Sims2 is Here! [unboxed Spoilers!]

Cafe Society
61

Yes, my ladies do have a thing for the NPC’s. :stuck_out_tongue:

So far, the mail carrier, Pao, brought $1000 and no friends, while Mitch brought $1000 and one 100% friend.
He does not have a family tree.

Pao, I believe, came with Fortune, and Mitch, luckily for me, is family. I guess it’s supposed to be random. The funniest thing I thought is that Mitch is a fireman, right? Well his body skill was maxed out (by the way, I finally noticed you can click your sim to “Do Yoga” or “Meditate” to gain body) but he was completely out of shape. He was pretty quick to pick up the fire extinguisher though when he set the kitchen on fire…really, you’d think a fireman would take better precautions. :smiley:

As I said, he put out a fire for Elizabeth when she was a teen. After the fire was put out, she tipped him money and that began their relationship score.
I didn’t have her contact him again until after she reached adulthood and needed someone interesting to marry since now she couldn’t marry her teen sweetheart, George.
He’s a store clerk and I can’t play him to make him age or she would’ve married him. :frowning:

I really let Elizabeth decide whether or not to love him. I just kept inviting him over every time she had that want to fulfill. She’s a Popularity Sim so it took a long time for any good “love” wants to come up. She mostly just wanted to play.
Then one day she leaped into his arms and fell in love. :slight_smile:
Now they have two kids and contemplating a third.

62

We need SimIntervention, too. We’ve been playing it all weekend and conversations about completely different things will often wander back to Sims, whereupon we slap ourselves.

We are having a great time.

Can’t wait to go home and play some more.

63

Oh yeah.
Who else was mortified to find a group cheering on your Sims as they WooHoo in the dressing booth? :smiley:

I even caught the clerks gossiping about it a few days later when I had a totally different sim from a different household go to buy clothes. :stuck_out_tongue:

64

I didn’t do a whole lot with the original Sims game - just made houses, made people, got bored, evicted people, bulldozed houses, repeat. :rolleyes:

Just got Sims2 the other day and only played it for about an hour - the weekend was just tooo busy.

So I have a few questions if any of you can tear yourselves away from the game long enough to help me out :smiley:

How do I find out how to make it play one of my mp3’s for example? Are you all creating your own families or using existing ones? Are you all building your own houses or using existing ones? How do I get them to go out on the town?

(I have to admit I spent most of my hour - you guessed it - making the Sims and building their house).

Thanks!
S.

65

Me too. I found that the level of micro-level trivial intervention required to keep things moving along was simply too cumbersome. Sheesh. Had to tell them when to go to bed or when to eat for heaven’s sake.

Does Sims 2 allow you to control the characters at more of a macro level? Do the details of daily “life” take care of themselves?

66

If you leave your Sims alone, they’ll do most of the little things - like using the bathroom or cooking a meal - on their own. And they are a little bit smarter about which they should do, which means that left to their own devices, they won’t watch TV when their fun level is still fine but their bladder level is approaching zero. But if you do a lot of intervening, they’ll tend to ignore their own needs to do what you tell them to do.

The other thing is, if your Sims are dying off because you leave them alone for an extended period of time, you might need to look at things like layout and make sure things aren’t broken. If they are hungry, they’re going to eat, unless something is keeping them from doing so, like a broken fridge or the door facing the wrong way, or a chair in the path. For them to really be self-sufficient, they need a lot of things that will meet their needs - enough bathrooms, enough beds, enough food in the fridge (they won’t order groceries autonomously, from what I can tell). If they have all the things they need to meet their needs, they’ll use them and keep themselves functioning pretty well. As long as you’re not constantly keeping them too busy doing what you want them to do as opposed to the things they feel they need to do.

All that said, the game seems a little bit buggy to me in general. I had a trash compactor that broke that no one could fix - not even the repairman. I had to sell it back and buy a new one. Everytime I directed someone to fix it, they would just stand in front of it, doing nothing. Alson the party game that resembles bingo (can’t remember it’s actual name) seems to often fail. If a Sim tries to use it, occasionally they’ll just stand there, motionless in front of it. Their fun motive isn’t increasing (but is decreasing as if they weren’t doing anything) but the “Play Game” action is shown as active and attempting to move it in buy mode tells me it’s “In Use.” And I’m thinking my mysterious guest problems are either a bug, or my Sim acting autonomously (ie, asking people to “spend the night” - an interaction I’ve never seen available yet).

Bugs aside, I still love the game. And I gotta say the baby Simlish - the laughter when they’re playing, especially - is just too damn cute.

67

I’ve done all of these. The house I built doesn’t have anyone in it yet.

Use the phone to call a cab.

68

“Nervous Subject” is no more. I have now had the scientists adopt a baby so when it grows up, they can experiment on it. :slight_smile:

69

I’m feeling very cranky now … because I’m stuck at work when all I want to do is go home and get into Sims 2 …

Hmmmmmm … wonder if that’s a valid reason to call in ‘sick’ tomorrow? :slight_smile:

KIDDING!!!

(sorta)

70

Well, crap. I wish I’d looked for the moveobjects code sooner. Enda Testcase, otherwise a good cook, set herself on fire making omelettes (she’s okay, the fireman saved her). The remains of the omelette stayed on the stove, but I couldn’t get rid of them or use the stove. I moved the stove out to a corner of the lot and bought a new one, but still asked tech support about it - they told me to evict the family, which took away all my other items! Argh!

And Sam had a beautiful still-life of Enda using the telescope, and had started one of Edna and her girlfriend making out in the hottub that I was saving for him to do in his old age. :smiley:

TellMeI’mNotCrazy: About the bingo thing: I think you have to have one person Use the game, then either other people must interact with the Sim playing it and pick “Join,” or select the one playing and “Ask” the other people to Join. Doesn’t it say in the description that it takes at least 3 people?

71

OK then in that case there’s a bug in that it will let my people play alone sometimes.

But in thinking about it, I’m pretty sure there’s a “practice” option.

72

When I played The Sims (1) it started to feel like a chore. I had no spare time with the sim, no time to improve him. I was constantly feeding, Washing, housecleaning, learning him. On Sims 2 it started to feel the same way but I decided to stick at it. Good job I did. My sim is now in love and close to marriage. I gave him the family aspiration and he’s fullfilling it. One of the best things against the monotony and constant ‘care’ is having days off from work. It gives me plenty of time to advance the sim’s skills, needs, and status.

I did make the mistake of using the mood thingy before having gold status. Knocked many of my needs bars down to zilch. It took ages to get them all back up.

I am learning to synchronise, so that my sim has energy for work, and is clean when he needs to be.

Yep. I’m gonna stick at this one. I’m looking forward to my sim getting married and having kids.

73

P.S. With the sim I’m in love with. I originally avoided her, because I assumed she was married. She was flirting with me like mad.

The reason I thought she was married was I thought she was one I’d created earlier with a SO. That was until the one I created actually turned up.
So I could have got with the sim quicker if I didn’t assume she was attached.

p.p.s. When I say “I’m” I mean my sim. not me.

74

That’s exactly it. I was a little disappointed at first because it seemed that there were so few objects available compared to the original, but then I realized that a) the game has been out for 4 years, and 2) there’ve been seven expansion packs (and I own them all). I loaded up the Mac version of the original and was surprised to see how much wasn’t there. A lot of stuff from Living Large, in particular, I mis-remembered as being part of the original game.

It’s unsettling how engrossing this game is; I don’t even feel like I’m obsessed with it yet, and still I find myself playing for hours at a time without realizing it. I still can’t get over how much more “alive” the sims are in this game. I had two sims I was playing earlier who had fallen in love and gotten engaged, and later they showed up as part of the welcome wagon for a new family I was staring. As soon as they showed up on the lot, they autonomously started making out with each other. During the little party that followed, they would occasionally think of the other person and stare across the room and them, and a little thought bubble with the “Woohoo” icon would pop up over their head. Horny little bastards.

I finally found a house design that is interesting looking but still affordable for a starter family, so I’ve started plopping those around Pleasantville. I still haven’t attempted to make a new neighborhood with SimCity 4, but that’s next on my list to try.

The game did shame me, a little bit. I had a couple that I was working on getting together, so I had them flirting and making out with each other, only letting them stop long enough to take care of the basic necessities like going to the bathroom and eating. Eventually they had the little pink hearts flying over their heads, so I took them up to the bedroom and had them relax on the bed together. But no Woohoo was available. I couldn’t figure it out. Was the bed not expensive enough? Was it a bug? I just kept having them make out and then go to sleep. After a couple days of this, they finally had the red hearts pop up over their head. When they went to bed, the Woohoo option was finally available.

So the sims will only have sex after they’ve fallen in love. I’m embarrassed that it took me so long to realize that was what was going on.

75

Great game. I played it for about 14 hours straight yesterday. I wanted to see if I could get both of my sims to be the Mayor of SimCity at the same time, but I’ve shot myself in the foot. I had their son move out on his own, which unfortunately dropped the number of family friends by 5 :smack:

My only complaint about the game is that the townies don’t age.

76

Has anyone else had problems changing the view angle? I’ve done it a few times by holding down the right mouse button and eventually the cursor changes into the one that raises and lowers the camera, but I can’t figure out why it only works sometimes–is there a bug caused by the nude patch?

Fenris

77

Nude patch? Where?

78

On second thoughts. If I fulfull my aspirations I may end up with at least 3 sims to control. One is hard-work enough. How much work do 3 involve? And how much more work is a baby/toddler than an adult?

What am I letting myself in for?

Is it worth it in th end? (bear in mind that I have made my sim to be like me, i.e. my main/goal/aspiration is to have a family)

79

Three isn’t that hard. We have one house with seven, and that’s proving to be quite a bit of work.

You will want to learn to play with one hand on the “P” key.

Babies aren’t that much work, actually, since you don’t actually control them. Toddlers are pretty intense, though.

80

Just thought I’d mention, I just discovered that you can save camera positions tonight, and it’s a HUGE help for me, especially dealing with multi-level houses. If you haven’t tried it yet - check it out. I just set up a few different angles and assigned them to the keys in order, like this:

CTRL-F4 > Bedroom/Bathroom
CTRL-F5 > Kitchen
CTRL-F6 > Phone/Easel
CTRL-F7 > TV/Bookshelf
CTRL-F8 > Front Door
CTRL-F9 > Wide Shot

Then I just have to hit those F keys to flip between the views.

What the heck let me make a vid to show what I mean… here we go. (1.5 MB)

And while I’m waiting for that to upload, I’ll mention my sim’s story. Her mother was a swingin’ single until the verge of old age when she suddenly hit a jackpot in one of the lottery cards at work, earning her a huge jackpot. :smiley: Not wanting that wealth to die with her, I quickly had her adopt two kids. The kids made it to their teen years before their adopted mother, who didn’t know about the elixir of life yet, passed away, leaving the two of them to manage for themselves in a gigantic house with all kinds of stuff, though with very little money.

They did OK for a while, but Mom still lurked about at night, and for some reason she did seem to happy, perhaps because her slacker kids were enjoying everything she left, while never taking the time to remember her and visit her simple gravesite. Eventually, Mom scared the bejeezus out of the brother, and he dropped dead on the spot. Try all she might, his sister couldn’t convince death to let him stick around.

Not wanting to risk the same fate for the sister, I tossed both gravestones at sunrise and worked her through to adulthood, moving out of the death house as soon as she could. :wink:

Now, despite her checkered past, she’s doing quite well as a Congresswoman with a fancy house and lots of friends dropping by with well wishes. Not too shabby! :smiley:

Damn, I really am addicted to this game.