Friday 6 August 2004

Pic of the day: Non-heroin chic style! I want her and I want her now. Or at least in September, when Sims2 is released. (Screenshot from Sims2 Body Shop.)

Waiting for Sims2

Oh yes, I almost forgot that. I also bought the Exclusive Bonus CD Preorder for Sims2, except due to random randomness I did not get my preorder registered. That's hardly reason to worry. I suspect there will be lots of Sims2 in the shops come September.

According to the box, Sims2 will be released September 16 here. That's kinda surprising, since it was supposed to be released September 17 in the USA. Norway is usually a few months behind. Not that I'm complaining.

The truth is that I still like the original Sims. I have all the expansion packs, although I haven't installed Unleashed on all the machines since it was more of a hassle than it was worth to me. Sure, there are pets, but they pee all over and besides the characters get artificially slowed down (turning around their own axis before doing simple things like cleaning the table) and you can't remove puddles near chairs, tables etc without moving the objects away first. Stuff like that. Basically, you have to play with "move_objects on" and it's just not worth it unless you have too many Sims to fit in the original neighborhood. (Unleashed introduces a much larger neighborhood.)

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Anyway, I've downloaded the character creator for Sims2, Body Shop. It lets you create some Sims, although even with the starter pack the selection is rather limited. You can mold them in very fine detail, there are lots and lots of mouths and noses etc that look mostly the same to me, but I bet a real human would notice the difference. I have a hard time remembering the faces of humans unless they have some unusual feature, human heads look largely the same to me except for their skin and hair colors. I'm sure I can set those in the final version of the tool so I will be able to tell my Sims apart.

One thing I was happy to see was that there was a broader model. The screenshots generally show unnaturally thin people. By pressing a button you can give them real hips. That was nice of them. I might have bought the game anyway, but I really carried a grudge for them going with the Bennetton / "heroin chic" style. Now I feel much better about playing it.

And I think I can use a break from City of Heroes. Not because I'm fed up with it, but because I'm not. And that worries me. Actually I'm already playing a couple other games, especially late at night. More about that later, I hope.