Sims3 ≠ Sims2 + 1
Jun. 14th, 2009 10:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fuzzysporkI must apologize for my lack of online presence the past couple (few?) weeks. There are several reasons, but mostly because my husband is on lay-off from his job, which means he is at home all the time now. Every day. Every single day of the week. Week after week. o__o And when you take into account that he has zero neat points, compared to my 8, I now seem to be always cleaning up after a hurricane. BUT, he did sort of make it up to me by bringing me a copy of The Sims 3 the day after it came out. Despite the fact I really didn't want it, and had intended on waiting for at least one expansion pack before delving into that. He's a good guy, though. ;)
OMG, HUGE rambling post about TS3. And picspam!
After playing around with Sims3 for the past couple of weeks, I have a few opinions about it. I'm not going to say it's "better" than TS2, nor am I going to say Sims 2 is "better" than Sims3 (though, at the moment, I largely prefer to play TS2). It's going to come down to what the individual gamer likes, and one style of game-play might be more appealing to them than the other. Comparing Sims2 to Sims3 is rather like trying to compare chess to checkers. There are distinct similarities, but you can't play checkers using chess rules.
Which is what I was trying to do when I first started playing Sims3. And I hated it right out of the gate. After a frustrating week of trying to love the game, I finally realized I was approaching it all wrong, and decided to start over again. But I'll get to the actual game-play in a minute...
From a technical point of view, my computer seems "okay" for running the game. I've got a 2.60 GHz dual core processor, 4 GB of RAM, and 32-bit Windows Vista. My graphics card was what had me worried; it's an NVIDIA GeForce 8400 GS. (I mention all of this only as a point of comparison for anyone thinking about getting TS3) Not top of the line, but the game runs smoothly enough, with only the occasional jerk or stutter. I play it in windowed mode (which is a built-in option now, yay) on a widescreen monitor. Though my graphics card does start to protest when I'm running the game, and the internet, and a photo editing program, all at the same time. That's when I can hear the cooling fan spinning at about 47 million RPM. Anyway, the only graphics options I've changed to the highest settings are 'texture detail' and 'Sim detail'. Everything else was defaulted as such:
However, after upping the texture and Sim detail, I noticed that there is now a slight lag when rendering a new scene. Like if I zoom out from the center of town, then close-up on one of my Sims back at the house, it takes the game half a second to put all the colors and textures on everything. Not a long enough lag to bother me, though. Before changing those details options, it was mostly instantaneous. I've not yet experimented with turning anything else up, mostly because I'm satisfied with how the game looks. Even with "draw distance" set at medium, this is what the landscape looks like from the house my Sims live in (taken with the in-game camera):
Personally, I don't see any reason to have that setting any higher (only to slow the game down). The surrounding landscape is pretty, yes. But honestly, I spend 99.5% of my time looking at the inside of the house, or zoomed in on a Sim, and the game having to process all of that landscape just slows things down. Though for picture-taking purposes, having a lovely backdrop is kinda nice. Too bad the picture-taking is such a tedious process! It took me some time to get used to it. And I'm still struggling to get things into frame just the way I want them.
Anyway.... One of the first things I did was to make a Sim in CAS so I could explore the new create-a-sim features and give her some of the more "interesting" personality traits. I named her Happy Camper, and gave her some scary traits which included Insane, Inappropriate, and Kleptomaniac. After I moved her into town, it was a few Sim days later when she met herself at the corner bistro one night...
Same crazy clothes I designed in CAS. Same name: Happy Camper. Same traits. Same everything. I'm assuming this is a glitch, because I've not seen any of the other bin sims move a copy of themselves into town yet. After this, I went into the "edit town" screen and found the house Happy-clone was living in. The household was called "Camper" and she was living with an elderly couple which the game must have spawned as her roommates or parents. So I evicted them and deleted them. Which is something that would explode your game in TS2, but in this game there aren't those complex character files to mess things up. Otherwise they wouldn't make it such an easy option to delete any Sim in town, right? *roll eyes*
These TS3 Sims are more like objects and less like actual characters. These Sims have no memories. They have no turn-ons, no turn-offs, no zodiac, no personality points... The only personality they have is from those 5 traits. I love the "idea" of the traits, but those alone really limit the range of individuality. For example, instead of there being points of neatness somewhere between total neat-freak and complete slob, a Sim is simply only Neat OR a Slob depending on whether they actually possess one of those traits. If they don't have one of those traits, they are just sort of benign about cleanliness. There is no in-between or variation. It's all either/or. Ideally, I would like to have seen them leave the personality points in place, then give you the 5 traits on top of that (leaving out traits like "neat" and "grumpy" which are already covered by the points). And left us with the more interesting traits to add to the regular personality, like Loves the Outdoors, Neurotic, Childish, etc. It would have given these Sims much more fleshed-out personalities.
This is probably the main reason why I just can't seem to get attached to any of these Sims. I've played into the forth generation of one family, and after a while it really starts to feel like they are all exactly alike. They are more like animatronic game pieces, and less like little people.
Speaking of exactly alike...
There seems to be this annoying trend that families around town have to wear the same hairstyle. This is the Tate family, and I think that's a father and mother, their adult son, and his wife (or maybe sister). But don't ask me who is who.
Speaking of annoying trends....
Another reason it's so hard to take a decent photo in this game is because as soon as you hit "pause" the Sim you have in frame usually moves their head to the side AFTER you hit pause. Or they roll their eyes around. Sometimes the eyes roll in opposite directions. In general, the way they roll their eyes around reminds me of those baby dolls with the eyes that roll back in their head to make it look like they are sleeping. I don't like it. It's creepy as hell.
And all the Sims have that same deadpan expression. Even when they are in a good mood they just stand there with that somber look on their face. You can usually tell when they are in a good mood because after several minutes they will suddenly bounce and clap and laugh like they are mentally challenged. Then it's back to looking like a mortician. This lack of facial expression makes the children especially creepy.
These New Sims are far less animated than TS2 Sims. Especially in the face. There's a lot of standing and looking all emo. Some of the traits have built-in idle movements, like the Insane Sims will talk to their hand. But not all traits have something, so there's a lot of standing and looking all emo. o___o
Most of the interactive animations between Sims were taken directly from Sims2 (way to shortcut, EA)...
But there are far fewer interactions now, and you have to actually "unlock" interactions between Sims. Romance is like a mini game (sorta like Matchmaker Dates in TS2), and even if the Sims are married they have to go through the whole process of getting to that stage where they find each other "very irresistible" before something like woohoo or Try for Baby is an option. Which annoys the hell out of me. Unless one of them has the Family-Oriented trait, the Try for Baby option isn't always there. Though even with the option there, if the other Sim is not at least to the stage of "very alluring" or in a good enough mood, the woohoo might be rejected.
I have heard that the Sims will woohoo autonomously, but I've yet to see them get to that stage on their own. They will flirt and kiss up to that "very irresistible" stage, then one of them will throw in a non-romantic interaction like "gossip" and reset the whole process. There is no chemistry between TS3 Sims, and they will like the next Sim just as much as this Sim. It doesn't really matter who you hook them up with (though some traits clash and it takes a little longer to build the relationship). You pretty much have to force the relationships anyway.
My observations show the "Townies" either spawn with a spouse or just never get married. I have yet to witness autonomous marriage. There is occasionally a wedding announcement in the newspaper, but these are always the "new" people in town who have spawned with a spouse. It looks like sometimes the game gives them a random "steady" girlfriend or boyfriend, that is usually a roommate, and they will usually have kids along the way. The game seems to decide how many people should live in a house based on how many beds are in it. So there's often unrelated Sims living in the same household. Babies seem to spawn to single people as often as to the couples. Even men end up with a child that technically has no mother.
Speaking of babies...
Just like in TS2, they all look the same. Except even more so, because these babies don't seem to show a hair or eye color until they are toddlers. I think this particular baby grew up to have black hair and brown eyes. You can now click on the baby to view it's needs. And let me tell you, infants' needs drop twice as fast as normal! But, there is the option to take them to a birthday cake and age them up to toddler the minute they are born. In fact, you can age any Sim before their actual birthday. Within reason... I think adults have to go through half their adult stage before you can "cake" them to elder. The toddler stage is now 7 days (when the game is set to normal aging), but I usually cake them ('cake' is a verb now, yo) after they learn all there skills. Which sometimes only takes a couple of days. This really speeds up the family-growing process, and gives you more time to help the Sims with that ridiculously slow skill-learning. (OMG, skilling has taken on a whole new SLOW.)
The genetics are pretty simple. There are no hidden or recessive hair and eye colors. The kids either get one of their parents' hair and eyes, or one of their grandparents (if there are any). And I heard somewhere that there is like a 10% chance of a totally random, mutant hair and eye color. Facial features seem to work like they did before, where the child gets either parents' nose, mouth, jaw, etc.
You can't really tell anything about how the child is going to look when they are still children....
These are twin sisters; that's Lyric on the left, and Joy on the right. And though they look almost identical...
They aged-up to teen looking more distinct from each other. That's still Lyric on the left, and Joy on the right.
Incidentally, these two girls happen to be my simself's granddaughters. And at this point I decided to do a little genetic experimentation. So when they aged up to Young Adult, Lyric was sent out to live among the Townies, while Joy was sent husband-hunting...
That sneer is what passes as a smile in this game. D:
Anyway, that's Joy and her husband, Jarrett. I picked him because (besides her being friends with him since she was a kid) he has moss-green eyes and that awesome skintone which is like the equivalent of S47. Luckily, young adults are able to get married and have babies now. So when you combine the length of the YA stage with the length of the normal adult stage, that's nearly 40 days worth of fertility! So the potential for huge families is definitely there.
Here are their first three kids; all boys; all single births...
Left to right:
Jericho (young adult), Jordan (teen), and Jasper (teen). Like the names matter, but whatever. ;D
I think this is a pretty good example of how the facial features get distributed. I've not seen any clones so far (and this is the 3rd born-in generation). I've been looking at black hair since Fuzzy's son, so I decided to dye Jarrett's hair red and see if that has any effect on the next child born. Because I heard that dyed hair can be inherited.
The next birth was twin girls...
Try not to look too excited, girls. Someone might suspect you aren't soulless manikins.
Now is when the strangeness began. No inherited red dye, but they both have dark brown hair. Which was their grandmother's hair color, so it might have come from her; or not. However, what's odd is that Juneau (on the left) has black roots, while Joplin (on the right) has lighter brown roots. Again, they look like they have identical features...
But this is Juneau (left) and Joplin (right) as teens.
There was still room in the house for one more offspring, so I went through the process of getting Joy and Jarrett to Try for Baby again. He's still got his hair dyed red at this point, and the baby they had was not what I was expecting.
Are you ready for this?
Meet the 6th child, a girl named Jupiter....
Did you go 'O_O'
Yeah, I did too. ;D Blond hair and purple eyes. I have NO idea where that came from! She must have gotten that 10% chance of the 'mutation' rolled for both her hair and eyes. Funny that I named her "Jupiter" without having set sight on her yet. She really is out of this world.
Here she is as a child. It's cool that I can make clothes for her that actually match her eyes. Believe it or not, her favorite color is purple.
Anyway, that's as far as I've played with my genetic experimentation, and I've yet to see Jupiter as a teen. Joy still has a lot of adult life to go, so she'll be having kids as long as I can stand it.
A few more things about the game that are just "different" than in TS2.... one of which being death.
Dying of old age now involves a light show, then *pop* - U R GHOST.
Then Grim shows up and directs you towards the afterlife.
Grim was not cooperating with me when I was trying to take these photos. Every time I hit 'pause' he would turn his head away from the camera. So it looks like he's got a large duck head under his cowl.
By the way, it's a complete coincidence that Leighton Sekemoto happened to be at the cemetery when he died of old age (he was collecting rocks), and that his oldest son, Sam, happened to be there, too.
Leighton also happened to be Fuzzy's townie husband, and the great-grandfather of those kids you were just looking at. Before he died, my simself met an untimely death...
As an elder, Fuzzy had a high skill in mechanical, so I set her to upgrading the appliances. She was making the stove "fireproof" (by hitting it with a hammer) when she was electrocuted. (ignore the stupid man-maid) Well, that didn't kill her. In fact, her needs never even budged, so I figured it was just a cute/silly event that could happen when upgrading electrical appliances. So I set her to finishing the upgrade...
When it happened again....
And this time took. See that puddle of water? Yeah, I couldn't see that from the other side of the wall where I was watching from.
Grim showed up just like he does for old age. At that point Leighton had the option to "Play chess for Fuzzy's life" with Grim, but I couldn't get him to stop the crying action in time to act on it.
Since there are no aspirations, the deceased get a symbol on their grave showing how they died. Looking through the cemetery, Sims can also drown, starve, and burn to death.
(Sorry about the warped perspective. I was still trying to get used to how the camera works at this point.)
When a family member dies, someone will get the "opportunity" to take the urn to the science center for some experiments. What happens is the dead Sim is returned to playable form, but they are still a ghost. So basically, you have a transparent Sim whose needs decay just like a normal Sim. I guess this is handy for untimely deaths, and you really want to complete their LTW. Or make them come back and finish upgrading the damned appliances.
After you are tired of playing a ghost, you can just send them back to the afterlife, and they become "normal" ghosts again. Ghosts in this game are like any Sim that is visiting the lot. They can be interacted with just like a living Sim. And like all Sims, they seem to suffer from needs decay....
And seem to always be tired. Fuzzy's favorite thing to do was start preparing a meal she never finished, then take a nap in one of the kids beds.
Leighton always played with the toddler when there was one around. Or just played video games. Then take a nap.
To me the ghosts are a little more annoying than TS2 ghosts. Mostly because a Sim will drop everything out of their queue to go "A Ghost!" even if they were just talking to him 2 seconds before that.
The Sims 3 seems to be designed for you to play it from one household's perspective. Always. And you watch the rest of the town evolve around you. I did try experimenting with switching between two households, and that was a disaster. It takes about 3 days to get one family taken care of, their needs met, wishes granted, and opportunities taken. But when you switch to another household, then come back, it's like starting over again. Except they are now older and have not made any progress in learning skills or their career or school. The Townies are a lot like Dormies from TS2 University. They appear to be doing stuff and accomplishing things, but they are really just puppets until you marry them in and make them playable. Except these Townies do age, and sometimes spawn a child. If you MUST be in control of the "spares" who move out, then you need to be playing TS2. Here, there is no control of anyone but the active household.
Because this is more of a "watching" game, than an "all-control" kind of game, there are other things to do. Supposedly to keep you from getting bored "watching" the Townies get fat and fight with each other in the park. You can make one of your active Sims collect stuff. Like fish, bugs, recipes, and rocks that can be smelted into metal or cut into gems.
But there doesn't seem to be any "reward" for collecting everything, like all of the gems. Except you have collected them all, and have to find somewhere to put them. There is often some kind of special ability or item for getting a Sim to the top of their career, but this doesn't always benefit the next generation (like career rewards do).
At this point I feel like there isn't anything in the game to keep my interest. Building a legacy and generational game-play is really very tedious to me. Mostly because you are stuck inside that one household, and can't take a "break" by playing a spare's house without your main house going to hell while you are gone. TS3 is more like a series of mini games, and things to collect. The collecting aspect is kinda cool. Though it reminds me a LOT of games like Harvest Moon and Animal Crossing. So I can see how this will appeal to the younger crowd. I really like Harvest Moon and Animal Crossing, by the way! But, I play The Sims because it's not like those games. So while Sims3 has it's "fun" points, I think I'll stick to Sims2 as my main "Sims" game.
OMG, HUGE rambling post about TS3. And picspam!
After playing around with Sims3 for the past couple of weeks, I have a few opinions about it. I'm not going to say it's "better" than TS2, nor am I going to say Sims 2 is "better" than Sims3 (though, at the moment, I largely prefer to play TS2). It's going to come down to what the individual gamer likes, and one style of game-play might be more appealing to them than the other. Comparing Sims2 to Sims3 is rather like trying to compare chess to checkers. There are distinct similarities, but you can't play checkers using chess rules.
Which is what I was trying to do when I first started playing Sims3. And I hated it right out of the gate. After a frustrating week of trying to love the game, I finally realized I was approaching it all wrong, and decided to start over again. But I'll get to the actual game-play in a minute...
From a technical point of view, my computer seems "okay" for running the game. I've got a 2.60 GHz dual core processor, 4 GB of RAM, and 32-bit Windows Vista. My graphics card was what had me worried; it's an NVIDIA GeForce 8400 GS. (I mention all of this only as a point of comparison for anyone thinking about getting TS3) Not top of the line, but the game runs smoothly enough, with only the occasional jerk or stutter. I play it in windowed mode (which is a built-in option now, yay) on a widescreen monitor. Though my graphics card does start to protest when I'm running the game, and the internet, and a photo editing program, all at the same time. That's when I can hear the cooling fan spinning at about 47 million RPM. Anyway, the only graphics options I've changed to the highest settings are 'texture detail' and 'Sim detail'. Everything else was defaulted as such:
However, after upping the texture and Sim detail, I noticed that there is now a slight lag when rendering a new scene. Like if I zoom out from the center of town, then close-up on one of my Sims back at the house, it takes the game half a second to put all the colors and textures on everything. Not a long enough lag to bother me, though. Before changing those details options, it was mostly instantaneous. I've not yet experimented with turning anything else up, mostly because I'm satisfied with how the game looks. Even with "draw distance" set at medium, this is what the landscape looks like from the house my Sims live in (taken with the in-game camera):
Personally, I don't see any reason to have that setting any higher (only to slow the game down). The surrounding landscape is pretty, yes. But honestly, I spend 99.5% of my time looking at the inside of the house, or zoomed in on a Sim, and the game having to process all of that landscape just slows things down. Though for picture-taking purposes, having a lovely backdrop is kinda nice. Too bad the picture-taking is such a tedious process! It took me some time to get used to it. And I'm still struggling to get things into frame just the way I want them.
Anyway.... One of the first things I did was to make a Sim in CAS so I could explore the new create-a-sim features and give her some of the more "interesting" personality traits. I named her Happy Camper, and gave her some scary traits which included Insane, Inappropriate, and Kleptomaniac. After I moved her into town, it was a few Sim days later when she met herself at the corner bistro one night...
Same crazy clothes I designed in CAS. Same name: Happy Camper. Same traits. Same everything. I'm assuming this is a glitch, because I've not seen any of the other bin sims move a copy of themselves into town yet. After this, I went into the "edit town" screen and found the house Happy-clone was living in. The household was called "Camper" and she was living with an elderly couple which the game must have spawned as her roommates or parents. So I evicted them and deleted them. Which is something that would explode your game in TS2, but in this game there aren't those complex character files to mess things up. Otherwise they wouldn't make it such an easy option to delete any Sim in town, right? *roll eyes*
These TS3 Sims are more like objects and less like actual characters. These Sims have no memories. They have no turn-ons, no turn-offs, no zodiac, no personality points... The only personality they have is from those 5 traits. I love the "idea" of the traits, but those alone really limit the range of individuality. For example, instead of there being points of neatness somewhere between total neat-freak and complete slob, a Sim is simply only Neat OR a Slob depending on whether they actually possess one of those traits. If they don't have one of those traits, they are just sort of benign about cleanliness. There is no in-between or variation. It's all either/or. Ideally, I would like to have seen them leave the personality points in place, then give you the 5 traits on top of that (leaving out traits like "neat" and "grumpy" which are already covered by the points). And left us with the more interesting traits to add to the regular personality, like Loves the Outdoors, Neurotic, Childish, etc. It would have given these Sims much more fleshed-out personalities.
This is probably the main reason why I just can't seem to get attached to any of these Sims. I've played into the forth generation of one family, and after a while it really starts to feel like they are all exactly alike. They are more like animatronic game pieces, and less like little people.
Speaking of exactly alike...
There seems to be this annoying trend that families around town have to wear the same hairstyle. This is the Tate family, and I think that's a father and mother, their adult son, and his wife (or maybe sister). But don't ask me who is who.
Speaking of annoying trends....
Another reason it's so hard to take a decent photo in this game is because as soon as you hit "pause" the Sim you have in frame usually moves their head to the side AFTER you hit pause. Or they roll their eyes around. Sometimes the eyes roll in opposite directions. In general, the way they roll their eyes around reminds me of those baby dolls with the eyes that roll back in their head to make it look like they are sleeping. I don't like it. It's creepy as hell.
And all the Sims have that same deadpan expression. Even when they are in a good mood they just stand there with that somber look on their face. You can usually tell when they are in a good mood because after several minutes they will suddenly bounce and clap and laugh like they are mentally challenged. Then it's back to looking like a mortician. This lack of facial expression makes the children especially creepy.
These New Sims are far less animated than TS2 Sims. Especially in the face. There's a lot of standing and looking all emo. Some of the traits have built-in idle movements, like the Insane Sims will talk to their hand. But not all traits have something, so there's a lot of standing and looking all emo. o___o
Most of the interactive animations between Sims were taken directly from Sims2 (way to shortcut, EA)...
But there are far fewer interactions now, and you have to actually "unlock" interactions between Sims. Romance is like a mini game (sorta like Matchmaker Dates in TS2), and even if the Sims are married they have to go through the whole process of getting to that stage where they find each other "very irresistible" before something like woohoo or Try for Baby is an option. Which annoys the hell out of me. Unless one of them has the Family-Oriented trait, the Try for Baby option isn't always there. Though even with the option there, if the other Sim is not at least to the stage of "very alluring" or in a good enough mood, the woohoo might be rejected.
I have heard that the Sims will woohoo autonomously, but I've yet to see them get to that stage on their own. They will flirt and kiss up to that "very irresistible" stage, then one of them will throw in a non-romantic interaction like "gossip" and reset the whole process. There is no chemistry between TS3 Sims, and they will like the next Sim just as much as this Sim. It doesn't really matter who you hook them up with (though some traits clash and it takes a little longer to build the relationship). You pretty much have to force the relationships anyway.
My observations show the "Townies" either spawn with a spouse or just never get married. I have yet to witness autonomous marriage. There is occasionally a wedding announcement in the newspaper, but these are always the "new" people in town who have spawned with a spouse. It looks like sometimes the game gives them a random "steady" girlfriend or boyfriend, that is usually a roommate, and they will usually have kids along the way. The game seems to decide how many people should live in a house based on how many beds are in it. So there's often unrelated Sims living in the same household. Babies seem to spawn to single people as often as to the couples. Even men end up with a child that technically has no mother.
Speaking of babies...
Just like in TS2, they all look the same. Except even more so, because these babies don't seem to show a hair or eye color until they are toddlers. I think this particular baby grew up to have black hair and brown eyes. You can now click on the baby to view it's needs. And let me tell you, infants' needs drop twice as fast as normal! But, there is the option to take them to a birthday cake and age them up to toddler the minute they are born. In fact, you can age any Sim before their actual birthday. Within reason... I think adults have to go through half their adult stage before you can "cake" them to elder. The toddler stage is now 7 days (when the game is set to normal aging), but I usually cake them ('cake' is a verb now, yo) after they learn all there skills. Which sometimes only takes a couple of days. This really speeds up the family-growing process, and gives you more time to help the Sims with that ridiculously slow skill-learning. (OMG, skilling has taken on a whole new SLOW.)
The genetics are pretty simple. There are no hidden or recessive hair and eye colors. The kids either get one of their parents' hair and eyes, or one of their grandparents (if there are any). And I heard somewhere that there is like a 10% chance of a totally random, mutant hair and eye color. Facial features seem to work like they did before, where the child gets either parents' nose, mouth, jaw, etc.
You can't really tell anything about how the child is going to look when they are still children....
These are twin sisters; that's Lyric on the left, and Joy on the right. And though they look almost identical...
They aged-up to teen looking more distinct from each other. That's still Lyric on the left, and Joy on the right.
Incidentally, these two girls happen to be my simself's granddaughters. And at this point I decided to do a little genetic experimentation. So when they aged up to Young Adult, Lyric was sent out to live among the Townies, while Joy was sent husband-hunting...
That sneer is what passes as a smile in this game. D:
Anyway, that's Joy and her husband, Jarrett. I picked him because (besides her being friends with him since she was a kid) he has moss-green eyes and that awesome skintone which is like the equivalent of S47. Luckily, young adults are able to get married and have babies now. So when you combine the length of the YA stage with the length of the normal adult stage, that's nearly 40 days worth of fertility! So the potential for huge families is definitely there.
Here are their first three kids; all boys; all single births...
Left to right:
Jericho (young adult), Jordan (teen), and Jasper (teen). Like the names matter, but whatever. ;D
I think this is a pretty good example of how the facial features get distributed. I've not seen any clones so far (and this is the 3rd born-in generation). I've been looking at black hair since Fuzzy's son, so I decided to dye Jarrett's hair red and see if that has any effect on the next child born. Because I heard that dyed hair can be inherited.
The next birth was twin girls...
Try not to look too excited, girls. Someone might suspect you aren't soulless manikins.
Now is when the strangeness began. No inherited red dye, but they both have dark brown hair. Which was their grandmother's hair color, so it might have come from her; or not. However, what's odd is that Juneau (on the left) has black roots, while Joplin (on the right) has lighter brown roots. Again, they look like they have identical features...
But this is Juneau (left) and Joplin (right) as teens.
There was still room in the house for one more offspring, so I went through the process of getting Joy and Jarrett to Try for Baby again. He's still got his hair dyed red at this point, and the baby they had was not what I was expecting.
Are you ready for this?
Meet the 6th child, a girl named Jupiter....
Did you go 'O_O'
Yeah, I did too. ;D Blond hair and purple eyes. I have NO idea where that came from! She must have gotten that 10% chance of the 'mutation' rolled for both her hair and eyes. Funny that I named her "Jupiter" without having set sight on her yet. She really is out of this world.
Here she is as a child. It's cool that I can make clothes for her that actually match her eyes. Believe it or not, her favorite color is purple.
Anyway, that's as far as I've played with my genetic experimentation, and I've yet to see Jupiter as a teen. Joy still has a lot of adult life to go, so she'll be having kids as long as I can stand it.
A few more things about the game that are just "different" than in TS2.... one of which being death.
Dying of old age now involves a light show, then *pop* - U R GHOST.
Then Grim shows up and directs you towards the afterlife.
Grim was not cooperating with me when I was trying to take these photos. Every time I hit 'pause' he would turn his head away from the camera. So it looks like he's got a large duck head under his cowl.
By the way, it's a complete coincidence that Leighton Sekemoto happened to be at the cemetery when he died of old age (he was collecting rocks), and that his oldest son, Sam, happened to be there, too.
Leighton also happened to be Fuzzy's townie husband, and the great-grandfather of those kids you were just looking at. Before he died, my simself met an untimely death...
As an elder, Fuzzy had a high skill in mechanical, so I set her to upgrading the appliances. She was making the stove "fireproof" (by hitting it with a hammer) when she was electrocuted. (ignore the stupid man-maid) Well, that didn't kill her. In fact, her needs never even budged, so I figured it was just a cute/silly event that could happen when upgrading electrical appliances. So I set her to finishing the upgrade...
When it happened again....
And this time took. See that puddle of water? Yeah, I couldn't see that from the other side of the wall where I was watching from.
Grim showed up just like he does for old age. At that point Leighton had the option to "Play chess for Fuzzy's life" with Grim, but I couldn't get him to stop the crying action in time to act on it.
Since there are no aspirations, the deceased get a symbol on their grave showing how they died. Looking through the cemetery, Sims can also drown, starve, and burn to death.
(Sorry about the warped perspective. I was still trying to get used to how the camera works at this point.)
When a family member dies, someone will get the "opportunity" to take the urn to the science center for some experiments. What happens is the dead Sim is returned to playable form, but they are still a ghost. So basically, you have a transparent Sim whose needs decay just like a normal Sim. I guess this is handy for untimely deaths, and you really want to complete their LTW. Or make them come back and finish upgrading the damned appliances.
After you are tired of playing a ghost, you can just send them back to the afterlife, and they become "normal" ghosts again. Ghosts in this game are like any Sim that is visiting the lot. They can be interacted with just like a living Sim. And like all Sims, they seem to suffer from needs decay....
And seem to always be tired. Fuzzy's favorite thing to do was start preparing a meal she never finished, then take a nap in one of the kids beds.
Leighton always played with the toddler when there was one around. Or just played video games. Then take a nap.
To me the ghosts are a little more annoying than TS2 ghosts. Mostly because a Sim will drop everything out of their queue to go "A Ghost!" even if they were just talking to him 2 seconds before that.
The Sims 3 seems to be designed for you to play it from one household's perspective. Always. And you watch the rest of the town evolve around you. I did try experimenting with switching between two households, and that was a disaster. It takes about 3 days to get one family taken care of, their needs met, wishes granted, and opportunities taken. But when you switch to another household, then come back, it's like starting over again. Except they are now older and have not made any progress in learning skills or their career or school. The Townies are a lot like Dormies from TS2 University. They appear to be doing stuff and accomplishing things, but they are really just puppets until you marry them in and make them playable. Except these Townies do age, and sometimes spawn a child. If you MUST be in control of the "spares" who move out, then you need to be playing TS2. Here, there is no control of anyone but the active household.
Because this is more of a "watching" game, than an "all-control" kind of game, there are other things to do. Supposedly to keep you from getting bored "watching" the Townies get fat and fight with each other in the park. You can make one of your active Sims collect stuff. Like fish, bugs, recipes, and rocks that can be smelted into metal or cut into gems.
But there doesn't seem to be any "reward" for collecting everything, like all of the gems. Except you have collected them all, and have to find somewhere to put them. There is often some kind of special ability or item for getting a Sim to the top of their career, but this doesn't always benefit the next generation (like career rewards do).
At this point I feel like there isn't anything in the game to keep my interest. Building a legacy and generational game-play is really very tedious to me. Mostly because you are stuck inside that one household, and can't take a "break" by playing a spare's house without your main house going to hell while you are gone. TS3 is more like a series of mini games, and things to collect. The collecting aspect is kinda cool. Though it reminds me a LOT of games like Harvest Moon and Animal Crossing. So I can see how this will appeal to the younger crowd. I really like Harvest Moon and Animal Crossing, by the way! But, I play The Sims because it's not like those games. So while Sims3 has it's "fun" points, I think I'll stick to Sims2 as my main "Sims" game.
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on 2009-06-15 03:40 pm (UTC)Hawthorne. <3 Yes, I'll be returning with more of him and the rest of the gang. I guess I'll need to figure out an alternative to the Exchange for posting the O'Leery's story. D: This venue is an option, but I rather like the slideshow aspect. So I'm scouting around for a good alternative.
Thanks, Annie. :D