple of times it froze, there was a weird error message about the video card not updating some 3D graphics thing, then the game continued as normal.
I started with the tutorials, then the Dreamers family in Pleasantville. So far I’ve gotten Darren a job and caused Dirk to miss school. I think that was because I didn’t get him to bed until 6AM bacause I wasn’t sure where his bedroom was.
When they’re asleep, they dream. I gotta get them hooked up with someone. They’re so cuuuute.
Question: How do I import custom content into the game? A couple of weeks ago I downloaded the Body Shop and made a sim with one of my T-shirt designs. How can I get her into Pleasantville? Do I have to upload to the website and then download?
But what if it were Caramel Covered Crack? Then, might you change your mind?
It’ll be my Christmas present to me (I still need to buy Unleashed). And I also want the first patch to have come out. But this sounds so fun…can’t wait.
::Groan:: I want this so bad and I could go out right now and get it. And a pack of cigarettes. Hell, make that a carton. It’s been about 2 1/2 years since I’ve been hopelessly addicted to either.
So, that, or spending time making up promos so I can have the illustration career I want and a really nicely decorated house and possibly, some friends, maybe even a little exercise…Hmmm…
I know! I’ll get the game and make a Sim who exercises and that has an illustration career, a nicely decorated house and some friends! So much cheaper & easier! Whew! Thank Og I got that figured out! Can you get Sims to smoke? Still just the bubbles, huh?
This game is evil. Evil, evil, evil. I want it NOW.
Armed with a cheat code, I loaded up my family and moved them into the beautiful house there on Wright Way (the one with the big water feature in front)
Beautiful house, but almost impossible to navigate and furnish. It was so busy, I couldn’t even stand it.
My only complaints so far (apart from the fact that it’s sucking me in again):
The music is kind of repetitive. I love Mark Mothersbaugh’s music for Rushmore and The Royal Tennenbaums, but I think it only works if you hear little snippets of it, not a constant loop of it. I’m going to have to figure out how to replace the music, at least build/buy and shopping, with the original game.
And it’s near impossible for me to build an affordable house! What is this, The Sims: Livin’ In the San Francisco Bay Area? I’d spend a half hour or so building a nice, modest place, get out to the neighborhood, it’s over 40,000 simoleons. So I keep scaling back, scaling back, and after about 2 hours of trying, ended up with a tiny one-bedroom place that cost around 17,000 simoleons. I still haven’t figured out where all the money is going to; I haven’t been that extravagant.
Everything else is gold. The characters are so much more expressive; it’s hard not to get attached to them.
Two warnings in case people didn’t realize them (I didn’t):
The Romantic aspiration is for players, not lovers. One of the biggest fears for the Romantic aspiration is proposal/marriage. So if you’ve got a Sim you’re planning to get hitched, give them the Family aspiration instead.
The pre-made houses that you get in neighborhood lot-place mode are not templates, they’re one-shots. So once you plop a house down in the neighborhood, it’s out of the tool palette. I demolished one of the pre-made houses, one that I liked a lot, and was surprised to see that it was gone for good.
I added some mp3s to my play lists because the music was annoying. It was hilarious to watch staid, uptight Dani Maddox working out to Dr. Dre.
Sadly, the laughter ended soon after when the Maddox family lost their only daughter to social services because the girl couldn’t be arsed to do her homework. Fortunately, young Sam was born shortly after and they had their hands full with a newborn. Then Dani got stuck standing before the crib and I had to move them out of their house to unstick her.
I also started another family: a single mom, Carmen Wyatt, who doesn’t look nearly old enough to be the mother of teenage son, Ben, or daughter, Maria.
I’ve found that trying to get the kids to do their homework is really tough, if you’re just starting out and don’t have money to provide items to fill all their needs. Groups are significantly more difficult to take care of than a single person. My very first household was a single woman, whose name escapes me at the moment, with no specific quirks or anything. She was easy to control, but I didn’t get to see a lot of the cool things the game had to offer. I was beginning to suspect she was an ephebophile, though. All her friends seemed to be teenage boys.
So what exactly does Sims 2 have that the original didn’t? I played the first one for a while, even got an expansion pack or two, and then got bored and never really came back to it.
Most of the humor is from the unexpected. Sam and Edna are roommates, and I’ve been keeping them purely platonic. Sam took up a life of crime, so he’s been working odd hours and can’t really socialize at all, but he managed to start being friendly with a coworker (Crystal) he brings home from time to time. Edna’s rising through the medical ranks, so she has some wierd jobs as well.
Through one of the in-job decisions, Sam managed to score 20,000 Simoleans, a stat boost, and through the new stats a promotion (to daylight hours!) all in one night. Even better, he gets a day off. Celebration time! He calls over Crystal, lays out some serious cash for a flat tv, new couch, and a couple of double beds, and begins some serious wooing (and some hooing, but that’s later). A few hours later, Crystal succumbs to Sam’s charms and they have a cutscene. The morning after, Sam wakes and cleans up, then goes outside to get the paper. While Crystal is still sleeping in Sam’s bed, Sam runs into Edna’s girlfriend Circe coming down the sidewalk. Still in his underpants, Sam hits on Circe and she responds favorably. Crystal chooses that moment to emerge from the room where she could see the new “couple” out on the front lawn through the living room window. Crystal, still in her underpants, heads outside and has an argument with the lawn gnome instead of confronting the two. Sam hugs Circe and sends her on her way, then cooks Crystal breakfast pastries. Classy.
Probably won’t keep your attention longer, but this one has lifecycles which means that your Sims children will grow up, move out, get old and die.
I am really enjoying the Sims 2, after a lot of worrying that it would spoil everything for me (like Civ III did), I’m so happy to find it’s fun too!
Right now, I’m annoyed with one of my Sims for having a sponge bath from the sink rather than just using the shower located next to it. Annoying, but funny. I was a little horrified at first when I discovered my Romance Sims aspired to Woohoo with three partners, but then I realised that Family Sims were the ones who aspired to have one true love, and had fun moving a Romance Sim roommate in with them for laffs.
The depth of the Sims awareness is amazing. Someone walks into a room, and everyone looks up to see her. If they’re outside and someone from the neighborhood walks by, they’ll wave autonomously.
I was literally laughing out loud last night when I had my Sim turn on the Yummy Channel. There is an absolutely hilarious Iron Chef parody - except it appears that Chairman Kaga is cooking - that had me on the floor. Listen to the commentators. (Only funny if you know and love the Iron Chefs, I suppose)
well… I have had it… My luck with the ladies is similar to my luck in real life…
I got a sim, and he had the hots for the cute little maid. So after a whiel of flirting with her on the job (which makes the cleaning bill much more expensive) she took a liking to staying over after work. So I get her to stay over and we do the woohoo and I started to wonder. What is she going to do come 10 AM when she is supposed to start cleaning the place up? Just because she is a maid doens’t mean that she cleans on her own time. I guess she called in sick and just lounged around the house all day in her underwear. So I noticed one of my aspirations was to have her over for that night, and I call her. She wanted to bring a friend, so I decided why not invite my best friend over, he seems cool and he’s single. Well he wants to invite a friend too. Well it turns out that I catch my girl with him in my own damn house! What betrayal! So my sim has been moping around ever since. I am getting older too, so I have decided that I am going to have to get rich and life the high life, because my guy has the romance aspiration and I just can’t manage in this time period that I have. I am going to buy myself a sweet house and throw kicking house parties all the time from now on. So take that… maid… I am going to be with all the girls from now on, and I may have you over if I feel like it!
Uh, my house seems to have been invaded by a herd of… gardeners. A bunch of gardeners - about 5 - showed up and they’ve all been drinking my champagne and taking BATHS (visitors never, ever do this).
