Decision Made

 With a $20 gift certificate from EA and World Adventures dropping to $19.99 this past week, the decision was pretty much made for me.  Ah well, I always liked getting the expansions "in order" anyways.  So now I'm dreadfully late ooing and ahhhing over WA, but I have to say I've enjoyed it.  I didn't like Bon Voyage that much for Sims 2, but the WA pack is definitely an improvement.

I like the nectar making and the photography.  The martial arts to-do seems a bit cheesy, but I suppose those have to appear in every game, sooner or later.  More as I explore -- I haven't even made it to Al Simhara yet!

In and Out

I know I've not been here much -- and my excuse for that is not so very good either.   I went and made the "mistake" of downloading the Eidos Collector Pack from Steam around Christmastime.  With well over twenty new games dumped in my lap all at once -- from Thief to Hitman, and from Deus Ex to Mini Ninjas -- my free time has been amply filled.

But I can never resist the call of The Sims for very long.  Not long after getting involved with it again, I saw the High End Loft Stuff pack was available for download and so got that as soon as I could (after a long kafuffle with EA Customer Support).  I'm sort of drooling over the two expansions and don't know which to do -- I've been trying to economize lately, so buying both seems awfully decadent right now.

Maybe I'll put up a poll...

Things I've Learned About Sims 3

I have to say that in coming from Sims 2, I had a lot of expectations about things that didn't really play out quite that way.  If you're a Sims 2 player moving to Sims 3, you've got to look at it with new eyes, so to speak, because there are things that are just different but might easily missed when working from Sims 2 expectations.  Here's some of the stuff I discovered so far!

Muffins Are Meat

What's that you say?  Toddlers make meat muffins in their tiny play ovens?  They sure do.  This makes me look at my neice's Easy-Bake oven with something of an eye askew.  I mean, meat muffins from a toy oven?  Gack!  Nevertheless, if your vegetarian toddler eats a muffin from these things, they'll get sick and vomit.  Chalk one up for "weird Dev decisions".

Toddlers ...

So the first thing that got me was that Children and Toddlers can't interact anymore.  Not at all  The Child can't get the Toddler a bottle from the fridge, can't play with their toys with them, can't make faces at them, tickle them, chat with them.  It's almost like they live in separate but parallel realities.  It was really nice in Sims 2 when you had a lonely Child who could then talk to the toddler, but no, that's not possible anymore.

I was also a little baffled by the learning that Toddlers do.  They seem to get benefits from, say, the pegbox or the xylophone, but those don't show up anywhere.  Parents can read to them, too, and the game will eventually say they've "learned all they can" from a book, but again, no sign of what they learned anywhere.  This does eventually show up, though -- if a teen who gained some xylophone education picks up a guitar later their guitar skill will start at at least one, and maybe up to three.  So far I've figured out that xylophone does guitar skill, and that the pegbox does logic skill.  There are various kiddy art books they can be read which gains them painting skill.  

While toddlers can play with the block table, it doesn't seem to do them any good, however Children gain mechanical skill with it.  I've yet to find a way to get an early head start on Charisma, which I always liked to do for my Sims while they were kids and it was still fun.

Classes

I had a hard time figuring out where to send my Sims for their various classes.  They like to learn in them and, hey, it's quick.  But It took me forever to figure out that Sims learn to write at the Corporate HQ (the Sims devs obviously haven't been reading the same corporate correspondence I have).  I made myself a list of places to get classes:

• Corporate HQ: Writing class
• Sports Stadium: Athletic class
• Any restaurant: Cooking class
• Military Base: Handiness class
• Research Facility/Science Center: Logic class
• Theatre: Guitar class
• City Hall: Charisma class
• Grocery: Fishing class
• Community School: Painting class

Mom's Diet Influences Baby's Gender

That was a weird one -- and I'd never have guessed but I read it in the forums and it's always worked for me so far (though they say it's not 100%).  Eating apples makes the gender tend toward male and eating watermelons trends it toward female.  Apparently at least three servings should be consumed by mom during the pregnancy.  It's also good to know that these can be eaten as parts of other food (cobbler, pancakes, &c.), or just raw from mom's inventory.

Move That Mailbox and Style That Trashcan

Holy cow the lot mailbox and trashcan are finally movable with the hand tool -- and styleable with the recolor tool! It's so nice to be able to put them out of sight, or make them into less of an eyesore altogether!

Rubber Ducky, Your'e the One!

And they make bathtime lots of fun, too!  Your Sims can buy bubblebath and rubber duckies at the local grocery.  Once home, just move them onto the edge of the bathtub.  The ducky makes your Sim happier with their baths, and the bubbles enable the "take bubblebath" option on the tub.  Mmmm, scrubbing bubbles!

Two more broken showers and a fritzed dishwasher later...

Ghost Jane is still preggers.  I haven't had much time to play lately so I've yet to see the baby, but other Sims will happily pat Jane's belly and coo at it.  It's kind of freaky -- see my most screenshot "Eilram and Dead Pregnant Jane" for one example.

Things around the house are still breaking like mad.  I can't tell if this is the effects of the ghost or not, really, because this is the only household I've really played and it's always seemed a little "cursed" to me -- the stereo, computer, and TV all broke the first time anyone used them after moving in.  Ghost Jane is quite the mechanic though, so she just busies herself fixing things as they go.  She's also been slowly working on upgrading everything to "Unbreakable", which should be nice.

Meanwhile, my lot submissions are seeming to go OK, but I cannot manage to get a pattern accepted.  I've made two so far and have tried twice now to submit one of them, but it's just not going well.  My pattern was rejected the first time for not tiling properly, except it does, so I went and double- and triple-checked it (yep, tiling fine!), then resubmitted it with additional screenshots.  The first time I'd just submitted it with a screenshot of the pattern on clothing from CAS, so I thought having it on a wall and a bed, too would be good and perhaps that was the problem with the first submission.  I put together an image showing it as a bedspread and a wallpaper, and a dress and a robe, and submitted that only to have it rejected because, "We require you to submit an image that shows how the pattern tiles on a surface or clothing."

Argh, but I did, I did, I did!  It doesn't seem the reasons are matching up with things that are actually wrong with the pattern.  It's very frustrating.  I'm going under the assumption for now that it's just a glitch in the system and it will hopefully be worked out (I know that when I previewed my second submission the screenshot took several seconds to load off TSR's image server -- someone moving through sumbissions quickly might never have seen the screenshot unless they had it open for at least 10 seconds).  I hate to whine about it, but it is just very discouraging.  And I'm a whiner, too.  Perhaps it's the rainy days keeping me inside and making everything seem dull that makes it just all seem so very dire, eh?

Well that's ... different.

Today's new discoveries are two-fold: one, that whole backwards-arm bug is still there.  That's sort of disappointing -- you'd hope they'd straighten that out eventually.  It's just damned odd.  I'll add one to my screenshots so that it can be seen.  It looks like I'm back to my "when things go wrong" series.

The weird thing is ghosts.  They can rejoin the household now (through the science center), and I think George just got dead wife Jane pregnant.  Hrrmmmm!  I'll have to see how that pregnancy goes.  The weirdest thing about is that everyone's just going on about their lives as if having ghost mom living in the house is just perfectly normal.  Mom's translucent?  Yeah, yours isnt?

And yes, she's definitely pregnant -- my ghost Jane has been running to the toilet and vomiting after every meal.  Now I just wonder if the baby will be living or dead.

The ghost on the lot seems to cause a lot of things to go wrong.  Each of the three showers has broken at least once in the last 24 Sim hours, and the dishwasher went on the fritz, and all the trees in the garden died.  Could be a coincidence, but seems shpoooooky in the mean time!

Still Adjusting

There are definitely some oddities in Sims 3.  I am enjoying the game just as much as I enjoyed Sims 2.  I know a lot of people are saying they're disappointed, but I have to agree with some others have said -- that they likely just haven't sat down and played with it enough.  (It probably doesn't help that among many of those saying they're disappointed, I've also seen a lot of incorrect information about what's possible in the game.)

My unpleasant discovery yesterday: Children and Toddlers just can't interact.  I thought at first it was because my toddler hadn't learned to talk yet, so I was relentless with the poor babe until he could speak, but no go. There were just no interactions I could find between Children and Toddlers.  I always thought it was silly that Children couldn't talk to Babies or play peek-a-boo with them while someone else held them in Sims 2, and now that's been expanded.  Children can't chat with Toddlers like any Teen or Adult can, they can't "play with" them through a toy (like any Adult or Teen can), nothing.  If I had my druthers, Children would be able to get bottles from the fridge for Babies and Toddlers, and would be able to talk with and entertain Toddlers, at the very least.

My discovery: Fish actually get their burial at sea now!  I had a fish die off in its little bowl and mom just scooped it out and took it to the toilet -- flush!  That was sort of funny.

But you know, I'm not seeing so much humor in the game yet.  I remember being insanely amused by Sims 2 when I'd leave a Sim alone and they'd go play pirate ship in the bathtub, or some other whacky behavior.  I've not seen anything like that so far, but then the game's still new and I'm still in control freak mode.

Getting to Know Sims 3

For a long time now I haven't really played Sims 2, but have spent my time building lots for them.  I've been playing quite a bit with Sims 3, it being the new toy and all, but also have been trying to get to know its build features.

For play, there's a lot to like: Sims 3 seems to be running more smoothly on my desktop than does Sims 2, but then it's only the base game -- I have all the expansion and stuff packs for Sims 2 (except the H&M one), plus just tons of custom content, so I think it's bound to be a bit heavier than Sims 3 at this point.  Sims 3 doesn't run very well on my laptop at all (an Athlon 64 4000+ with 2GB RAM running WinXP).  It loads quickly and such, but about five to ten minutes in, everything bogs down to a crawl.  If I leave it be for another ten minutes or so and come back, it's usually straightened back out again and can go for a short while before the process repeats.  I'm absolutely sure that a lot of that is my graphics adapter -- the 128 MB Radeon XPRESS 200m just wasn't built for this sort of intensity.  World of Warcraft?  No Problem!  Sims 3 -- aaaarghle!

A lot has been streamlined in Sims 3.  Babies no longer leave bottles all over the floor (baby food and bottles miraculously disappear when the tot is done, and can be magically pulled out of thin air whenever needed), and such.  There are dozens of details like this which make the game "less bother" in some terms.  Buying groceries is no longer a hassle: if a Sim wants to cook something that's not in the fridge, they just pay for the ingredients out of pocket and continue with their cooking.  I'm actually still trying to decide whether I like these new features.  Part of enjoying the Sims for me has been dealing with the minutae of their lives.  I sort of miss cleaning up after the baby, making the grocery store runs and so on.  I think this is part of some players' desire for washing machines, dryers, and dirty laundry for their Sims: they play to get into every last detail.

Some things that have definitely been too streamlined for my tastes.  For example, whenever a Sim needs to travel to a community lot, they just go -- you don't need to pick a method since they'll just choose whatever's convenient.  If they're going to drive or take a taxi, they'll just walk to the curb; the conveyance appears out of nowhere and they fade out (fading back inside it) and are off.  I don't like that warping -- I want to see them walk to the vehicle and get inside.  I'd noticed this "warp" behavior in other games from other companies (Space Colony, Stronghold), and it always struck me as very lazy on the part of the animators: no climbing into equipment or anything, the people just fade out and fade back in on the item they were going to be using.  Watching Sims repeatedly slam the doors of cheap cars to get them to close properly always amused me -- perhaps because my own car is a '92 and I could feel their pain.

I haven't had much problem with Story Progression while I've been off a lot but then I turned it off in settings, I save obsessively, and I don't change families that often.  I have noticed a disturbing number of deaths within the town around my Sims -- relatives and acquaintances are seeming to drop like flies around them.  The problem I have been having is with things just going missing.  Example: I was playing George Dean for a while (he's a resident of Riverview (the free town available on the Exchange);  he started with two cars on his lot, and earned a third through work.  I left him and his wife at home, and went to build another lot (keeping the story paused the whole time), then came back to George and his family to find they had no cars.  The cars weren't in their inventories, nor anywhere else to be found, and they didn't have any extra cash.  I still haven't figured out what happend to them.

Maybe eventually the mystery will be solved.