Tuesday 21 February 2006

Pic of the day: She forgets all her pain for the joy that a new life has been brought into the world game.

My new Sims challenge

When people have played Sims2 for a while, they often look for a "challenge". That is to say, instead of just trying to keep their Sims alive, they start to set long term goals for themselves and their Sims. As far as I can see from the Internet, the most popular such challenge is the Legacy Challenge. This consists of playing one family through 10 generations, and you get points for how much money they have, how many different gravestones they have, how many different colors of ghosts they have, alien babies and NPC's, stuff like that. There are strict guidelines on the size of the lot, what kind of downloads you are not allowed to have and some other rules.

I personally find the Legacy Challenge morbid and disgusting because of the importance of gravestones and ghosts. Here in Norway it is very unusual to have gravestones on private property... I'm not sure whether it is actually illegal, but I have never seen it practiced either. Ghosts are not only contrary to my religion, but morbid and disgusting in their own right. If I believed in that place was actually haunted, I would make sure to stay away. Be that as it may, I'm not playing the Legacy Challenge. I am however making a challenge of sorts.

***

When I play Sims2, the happiness of my Sims takes precedence. Mostly I let them do what they want, while helping them toward their long term goals. But eventually I devised a kind of challenge, too. It is really more a challenge for my computer than for my Sims. I made a new neighborhood, created a single Sim (suspiciously similar to myself, incidentally) and built a house for him on a large lot. The idea is to let all his descendents live in the same house. Nobody moves out, except temporarily to attend the University. When one of my Sims marries, the both of them will live in the original house, as will their children. I will extend the house as needed, but not build new houses. They will all live as one big family.

This would not have been possible if I had not been made aware of a hack that can be downloaded from Mod The Sims 2. This particular hack disables the upper limit of eight family members in each household. I'm not sure if there is an inherent limitation in the game mechanics that will make the game crash if you get past a certain size, but I'm pretty sure I will have to stop before that anyway. Today's computers and video cards are only able to process so much information before the game slows to a crawl and becomes unplayable. I intend to find out what that limit is for my gaming computer, and to have fun in the process.

I am also taking screenshots while I play, especially from important events such as birthdays and weddings, but also snapshots from daily life. I write a small caption for each picture and upload them in the form of stories to my web site. I then link to them in a post in the LiveJournal Sims2 community, to entertain and inform my fellow Sims2 players. I hope others too will discover the fun of large families.

Not that 8 people is a large family in real life. Then again, the graphics engine in Real Life is just plain awesome. Now if only we could get the long promised feature for restoring saved characters...