Monday 21 July 2003

Pic of the day: I will not lose to her! Lulu sulked, plotting her revenge ... (Screenshot from The Sims)

Monday with Sims

Nothing much happened here. I played The Sims on Holiday on the bedroom computer, the one with a pen instead of a mouse. (I originally wrote "a bed instead of a mouse". Could I perhaps still be a little sleepy?) Playing with a pen is OK for such a game, it feels natural and is less stressful on my hand. And the game is very much a "point and click" game.

For some obscure reason you still cannot just point at the screen, the way I do with my pocket PC. I had expected that more intuitive technology would win out, but instead it seems evolution has frozen at the mouse level. It's anybody's guess how much that costs society in wrist, shoulder and neck damages and lost productivity. But people want standards, and standards they've got.

***

Playing The Sims was fun as usual. I had downloaded a few objects from Simstitution, which incidentally seems to be a mostly Norwegian-made site. (As usual with such things, the text is in English, apart from the names of the people.) Their "privacy door" is a great idea - it allows the family access to rooms but not guests. Some Simstitution objects are guest enabled, including their super computer which I have praised before. But the computer is so much fun, it may be hard to convince guests to join you in the spa or at the chess board, where you can also talk with them. So lock your computer away at the bedroom with a privacy door. You don't get your social needs met by watching guests play at your computer. (Unlike real life ... if you have kids or even nephews, you know that computer playing is actually a group activity.)

My latest Sim is very social indeed. She is also a stay-at-home artist who refuses to submit to the capitalist system of wage slavery.

Luckily there are many ways for Sims to earn money from home, unlike for most of us. Painting for money came with the original game, and further expansion have added lawn gnome making, canned food and growing your own vegetables. With the Simstitution Supercomputer you can try your hand at hacking, unreliable income but fun. And the typewriter from Fingermouse's Cheap Frills lets you write for a living – a steady income, and comfortable, but no fun. All taken together, the Sims have lots of opportunities to work from home. Wish it was me...

Lulu Konnichiwa is made with one of the anime/manga heads I downloaded some months ago, I have forgotten where. As you may notice by now, there is a lot of creativity from players. This adds a lot to the game. I doubt I would still be playing if not for the user add-ons. For instance, to take a CheapFrills invention again, the Internet Banking computer lets your Sims borrow money and pay it back with interest. It is a kind of crude tool that is easy to cheat with, but you are not competing against anyone so why cheat? In real life you are supposed to borrow some money to get started; I think it is quite reasonable to do so in the game too. Or the supercomputer with e-mail that gives happiness and satisfies your social needs. That is certainly realistic too. Well, it works for me! I love e-mail. ^_^

***

Since I have gone on babbling about The Sims, I guess I may as well consign the whole entry to blueness. I have looked at some screenshots from Sims 2, and I am not impressed. Looks polygon-based, which will certainly be good in rotating and viewing the characters from any angle. But they look uglier and less sexy than the original characters from the year 2000. Many of the characters now look really good. So what if you only can view them from 4 angles? They are good enough that I can make small comic strips with them if I take the time. (Not that I would do that now in this heat. All I want to be is lazy ... so lazy ...)

Unless they improve the character images, I will take a lot of convincing to switch to Sims 2. Usually gameplay counts for more than prettiness, which is where the convincing comes in. But with the wide range of things you can already do in the game (especially with all the expansion packs and user-made objects) I am hard pressed to think of gameplay that could be such a breakthrough that I would put up with the gangly creatures displayed so far. Just my preliminary opinion ...