My Sims playing has been going okay. I have tried to be careful about not playing too much, though I do think I’ve been losing a bit of sleep lately and I have a lot on my plate with work right now, so I will try to cut back on my play in the coming week. Just as well– I think I’m on the verge of getting a bit bored with it again already. No question, there are differences with this latest version of the Sims, as I list below here. But at the same time, the game isn’t that much difference from the old game, either.
A couple of highlights/observations from recent play:
* I created a character I named “Stevie Honest,” with the goal/plan of trying to play “honest” in the sense of not just getting a big pile of money and doing whatever I want. I cheated big time with my first family creation, the “Kaching” family (and the reason why I called them that is because that’s what you type to get more money in the cheat code, “Kaching”). Besides the fact that it got kind of boring to have everything, the elaborate house I built and all the stuff I put into it slowed down game-play A LOT.
* Which again speaks to the hardware requirements of the game. If you “keep it simple” in terms of what you build and how many Sims you keep in play, I suppose the minimum requirements are enough. But I certainly wish I had a much more beefy system than I’ve got.
* This version of the game asks you to create different sorts of aspirations for your Sims, aspirations that significantly influence their motivations, what they do for work, etc. I made Stevie Honest’s aspiration to be a “knowledge seeker” type (seemed appropriate), and he embarked on a medical career. Frankly, he has climbed the ranks pretty easily, it seems to me. Or at least it seems easier than the original Sims game.
* Stevie Honest met, fell in love with, got engaged, and ultimately married to this Sim named Nina. It all seemed to happen quite easily… a bit too easily, in fact. Well, after Stevie and Nina moved in together, I think I figured out why it was so easily. Nina, whose aspiration is to be a “rommance seeker” type, is a bit of a nympho. While Stevie’s aspirations include goals like “gain another mechanical knowledge point” and “stargaze with a telescope,” Nina’s aspirations are things like “make out with three different Sims,” “WooHoo (that is, have sex) with three different Sims,” and “WooHoo in a public place.” She wasn’t all that crazy about getting married (I guess that cuts into the sex for her), and as far as I can gather from what limited experimentation I’ve done so far, she’ll have sex with anyone who is willing to have sex with her. I guess this is a computer game developer’s definition of “romantic.”
As an aside, I think my next Sim experiment will be to put a bunch of roommates together in the same house who all aspire either to be “romantic” (like Nina) or to be “friendly” (which I think means have parties and stuff), and see what happens. I predict a Sim-orgy.
* At this point, I’m sort of curious to playing this group out to the “next generation.” In theory, Stevie and Nina are going to have a baby one of these days, and I assume that eventually, Stevie and Nina are going to die. There are ways to prevent that– there are “magic formulas” and things that your Sims can take to extend life– but actually, I’m kind of curious to see what happens if they just die, especially if they leave offspring behind. Can the children, hopefully old enough, inherit money and property? Can Sims have grandchildren? We’ll see.