Friday 22 October 2004

Pic of the day: A happier moment in Nathaniel's life, as a young man surrounded by his loving family. None of us knew what tragedy fate had in store for him ...

Sim Kaze

I have mentioned the anime "Koi Kaze", where the plot is that a man meets his younger sister who he hasn't seen since she was a baby. None off them recognize each other, but both feel that the other is somehow special. They rapidly fall in love, and then they learn that they are brother and sister and will now live together at their father's house.

What has this got to do with the Sims? After all, in the first game there are no grown-up relatives, since children never grow up. In the second game, the character database keeps track of how everyone is related, and flirting is not an option when you're close family. Actually I don't know if it's an option even if you are remote family; I don't have enough generations to test that out. (You can flirt with in- laws, but you can also treat them as family. I was pretty surprised when Nemo Vrimoen went over and kissed his wife's cousin, but according to both of them it was a "family kiss" so no romance involved.)

Well, what happens if you accidentally forget who you are, and everyone else too? This scenario happened to the second of the Vrimoen boys, Nathaniel. In a bad case of amnesia, he forgot all his friends and family, and with his new hairstyle that didn't cover his eyes, nobody recognized him. The story behind this is of course a bit more complicated.

***

Nathaniel is the popularity hunter of the Vrimoen family. He had his hands full when he lived at home as a teen, taking care of the younger twins and doing his homework, so there was little time for friends and love. As soon as he was old enough, he moved out and got his own place. He started to build his popularity with a vengeance, talking to new people every day and making friends and best friends and eventually falling in love with Amber. Almost every night was party night at the Vrimoen Jr residency. It was THE place for people to meet. Amber was starting to sleep over at his place, and they were ready to get engaged and marry.

Then things started to go wrong. While he was talking on the phone, he would suddenly see a vision of the person he was talking to, and hear the phone ring. Then suddenly he stood without the phone, and with no memory of the rest of the phone call. This was kinda unnerving, since he used the phone a lot to keep in touch with his many friends. But it got worse. Some days later, he sat down in the sofa with a cup of coffee. Suddenly he stood on the floor, with no coffee and just as tired as before. He tried again, and again, but it happened every time. He moved the coffee machine and the sofa, he bought a new sofa, but nothing helped. Next place it happened was while eating, but at least the food did not disappear, so he could continue the meal. Finally it started to happen while he was chatting with people. Suddenly he was just standing there, as if he had not been talking to anyone at all. One day he moved away, and when he came back, it was as a stranger.

***

What REALLY happened was my first encounter with the "jump bug". According to the Sims2 help site, this happens if you make more memories than the game was dimensioned for, typically because you turn aging off or use Elixir of Life a lot. The memory buffer overflows and overwrites something else, it seems. Until a patch comes out, they recommend that you pack the family to a file, delete the original, and unpack it again. This will compress away some of the extra memories. Fool as I am, I took their advice. The program informed me that the packaging process would delete all their connections to friends and families, but I assumed that they would be restored when I unpacked it. Boy was I wrong. All his friends are gone. The family tree is still visible, but evidently not to him, or to his family, because there are no longer any family actions and family members no longer have family status in the friends list. But, conversely, he can now flirt with his twin sister. (They hated each other as children, but grew much closer during their teen years.) So ... if you desperately need Sim twincest, this is the way to go. I think I'll try Amber again, though.