The Sims 2 is harder than real life. Discuss.
2007-10-08
I bought Sims 2 on Saturday. Wow...
Once upon a time I had The Sims. Still do, in fact. It was an amazing game, but when the first expansion came out I couldn't install it on my machine (nor my next two). I got annoyed with the missing expansion, frustrated with the game as a whole and in my disillusionment stopped playing it because it didn't have all the neat new features. Besides that, I was annoyed with the whole expansion thing, mainly because I was getting behind on them.
I've missed it though. An advert for the new Wii Sims game tempted me (until I found out that it's mainly building stuff for them, rather than actually running their lives), so I looked up the available Sims games and decided that despite its age, Sims 2 was my best bet. So I wandered into town, got the deluxe edition (core + Nightlife), University, and a cheap preowned copy of the business one.
It's brilliant. Really it is. I mean absolutely amazing.
For those who don't know, you have these little virtual people. They have Needs represented by little bars [Comfort, Energy, Hygiene, Bladder, Environment, Fun, Social, Hunger]: keep the needs fulfilled in order to keep the Sim happy. You get them to find a job from the paper (or on the internet if they have a computer), and they go to work and bring home money. The jobs come in career tracks; to get promoted a Sim must go to work in a consistently good mood, train up particular skills [Creativity, Logic, etc.] and have enough family friends.
In the first game, Sims didn't really age. Adults could have babies (although this was always in the form of the adoption agency ringing and asking if they wanted one) but after a few days of being stuck in a crib in the corner, the baby would become a child. Children were stuck that way forever, like the Simpsons. They'd occasionally get some cash from their grandparents if they did well at school, but mainly they made no contribution to the house.
Now Sims have a number of age categories. A baby becomes a toddler after a few days, a toddler turns into a child, then a teen, then an adult. After about four weeks, the adult becomes an elder, then dies after an amount of time based on how happy their life has been. The University expansion adds an optional Young Adult stage: it gets inserted when you send a teen to college.
A bigger change is the Aspirations. Each Sims has a general aspiration [Knowledge, Family, Fortune, Popularity, etc.] and a specific life goal. Each day they randomly get four (or more) Wants and three Fears, which when fulfilled will affect their aspiration meter (positively or negatively, respectively). Keep the aspiration bar high and the Sim will do well at work and school even if their Mood is not so good.
The aspirations give a touch more structure to the game. It's still a sandbox, but rather than setting your own goals for the Sims, they now have them built in. This may or may not be to your taste: I love it. I love trying to work toward the lifetime goals; although many Sims want to get to the top of their preferred career track, others I've seen wanted to get three children through college, to have six grandchildren, or to maximise all the skills.
It's not as easy as it sounds. The Sims aren't so smart and generally won't do the right things at the right time if you leave them to their own devices, but unless you practice pausing the game all the time you'll find that even running it at its slowest speed it becomes quite difficult to direct more than two or three of them.
My first attempt, I went into the character generator and made a couple: characters designed to go well together and make a nice household. I gave them a toddler, and started the game.
Buying and outfitting a house with one family's starting funds is not easy. I initially had the idea of getting the father a job on the science career path (his lifetime goal was to be a Mad Scientist) and letting his wife stay at home, but I quickly found that rather than making friends and learning skills my Sims were spending all their time fulfilling their needs and generally living on a shoestring because the stuff in their house was junk and they couldn't afford better. They were aiming for a large family (because Mum wanted to see three of her children graduate) but it was really straining the cash.
Until I ran out of money and Mum starved to death. I quit without saving, went back to the last save, but on a second attempt I got the children taken away by social workers because their performance at school was so bad.
One of the other changes is that the game now has days of the week. Children and many adults get weekends off (other adults have days off at other times of the week), and on the adults' days off you receive no money. It's surprisingly easy to starve the family if you run out of groceries on a Friday, have no money for more and can't really spare anything to sell off.
Having learned a few lessons from that, I picked a singleton from the 'bin' of pregenerated families. I set her up in a house to suit her and got her a job. She had a family aspiration (she wanted to have 6 grandchildren) so I found her a man, had her court him and got him to marry her and move in. He brought with him the starting funds from his own household (ka-ching!) and was already close to the top of the business career track, so they upgraded everything and started trying for children.
Yes, they can now have their very own biological offspring. It took me a while to work out how (fnar fnar) but you can get them to 'try for a baby' (which has the same hiding-under-moving-bedclothes animation as the action called 'woohoo'). They can still adopt though, and it remains to be seen whether my aspiring grandmother gets credit for her daughter adopting: I'm hoping so since a dearth of decent men at university encouraged her to be a lesbian.
All goes well for that family, who now have a grown-up daughter living on another lot with her life partner, a son about to turn teen and a younger daughter. And because of the game's crazy time-keeping, Mum has managed to keep her job in military intelligence.
A few quick points of interest, tips, and other stuff to demonstrate the craziness of the game, and the way it may be cunningly similar to real life:
Once upon a time I had The Sims. Still do, in fact. It was an amazing game, but when the first expansion came out I couldn't install it on my machine (nor my next two). I got annoyed with the missing expansion, frustrated with the game as a whole and in my disillusionment stopped playing it because it didn't have all the neat new features. Besides that, I was annoyed with the whole expansion thing, mainly because I was getting behind on them.
I've missed it though. An advert for the new Wii Sims game tempted me (until I found out that it's mainly building stuff for them, rather than actually running their lives), so I looked up the available Sims games and decided that despite its age, Sims 2 was my best bet. So I wandered into town, got the deluxe edition (core + Nightlife), University, and a cheap preowned copy of the business one.
It's brilliant. Really it is. I mean absolutely amazing.
For those who don't know, you have these little virtual people. They have Needs represented by little bars [Comfort, Energy, Hygiene, Bladder, Environment, Fun, Social, Hunger]: keep the needs fulfilled in order to keep the Sim happy. You get them to find a job from the paper (or on the internet if they have a computer), and they go to work and bring home money. The jobs come in career tracks; to get promoted a Sim must go to work in a consistently good mood, train up particular skills [Creativity, Logic, etc.] and have enough family friends.
In the first game, Sims didn't really age. Adults could have babies (although this was always in the form of the adoption agency ringing and asking if they wanted one) but after a few days of being stuck in a crib in the corner, the baby would become a child. Children were stuck that way forever, like the Simpsons. They'd occasionally get some cash from their grandparents if they did well at school, but mainly they made no contribution to the house.
Now Sims have a number of age categories. A baby becomes a toddler after a few days, a toddler turns into a child, then a teen, then an adult. After about four weeks, the adult becomes an elder, then dies after an amount of time based on how happy their life has been. The University expansion adds an optional Young Adult stage: it gets inserted when you send a teen to college.
A bigger change is the Aspirations. Each Sims has a general aspiration [Knowledge, Family, Fortune, Popularity, etc.] and a specific life goal. Each day they randomly get four (or more) Wants and three Fears, which when fulfilled will affect their aspiration meter (positively or negatively, respectively). Keep the aspiration bar high and the Sim will do well at work and school even if their Mood is not so good.
The aspirations give a touch more structure to the game. It's still a sandbox, but rather than setting your own goals for the Sims, they now have them built in. This may or may not be to your taste: I love it. I love trying to work toward the lifetime goals; although many Sims want to get to the top of their preferred career track, others I've seen wanted to get three children through college, to have six grandchildren, or to maximise all the skills.
It's not as easy as it sounds. The Sims aren't so smart and generally won't do the right things at the right time if you leave them to their own devices, but unless you practice pausing the game all the time you'll find that even running it at its slowest speed it becomes quite difficult to direct more than two or three of them.
My first attempt, I went into the character generator and made a couple: characters designed to go well together and make a nice household. I gave them a toddler, and started the game.
Buying and outfitting a house with one family's starting funds is not easy. I initially had the idea of getting the father a job on the science career path (his lifetime goal was to be a Mad Scientist) and letting his wife stay at home, but I quickly found that rather than making friends and learning skills my Sims were spending all their time fulfilling their needs and generally living on a shoestring because the stuff in their house was junk and they couldn't afford better. They were aiming for a large family (because Mum wanted to see three of her children graduate) but it was really straining the cash.
Until I ran out of money and Mum starved to death. I quit without saving, went back to the last save, but on a second attempt I got the children taken away by social workers because their performance at school was so bad.
One of the other changes is that the game now has days of the week. Children and many adults get weekends off (other adults have days off at other times of the week), and on the adults' days off you receive no money. It's surprisingly easy to starve the family if you run out of groceries on a Friday, have no money for more and can't really spare anything to sell off.
Having learned a few lessons from that, I picked a singleton from the 'bin' of pregenerated families. I set her up in a house to suit her and got her a job. She had a family aspiration (she wanted to have 6 grandchildren) so I found her a man, had her court him and got him to marry her and move in. He brought with him the starting funds from his own household (ka-ching!) and was already close to the top of the business career track, so they upgraded everything and started trying for children.
Yes, they can now have their very own biological offspring. It took me a while to work out how (fnar fnar) but you can get them to 'try for a baby' (which has the same hiding-under-moving-bedclothes animation as the action called 'woohoo'). They can still adopt though, and it remains to be seen whether my aspiring grandmother gets credit for her daughter adopting: I'm hoping so since a dearth of decent men at university encouraged her to be a lesbian.
All goes well for that family, who now have a grown-up daughter living on another lot with her life partner, a son about to turn teen and a younger daughter. And because of the game's crazy time-keeping, Mum has managed to keep her job in military intelligence.
A few quick points of interest, tips, and other stuff to demonstrate the craziness of the game, and the way it may be cunningly similar to real life:
- Get the best bed you can afford, otherwise your Sims won't fulfill their Energy need quick enough, and they'll be tired all the time.
- Sims will go out and get the mail from their mailbox; it's always a bill. They'll put it down somewhere, on a table if there's one handy, otherwise on the floor (sometimes out by the mailbox). Sims will never pay a bill on their own so you've got to keep an eye out for them, or they'll go unpaid and the repo-man will come.
Children do exactly the same with their homework... - Never underestimate the value of 'woohoo'. It's good for their relationship, it fulfils their Social need and is good Fun, and because they invariably fall asleep together afterwards it's good for Comfort and Energy (provided they don't try for a quickie before work).
- University is a toss-up between getting good grades and having friends. In order to get enough term credit, each semester must be a carefully regimented cycle of getting all the Sim's needs as high as they'll go then pushing them down again by forcing her to study long and hard. Although fulfilling Social and Fun needs are a necessary part of this, there's no time for making friends.
Although saying that, you can persuade other people to do the work. Plus, as above, get the best bed. It helps that if you're in a dormitory the game will let you sell off everyone else's stuff! - The Wants and Fears often come in pairs: he wants to kiss his wife but he's afraid she'll turn him away, that sort of thing. At one stage I had a Sim who wanted to have a baby, but was afraid of having a baby: while this makes perfect sense in a real-world want/fear combination, the in-game fears are more like want-nots and the game effect of having both was that she got a smaller nett reward for having the baby.
- Provided you don't take it too seriously, the Wants and Fears mechanic actually represents real people and some real-life issues quite nicely. It's easy to keep the aspiration meters of a couple high, because they normally want to spend time together and interact. When they have a child, they start splitting their available Wants between the baby and each other; graduate Sims actually have an edge here, because those that go through college get additional Want slots unlocked. Interestingly, having twice had families with Mum having Family aspiration and Dad aspiring to Knowledge, as soon as the child hit school the parents diverged drastically: Mum with things like 'I want to talk to my daughter', 'I want to play with my daughter' and Dad with 'I want my daughter to get a good report card', etc.
- A Sim family cannot do without a maid. You can hire one with a single phone-call, and even if you have a house of compulsive tidy types the time they'll spend cleaning would be better spent making friends, practising skills and staying happy. If you don't have Sims inclined to do the cleaning themselves then you have to waste your own effort telling them to do it, which is even more reason.
A nanny can be helpful if both parents work, but she generally just lounges around and plays with your stuff.
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