Friday 28 October 2005

Actually I arranged for this to happen to my Sim, as I wanted him to be the founding father of a really unusual community. Luckily he was great friends with his old Professor from college, and she agreed to move in with him as soon as she retired. She has spent her old age taking care of the half alien Allan, while his father has been earning their daily bread. (At night he is earning the lady's loyalty in a different way. She is a romance Sim, it turned out.) Allan is now a teenager and happily in love with Tosha Go, the blonde pigtailed sweetie. I cannot think of a better mother for the green tribe. Definitely a keeper.

Be that as it may, I have really come to appreciate the inventory feature of Nightlife. It may indeed be worth buying the expansion just for that, if your Sims move around a lot. And mine have not just moved from a smaller lot to a larger, which is the typical case. They have also moved from one computer to the next and the next again.

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I started up installing Nightlife on my living room computer, which has an inferior graphics card but good enough for test runs. It also runs the Norwegian version of Sims2, so I got the chance to look at the new translations. But after a while I started to fret over the slow reaction of the game, and when I got my multimedia portable back from work I moved the neighborhood over there. Luckily this was the latest neighborhood I had created and had number 6, higher than any of the existing neighborhoods. If that had not been the case, I would have had a problem, for the number of the neighborhood is repeated in each file within that folder. Renaming them all might or might not help, I haven't tried, but it would be quite a bit of work in Windows. Alternatively I could move away the original folder with the same name. Mixing the two would be a recipe for disaster.

The game ran at a decent clip on the portable when all the graphic options were turned to a minimum. This lasted for some time, but when Allan became a teenager he started to want a new cellphone each day. At first I thought this was just another case of humorous realism, but it turned out to be one of several bugs in Nightlife. There is a patch out which fixes them all, some of them rarer but potentially more devastating. So I downloaded the patch and ran it. This solved the cellphone mania. Unfortunately the game speed is now unacceptable even at minimum graphics. In all fairness, the handbook warns that laptops are not supported, no matter which graphics chipset they have. But still, it was a letdown since it had worked before. So I eventually caved in and installed Nightlife on my bedroom computer, which is my main gaming machine and has by far the better video card.

But how long was Adam in Paris? When I loaded the happy household, they were all frozen. No matter the game speed, time did not move. (No, I am not an idiot, I toggled pause on and off repeatedly.) Clearly this was some side effect of moving them around. I tried to convince the system by playing another neighborhood first. (It worked flawlessly.) I visited the university, I visited Downtown (the new area added in Nightlife). I created a new Sim and moved her into their old home. (Rabeate Vrimoen, presumably a far descendant of Nanna and Norman Vrimoen who figured in my early Sims2 entries in September/October last year. Popularity Sim, wearing formal clothes for everyday and loving karaoke.) In retrospect I guess I ought to have moved her in with the Bergs too, but in the end I loaded the furniture and rewards in their inventories and moved them out, then moved them back in. This unfroze them (and cleaned out the various friends who had gathered on their property, including one tombstone, during the move from computer to computer).

If this had been prior to Nightlife, they would have lost all their rewards and the furniture would have sold for depreciated value depending on how long they had owned it. Buying new would have been more than they could afford, so they would have had to start again with cheaper stuff and less of it. As it was, they only lost a couple things – for some reason the stereo refused to load into any inventory, and Allan's high school homework too. Thanks to Nightlife they kept their stuff. Of course, if not for Nightlife they might not have had to move to a new computer in the first instance. Oh well.

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In conclusion, I am gradually warming to the expansion pack. There are some new and nifty things, and the inventory is priceless. Also if you have Romance Sims or if you are used to having a car around, you should probably get this one. On the other hand, if your computer is barely able to run the earlier versions, stay clear of this one till you can afford a better video card. Or at the very least stay clear of the patch.