The Sims 2 - Gaming Nirvana

Games
41

I figure the best way to deal with bugs and design woozles is to just roll with them.

For instance, I got into a bug situation where my two sims (Adam and Eve Fundy) had just had twins, but Eve was stuck trying to get Daniel out of his crib. (I nicknamed the crib “The Lion’s Den”)

Nothing worked. Eve would NOT move and that kid was STUCK.

So I just let everybody go. Eve finally died of a burst bladder and starvation while child protection services came and took both twins away.

Adam was left to mourn over two empty cribs and an urn. I figured, whatever, this is just an opportunity for Adam to get remarried. He’s remarried now and he and his second wife have recently reached senior level. Their daughter Violet just became an adult. All’s well that ends well.

The only thing that bugs me is that the family tree still shows those two kids but I can’t access them in any way.

42

Hrm. I’ll give that a try, but I’m not entirely sure it’ll work. My telescope was taken once by the Repo Man and my Sim still had constant aspirations to stargaze.

Not me. I wanted to do specific things with the game (specifically, earn the cash to build a cool house and buy fun stuff), which were made really hard when he had the kid. I could have let the kid die, but that thought made me uneasy and would have had far-reaching negative effects on my sim. It was easier to fix the problem by reloading.

I tried “rolling with it” for a bit, hiring a nanny, but the baby still changed the game mechanics quite a bit --just as I would expect, having recently had a kid in real life. But after a while I started finding the game more frustrating than fun. And that’s no good.

I suppose this highlights the tension between the “open ended sand box” and “go along in story mode” styles of play that seem to be trying to co-inhabit this game. Sims’ aging is another example. I just wish I knew what was coming up so that I could have taken steps to avoid it without having to lose so much time by reloading.

43

I still can’t figure out how to access the cheat keys.

I hit Ctrl-Shift-C and I don’t see any console. Is there some special way I have to run the game or something in order to access that?

44

LOL, I think I just got my answer on their forum - I use CursorXP which uses Ctrl-Shift-C to toggle its cursor on or off. Damn Stardock software! ;)

45

I’ve been having a great time with this so far. I’m doing the Romance Aspirations, which gives you tasks like “have five girlfriends at once” and “make out with three Sims on the same day”.

The fears are pretty funny, too. On any given day you’re likely to be afraid of (a) your girlfriend dying and (b) getting engaged to her.

I’ve only just hit my first roadblock now as I finally tired of the lothario life and decided to invite one of my chickadees to move in with me. Now I’m in charge of both Sims and I feel like my gaming workload and suddenly doubled (because it has, I suppose.) I have enough trouble taking care of one Sim, how am I supposed to manage two?

Plus, now that this girl has moved in, I find myself missing all my other girlfriends. Just like real life.

46

The workload for managing a whole family of Sims can really multiply. My wife was having a little trouble with her family of two - including a pregnant wife. Then she had twins - the family had a serious meltdown. Not sure if she ever got them toilet trained.

It won’t install on my laptop, sadly, so I’m fighting for gametime with the missus on her machine. Very disappointing.

Troy

47

I started out my household with two roommates, and while it was rough to manage at first, it’s gotten easier with time.

I think the real key to the game is keeping your Sims feeling nice and clean - mostly because bladder and hygiene seem to be the fastest-draining bars. I haven’t had too much trouble with hunger; usually whoever’s less needy at the moment cooks, and the other person goes to the toilet and shower or whatever. Plus, I often have my Sims take seconds from the same meal. Fun was troublesome until I got them a game console and set them to multiplayer. Environment likewise until I started putting up paintings and decorations in response, and they perked right up.

48

Yep. My plan has been to start with a single guy and max out his career and skills. This means that he’s making money hand over fist, which has already allowed me to buy all the good furniture/etc. to keep him happy. And once I max out all the skills I can “retire” him and let him go on auto-pilot full time. I can then see another aspect of the game by focussing my attention fully on his soon-to-be new wife and baby. It should even be fun to watch my original sim do stuff on auto pilot that I wouldn’t normally have him do.

I’ll probably be at that point by the time I have to tear myself away to go to bed tonight. This game really has its claws into me. I got up at five A.M. this morning just so I could fit in an hour of playtime before getting ready for work (much like my sim often does).

49

Continuing my netless exodus (that survey yahoo did is right, you do go stir crazy) I treated myself to a copy of the Sims2.

Must admit I am impressed so far. Do still have a tendency to try and micromanage everything, but my original strategy with the sims still seems to work fine and dandy. Namely playing with a two sim household and essentially ignoring the worker who brings in the readies unless they need skills/needs improving, and using the housewife/husband to make the friends etc. Not sure if unplanned pregnancies still happen, but I can forsee healthcare workers turning up sharpish if infanticide isn’t a viable option.

Do agree within the little time I’ve actually spent playing with it so far that a lot of the social interaction is still pretty basic, but there does at least seem to be a bit less success in just continuing to plug at a conversation with someone until you make friends. I’ve certainly encountered a few people who just do not get on at all with my pudgy sim (experiment 1. How fat can I get a sim, and will it ever repulse her partner?) and cannot hold a conversation for more than a couple of seconds before the minus signs start appearing. Its just a shame that inevitably all her mood wheels (or whatever they are called) insists that she makes friends with them.

50

I simply love this game, Will Wright is a genius. The first time I played it for eleven hours nonstop forgetting about my need to eat and sleep (I started to play it at 1AM and finished at midday).

I also agree on the fact that using a cheat is, indeed, cheating. The game is built and balanced to give you all the tools you need. At the beginning I felt the time passing too fast and the various “phases” too short but after playing for more hours I figured out that the balance is perfect. The elixirs of life provide like a “goal” that is keeping your sims alive (well, till you feel so). Erasing this with a cheat means that you are “jumping” a part of the gameplay. The possibility to tweak the pace of the time passing would as well ruin completely the precise balance of the game.

My gripes are mostly against the engine. I hate the fact that options like the resolution don’t save and I have to reset them at each boot (just me or happen to everyone?). The engine moves quite good on my old geforce 3 at max detail but the game progressively lags and no matter what I set, the textures and models start to adjust dynamically till the game becomes ugly. It also lags more than right at the start with the full detail. I’m starting to get leak problems with every game and I’m wondering what’s wrong with my system even if I suspect a bug in the nvidia drivers that will never get solved (but the new pc is nearly ready in the next room with Athlon 64 3500+ and Geforce 6800 GT).

51

OMG I’ve seen that!! I was using it to improve my logic, and suddenly he comes storming over (My Sim hadn’t met him before), starts shouting then runs in through the house and out the front door. I was wondering what was gonig on.[/quote]

Just a note on the Mortimer-telescope thing (in case you all haven’t figured it out already)…Oh, and…

SPOILERS!!! (whatever)

Bella Goth had been cheating on Mort with Don Lothario. The night of her disappearance, she had gone to Lothario’s and he painted her portrait. After which, he witnessed her abduction by aliens. Lothario never told Mort on account of his guilt, and has never come forward as the artist of the painting (which can be bought for your home). Bella can now be seen homeless and memory-less on the streets of Strangeville. Somehow the Caliente sisters work into this, but I’m not fully sure how…though I know they know about Lothario and Bella.

-AM Urbanek

52

Your resolution should save between sessions. The only reason it wouldn’t save is if you crash or terminate the game’s process instead of exiting. The options aren’t written out until the game is exited, so it’s possible that what looks like a clean exit of the game for you actually results in a crash before the game finishes quitting. Your mentioning of problems with the GF3 leads me to believe that might be the problem.

Oh, you can also add -r1280x1024 (or whatever resolution you prefer) to the command line in your shortcut to force the resolution you want, regardless of what happens to your options files.

53

No, I played for eleven hours without exiting and with no problem so it’s not a matter of crashing. When I exit I simply save and then choose the option to quit.

And noone knows how to disable the dynamical load and have the options to not adapt to the performance?

P.S.
The command line also doesn’t work, there’s something in the game that overrides whatever I choose.

54

** SPOILERS **

I’ve played another 30 hours or so. I’m on my third sim (Romance, Fortune, and now Knowledge) and over the last 10-15 hours of play I’ve accumulated a few bugs, quirks, and commentary…

[size=5]Quirks/Issues:[/size]

The Sims 2 has a numerical display for the status of relationships, between -100 for intense hate and 100 for intense love. If I phone a lover who has a near 100 rating (indicating intense love) who the last 5 times she’s come over we’ve quickly proceeded to bed (and WooHoo), why would she ask if she can bring a friend over? And why could that friend be a child? Jeez, sure enough, WooHoo can indeed be engaged with a child in the same room 2 feet away from the bed. Creepier yet, that same child calls me on the phone once a day, every day. Once again, in a game where relationships are so important, why is the social modeling so shallow? I’ve had lovers bring their other lovers over… and this is in a game without the possibility of a threesome. The whole “bring a friend” really needs to be re-thought.

Burglars may have the comfort of knowing they get to enter into fisticuffs with a single cop in a worse-case scenario, but why do they have to be stupid? They always enter in the front door. This may be a factor of the engine.

More of the shallow social modeling: I asked a married woman to move in with me. Since her ratings with me were high, she said yes despite her ratings with her husband at 100. She moves in with me. A week passes. Her husband comes walking down the street, just like all the other passer-bys do. He walks by, just like all the other passers-bys do. He never calls on the phone. She never calls him. Finally I decide I want to get engaged with her, so I have her call him over to try to speed up the lowering of his relationship with her and enable an engagement to me. After living with me for three weeks and never seeing him, and after several insults, she still can’t break up with him. So another week, a call back, she “divorces” him (without a lawyer!) and we get hitched.
Also… WTF. She brings $600 or so dollars with her when she moves in, but she gets NOTHING in the “divorce”. Odder yet, when she moved in, before the divorce, I was given the option to bring over her two children!

I love Omelettes, Chili Con Carne, and Pork Chops. A casual attempt to min-max, nothing scientific. I love them so much that’s mostly what I eat. I could probably get away with eating nothing else. I could probably get away with eating nothing but Pork Chops. I wonder what would happen in traditional reality if I ate nothing but Pork Chops. Is this game called “The Sims”? Maybe a little code giving health problems for a lack of a balanced diet is a good idea.

As I previously said, Sims have problems hearing through walls (its actually a problem of social attention). I thought I’d exploit this. I have a good wife, but hey, I’m a guy playing a game with no repercussions (especially with the reload function), so I thought an affair is in order. Cooler yet, my plan is to have sex while the wife is home and awake. So I go into Buy Mode and move the bed outside the house onto the front lawn. Its the middle of the night, no passers-by to bother us (not that they would anyway). I call my lover over, meet her outside the home, and we proceed. The wife insta-discovers us and that’s that. Its obvious that its not a matter of hearing or seeing, the game is coded to stop affairs at home with an awake spouse.
Along these lines, all “relationship ratings” are actually how the other Sim feels about you. You can do anything, cheat however many times with however many women, or anything else, and your Sim will in no way change how he feels about anyone who is not the sim he’s currently with. Shallow Social Modeling. Guilt, meet Will Wright. Will Wright, meet Guilt.

Why can’t Sims own cars? Its silly to have to call a Taxi to go anywhere. I guess because the only functional locations are the public lots… not much of a point to a car. Its amusing though that YOUR Sim never has to take his turn at the carpool. I can just imagine the sarcastic words of the other driver: “Sir, your CARPOOL is here once again. Please step in.”

The Psychic Stop: Lets say I’m downloading the bladder’s contents and have two other things in my activity queue. I see a passer-by walking and want to talk to him. I select the “Greet George” option, which is now fourth in my activity queue. George STOPS immediately when I put the activity in the queue. The only logical explanation? All Sims have PSYCHIC POWERS. All are psychically linked to my activity queue. Did I mention something about the social modeling being shallow?

It took me a while to realize this, but all men and women have the same bodies, within their respective body types (fit, average, and unfit). Their bodies look somewhat different depending on the clothes. There is no height differential and no other differential besides age bracket, gender, and fitness bracket. Only the faces and heads are highly customized.
Along these lines, women are built like the proverbial “brick shithouse”. I’ve never seen an “unfit” Sim woman, but given the male equivalent they are probably nasty. Even the “average” Sim woman has a better body than probably 98% of traditional young women, and the “fit” Sim woman has a better body than at least 99.9%. If this is really “The Sims” then please send me to Will Wright’s world right now. Male bodies are more realistic but are still substantially better than the traditional equivalents, on average.

[size=5]Bugs:[/size]

On phonecalls, the voice from the other end of the phone continues for several minutes after hanging up. This doesn’t always happen but its fairly common. I normally play at High Speed (the middle of three speed settings).

Sims do not prioritize food cooking in the oven correctly. If ANYTHING is in their queue, they completely forget about the oven food. I can’t believe this bug got past testers. There is even a timer that goes off, which is ignored by the Sims (except when nothing is in the activity queue).

Sims low in Creativity skill have the “Practice Painting” option to them when I click on a canvas. When that activity is selected, it creates a grammatical bug for a higher Creative sim in the same household who (at any later time) has the Paint activity selected. While the Sim in fact Paints, it displays as “Practice Painting” in the activity queue.

Another grammatical bug, which no spell checker should have left unsettled: In the Medicine Career Tract, one job is “General Practioner”. Its supposed to be “General Practitioner”.

55

The game doesn’t model reality 100% accurately? Time for a recall! I can’t believe they thought they could get away with this shit!

P.S. You’re fucking nuts.

56

Your first “Koontz, WTF?!” post is special, treasure the memory always.

57

That post was truly epic. My Kootzometer is definitely pegged high. (I believe that I can use calamine lotion to take care of the associated itching).

The only bitch I have with the Sims 2 is that it corrupted my house on an exit save. There was then like this totally hosed stairway that once led to my front door. In order to fix it, I literally had to build a new deck and move the door to get people out the damn house. And a nearby couch was also corrupted. Weird sim behavior (like zooming around the house in a sitting position) resulted. Not so good.

The whole deck/stair/path/foundation thing can get a little wonky, too, with each of them seeming to cause the ground to “sink” and become unusable for paths. I get lots of WTF moments when trying to path my door to the sidewalk.

–scharmers

58

Koontz= Nice reply, Thanks. I have a different feeling about it, but I’ll give you the fact that you played it and gave a fun discription.

Personally, I don’t know how to explain it, but I’m playing S2 and feeling that ‘All Weekend Long’ feeling I got when I finally got into the ‘Planescape:Torment’ mood. Hard to compare them yeah, but that feeling of time is pretty scarily similar.

Less micromanagement + more visually appealing = just what I thought Sims1 was missing.

Is it so wrong?!?! :)

Just a few thoughts…

It seems like Sims are pretty effected by Walls and line of sight, so the WooHoo and Bathroom stuff seems a little better portrayed IMHO. I once had a party with ALL my girlie friends and made out with one in particular. The only one to get pissed was the one who jotted into sight at an in-oportune moment.

I could’ve sworn I got robbed from the backdoor before I put my fence up. And funnily enough from the 3 times I’ve been attempted on, one time my cop who came to my rescue got her ass kicked. And from that my sims fears relied heavily on getting robbed again, much more so than when the robbers got nabbed.

Social aspects I can kinda agree with. In my experience once you build up ‘love’, just invite them over and ‘hug’ kiss’ ‘hug’ kiss’, etc… till you’re short term is back in the black and your long term is 70+. It may be a fluke, but with the 7 or so girlies I’m in love with, keeping up the romance is pretty ‘samey’. Although I guess once you become invested in a relashionship (sp?! sorry, I’m drinking), it ( in a choose your own adventure style) can become more than that, thanks to your involvement. I thought friendships were pretty weak until I got (maybe spoiler) abducted by an alien and had a beautiful alien baby girl from it. I’ve never felt an overwhelming need to get a friendship up to 100 before that. I feel silly admitting this, but that baby girl meant more to me than Imoen, EASILY :)

Just to cut a long story short, S2 is lacking on technical terms ( not VERY buggy, but it’ll test your patience ) but long on emotional attachment. I feel silly loving this game, but I love feeling silly after this game.

:)

59

Probably because those meals are the most satisfying that your sim knows how to make. Smart AI from a (non) micromanagement point of view, less so from a role-playing point.

The Psychic Stop: Lets say I’m downloading the bladder’s contents and have two other things in my activity queue. I see a passer-by walking and want to talk to him. I select the “Greet George” option, which is now fourth in my activity queue. George STOPS immediately when I put the activity in the queue.

It’s to make the game easier (as in less frustraing) to play. I can easily imagine playtesters going through early prototypes and suggesting something like this.

It took me a while to realize this, but all men and women have the same bodies, within their respective body types (fit, average, and unfit).

Yeah, I was disappointed by this as well. I’d like to have short sims, tall sims, lanky sims, pudgy sims, etc. My guess is that they left out height variations because that’s often the only way to tell a teen from an adult sim. (Even still, anyone else wonder where the flirtatious options for Juliette in Veronaville were before realizing she was a teenager?) Still, I’d have liked to have seen half the variations in body shape that you can have with faces.

Yeah, it’s way too easy to make friends/lovers. Just queue up a bunch of social actions and you can have 100/100 in 2 or 3 days. And if your sim has the family or romance aspirations, it’s absurdly easy to get to platinum mood by doing the same thing.

I’ve been playing the game for a week now and I think I’ve hit a wall in terms of how much I’m going to enjoy it long-term. I’ll probably write up a post explaining why tomorrow.

60

Every single one of these was noted by testers. Just because it’s noticed, doesn’t mean it gets fixed.

Re: Body types, specifically height variation. There are a shitload of animations in the game as it is. For every new body type, all of the animations would have to be tweaked. In some cases, it would just be a modification of an existing animation across all body types, but the majority would have to be done separately. Repeat for each new body type.