Tuesday 28 August 2007

Pic of the day: Screenshot from Greater Pleasantview, more exactly from the Silvercrown Valley subhood, from the Place de Laplace community lot. In the corner you may see good old Darren Dreamer maxing his Logic skill. Jan Tellerman is visible in the background, but the rest seem to be newcomers.

Sims 2 again

As promised last year, I'd take a look at how far I came with "Piddly Creek", the Sims 2 neighborhood I was playing back then. The answer is: Forgotten. It still has the same family, actually, but I don't play it anymore. After I got the Dell laptop in December, I played a Danish neighborhood (I had installed the Danish version of NightLife on it). Then when I got Seasons half a year ago, I digged up a neighborhood I had played University on back when that was new.

You see, much some of my most fertile friends keep track of the years by their babies, I count backward with the Sims 2 expansions. This fall is Bon Voyage, the rework of the original Vacation for The Sims (1). Each fall it is a rework of one of the old expansions, each spring it is a genuinely new idea. This works well enough. The next is supposed to come in March and be called Hobbies. It will include many more things my Sims can waste their precious few days on. But they can probably still not play The Sims...

Last fall (2006) was Pets, which I tried but did not like. There have since been made a couple hacks that makes it a lot more playable, by banishing stray sims, a major source of irritation. (I hated that stupid feature in Unleashed too, the original Sims expansion with pets. Back then, Maxis eventually released a "stray-away" sign that kept strays off the property. This time I have to use a user-made hack. Then again, the hack is better. The creativity of gamers is astounding sometimes. Anyway, rather than play Pets, I made a fake farm, with fruit trees and vegetable patches created by ingenious gamers. The point of this kinda disappeared when Seasons introduced fruit trees and vegetable patches as an integrated part of the game.

The fall before (2005) was NightLife, another expansion that I hated at first. I still don't use most of its main features, dates and outings, but my sims tend to get a car eventually (unlike me, but then again they want one, unlike me). I would still keep it for its attraction system, that makes it easier for sims to decide who to fall in love with. This is a big deal for the sims (again unlike me).

And the spring that year saw the first expansion pack, University, possibly my all-time favorite. Since I mostly play Knowledge sims, they feel right at home there, and they need the extra want slots because they spend years wanting to see ghosts and be saved from death. Two of those sims were my self-sim, Magnus, and his wife who was a gender-reversed clone of him. You know, like Adam and Eve. Unsurprisingly they love each other very much, because I love myself very much! They also have a bunch of offspring, naturally fairly similar to the parents, scattered across Pleasantview. (Plesantview is one of the three ready-made neighborhoods that come with the game.)

***

Now I am playing Greater Pleasantview. It is the neighborhood I played in summer 2005, but with the Downtown from NightLife and the Bluewater shopping district from Open for Business. I don't have Pets on that machine, but I do have Seasons and there is a new farming neighborhood, but it is a sub-neighborhood to Pleasantview. Farmington also only has one family at the time, although it has reached 3 generations.

Somewhat belatedly I realized that filling even one neighborhood with descendants of one family would take decades of real time. There is no way I am playing Sims 2 in 2037 even if I am alive. I cannot even play Daggerfall on my current crop of machines, and long-time readers will remember that it was my staple game for several years of this journal. Hmm, I suppose I could use the unexpected money to buy two quality PCs (that would be HP, in my experience, or Goldstar if I ever find one again ... I have a Goldstar AT at work from the 1980es and it keeps ticking!!). Then I could just drag these computers with me unopened until I have no more computers left that can run Sims 2, and the unpack the first and restore my last backup... Nah. Not likely.

With Greater Pleasantview, I have taken a radically different approach. I am playing many families, and every now and then I create more "townies", non-playing characters which my playable sims can meet and make friends (or enemies) with. I installed a "better names" hack that has more than 10 000 names to choose from, to stop getting 3 Ivy Copur and 2 Melissa Fancey in the same neighborhood. More lately, I have started making new townies using names from my Gmail spam folder. ^^ Even with that, and all the ready-made characters that came with Pleasantview and the expansion subhoods, I just now am reaching 700 sims. I think that say something about the utter futility of last year's dream.

That said, it was a beautiful dream. If I had an antediluvian lifespan, I would totally go for it. A century spent playing The Sims 2... not nearly the worst you can do if you have several of them.

I wonder if I'm still playing Greater Pleasantview next year? Somehow I doubt it. Time flows differently for me. A year is an ocean of time, enough for entire empires to rise and fall. OK, that is in Civ4, but even so...