Only played the first one, and played it as a management game. Didn’t care how the houses looked except that after a while I had a rule that they couldn’t live outdoors. The dwellings usually looked more like workshops than homes and I fussed a lot over getting the layout just so.
Most of my families had 5 members, with two couples and a servant/social liaison who did the cooking and had all the friends. The couples all had similar zodiac signs, with a lot of athletic ability to be able to stand up to gruelling days of work, training, and then some TV with the spouse to bring fun and social stats to an acceptable level. They tended not to be very nice and sometimes getting them to couple up was tricky. The goal was to climb the career ladder while the servant smoked weed and watched TV with everybody from the neighborhood. I presume that’s what they were doing. I usually gave the servant a goofy costume, like a jester suit.
I didn’t use the money cheat or, after the first few times I played, deliberately kill any Sims.
It’s one of those games you can drop when you’re bored and pick up again when you’re… bored in a different way, I guess.
I’ll play it generally in runs of a couple of days - I’ll create a new family, build houses, get the neighbourhood running just-so, and then once it’s all working like clockwork I’ll get bored and move on to something else for a while. Wash, rinse, repeat.
Having said that, I’m on a Sims bender at the moment - found a place with awesome mods that make for a much more interesting neighbourhood. Previously I was using Pescado’s mods, but the community there is just brutal and I couldn’t handle their vitriol. I’ve since switched to twallans mods, and it turned out to be a great decision because they have a great story driver that creates all-new roles for the community. You can tweak them in all sorts of ways… very neat! I’m finding myself coming back just to find out what’s happening *elsewhere *in town, to the Sims I’m not playing!
Leads to entertaining stuff if you switch families, too. I swapped to a family I used to play and left my primary family alone for what… 2 Sim days, maybe?
When I came back the father had been turned into a Vampire, which miffed him a lot because a) he was a vegetarian and b) a career gardener, ie sun-loving garden dweller. It was hilarious, and I wouldn’t have thought to try it, so 3 cheers for twallan’s mod!
Sounds interesting, but Late Night introduced a bug that screws with mood and it makes the game run choppy on my computer, so I’m going to hold off for a bit.
I always had more fun designing houses and other buildings, with brief spurts of gameplay in between. I haven’t purchased any Maxis/EA computer games since the SecureROM business though.
