Ambitious

I do have lots of pictures I can post to get you up to date on where I’m currently playing in the Sunset Valley neighborhood, but I’m going to take a break for a moment to talk about the new expansion pack, Ambitions. I was way late with World Adventures and actually only just got it LAST WEEK (along with High-End Loft Stuff, all three are my anniversary present from my husband). But I had pre-ordered Ambitions, so I got it the day of release and have been playing the last couple of nights.

I thought World Adventures was okay. Love the scenery in the foreign neighborhoods, so pretty! The adventures are okay, it gives something to do and a break from just going to work/school. I sent one of the Goth daughters on a “study abroad semester” trip (not actually part of the game, just what I called it in my head) to China during high school (the Goths need something to do with all the money they have!) but I was disappointed to find out that the other family members were in exactly the same positions and actions when she returned as they were when she left. I had hoped time would pass for them while she was gone so it could actually be like she was gone for this certain amount of time. But anyway.

Ambitions, however, I am really enjoying! While I wait for my critical mods to be updated for the new expansion, I created a new Sim in the new hood, Twinbrook, to play around and try out the new features.

This is Sasha Mooring (some of these pictures were taken before I put my custom skins back in, so she has the EA default skin here). Her traits are dramatic, eco-friendly, friendly, slob, and…I think loves the outdoors was the other trait I gave her. Dramatic and eco-friendly are both new traits included with Ambitions.

Her hairstyle is one of the new ones that comes with Ambitions. It has a headband and flips out a little a the bottom.

Growing Up Goth, Part 2

Her parents had the picture-perfect romance. The quick, head-spinning kind of love that causes you to jump right into things before you’ve even caught your breath.

Thoughts on playing

(If you follow this blog through a feedreader, then you may have seen a partial of this post go through before I was ready for it to! Stupid finger hit publish instead of save draft!)

I’m not to the point that I’m playing an entire neighborhood yet, but I have been playing a couple of households and figuring out how to get the game to work for me, while also adjusting my playstyle a little. I accept the fact that TS3 isn’t TS2 and I’m learning to work with it. It really has been growing on me and I find myself actually wanting to play it now when I haven’t even touched it in months. (My last update before these recent ones was in November, which is also the last time I had launched TS3 before now.)

This post will probably be a bit random because it’s mostly just sorting out my thoughts and trying to figure out solutions to current needs I have. So I apologize in advance!

There are some mods that are essential for my playstyle. Twallan’s mods are at the top of the list. I recommend grabbing Story Progression, Careers Mod, Super Computer, and the Woohooer. Also I recommend Absimiliard’s Realistic Aging Mod. This changes the number of days that each age group gets. Right now, I’ve been playing with the AbsimiliardsRealisticAgingMod (AbsRAM) version on the long setting. This is the comparison between the EA default and the AbsRAM age mod:

Original EA Long setting:
Infant: 6 days; Toddler: 15 days; Child: 15 days; Teen: 30 days; Young Adult: 45 days; Adult: 45 days; Elder: 34 days; Total: 190 days

AbsRAM Long setting:
Infant: 3 days; Toddler: 12 days; Child: 21 days; Teen: 18 days; Young Adult: 66 days; Adult: 75 days; Elder: 15 days; Total: 210 days

The AbsRAM long letting divides time up so that each day is equivalent to 1/3 of the year.  So every 3 days is one year, if you want to play with defined ages and years in your game. I know that when you look at the list it seems like 21 days as a child is an eternally long time, but if you plan to play more than one household and allow your other households to keep aging without you, then you don’t have to play those entire 21 days for each child in each house because time continues on in the background for everyone. I already currently play TS2 on a two year basis and skip around households, imagining that everyone ages in the background without me. This method would be similar, except that they actually would age without me and I don’t have to manually advance their age bars. I decided on the long setting from this mod because I felt that the number of days provided in each age group would allow me to skip around among households without missing too much in my other houses.

Based on the AbsRAM aging mod on the long setting the ages work out to this:
Infant: newborn to 1 year (3 days)
Toddler: 2 years to 4 years (12 days)
Child: 5 years to 11 years (21 days)
Teen: 12 years to 17 years (18 days)
Young Adult: 18 years to 39 years (66 days)
Adult: 40 years to 64 years (75 days)
Elder: 65+ years (Remember that the 15 days assigned to this group is the minimum number of days your elder can live. They could live longer!)

For my own playing, I try to make sure that my playable Young Adults look different at 18 than they do at 35 through the use of hairstyles and clothing choices. I also try to make 5 year old children look different from 11 year old children. A stretchskeleton cheat would be nice though!

Twallan’s Story Progression mod has a lot of pop ups throughout the day, but I don’t mind them. I like having notices about what other Sims throughout the hood are doing. It will tell me what’s happening in other households that I control so if I get a pop up about something I don’t like, such as January Goth getting a job in the sports career even though one of her traits is couch potato, I know to jump back to that household and fix it. The Careers Mod is awesome because it opens up a lot of new career choices–one of the Goth daughters has a before school job as a paper deliverer!–and if you don’t want your Sim to get a job and want to keep the story progression from giving them one while you’re playing another house, you can have your Sim register as “unemployed” with City Hall. This tells the game that they have a job–Unemployed–but they have no pay and no hours, so you don’t have to worry about a car pool. This is what I did for January, after I had her quit her job in the sports career that the game had given her while I was playing the Sekemotos. Now the game thinks she has a job so it won’t try to give her one that doesn’t even make sense for her. She’s a full-time author anyway, so I didn’t want her working outside of the home.

Another awesome thing about the Careers mod is that it makes some of the businesses into trade schools for your teens. One of the Goth daughters wants to be a forensic investigator, so she currently attends the Science Academy. The other daughter wants to be a journalist, so she attends the Arts School where she studies writing. You don’t have to do anything extra to set up your businesses as these special schools, just install the mod and your teens will have the option to enroll in the school at some of the lots. There is also an option for homeschooling, which your students register for at City Hall and then download their homework from the computer each day.

I was feeling sad about the loss of Autonomous Casual Romance that I depend on so much in TS2, but then I found TwoFtMama’s mods. You can use either Teen Autonomous Woohoo/Try For Baby or Adults Only Autonomous Woohoo/Try for Baby. The difference being that the teen version affects both teens AND adults, and the adults only version affects just adults. So with this we can still let our Sims decide if they want babies.

One thing I still have to work out is how to work around not having chemistry in the game right now. I know the base game TS2 didn’t have chemistry either, but we’ve had it since the second expansion pack so it’s hard to remember playing without it. I’m still trying to figure out a good solution for pairing up Sims without a chemistry system in the game to guide me.

More babbling thoughts coming later.

Growing Up Goth, Part 1

Her parents met one quiet afternoon, almost accidentally. Well, maybe “met” isn’t the right word. Sunset Valley is a small town and they’d known of each other for a long time, but had never even spoken until that day she passed by him, saying a quick “Excuse me” as she went on. Just a flash of blonde hair and sweet perfume that captured his interest for a moment, but not enough to distract him from the book he was about to read.

Actual pictures

I played Sims 3 last night for the first time in a long time. I’m not entirely attached to it because I get frustrated by not being able to do all the things I’ve become so used to doing in Sims 2. Also I just find it harder to keep track of everyone’s lives since they keep doing things when I’m not looking.

But I did save a few pictures from the game. Mostly things that have amused me, but also a peek into the lives of the Sims I’m playing with.

This is when I really miss all the mods that I have in Sims 2

I have a weird problem in my game right now. I had Mortimer Goth get married to a Sim he had met and developed a friendship with. He even waited for her to grow up from a teen so he could romance her, LOL. So they had this beautiful beach wedding and now…she won’t move into Goth Manor. I know the household isn’t full because it’s just Mortimer and his parents there. She’s listed as his wife and if I go into her household, she shows that she is married to him. But she’s still living at home with her parents. I know that a spouse should move in after the wedding because Hailey moved in with Leighton Sekemoto after their wedding in the park with no problems.

I think maybe my game is mad at me for not following the rules and having Mortimer marry someone other than Bella.

If this was Sims 2, I would just grab Inge’s teleporter and move her in. I really, really miss all the mods that let me fix little glitches during gameplay. So tonight I’ll have to try again manually, having them talk and build their relationship way up and see if I can ever get the move in option to come up.

Mods I use

I’ve been playing Sims 3 a little more lately because I figured out a family that really captures my interest: the Goths. This is surprising in that I’ve never liked playing the pre-made families, in either Sims 1 or Sims 2. I’ve never liked the stories that Maxis sets up for us and was never interested in following them through. I played the Goths only a little bit in Sims 1 before I grew bored with them and focused on my own creations, and I never played them at all in Sims 2. In Sims 2, my only contact with the Goths was that I had Dina Caliente get pregnant by Mortimer. She had twins. The bad thing was, Nina was also pregnant (by one of my self-Sim’s grandsons) and she had twins also within a day of Dina. It was crazy. So that was the end of my gameplay with Maxis-made families, LOL!

Anyway, while I was playing my Sim Hailey, who married Leighton Sekemoto, helped raise his son Sam, and had a daughter named Abigail (who is evil), I kept zooming over to peek in at the Goths and see what they were up to. I found myself feeling a bit intrigued and developing a soft spot for Mortimer. I mean, here’s my chance to rewrite Goth history. Mortimer no longer has to marry Bella, watch Cassandra stupidly fall in love with Don Lothario, have Alexander who doesn’t seem to have a plotline of his own, experience Bella’s disappearance from his life, or get involved with Dina. The weird thing is, I don’t have a soft spot for Bella, just Mortimer. I don’t really know why, but he piques my interest.

And he’s great for pictures.

I have something percolating in my head focusing on the Goths, so I may start writing about it here. I don’t know when or if I actually will do it, but I’m enjoying playing Mortimer’s life in a different way and seeing how it goes.

Okay, now, as promised, the hacks I’m using so far that I consider essential:

• AwesomeMod with IndieStone Mod. Absolutely necessary to prevent craziness during gameplay. I don’t like families moving out of the neighborhood and disappearing, so this stops that. They can still get married and have kids and move into homes on their own, but I don’t allow them to move away. Also, I like that it gives me pop ups to let me know who in the neighborhood is getting married or having babies or moving in together.
• Autonomous woohoo with pregnancy. Just to give me back a little feature of ACR that I like, the ability to let my current household decide whether or not to try for a baby.
• Faster Novel Writing
• More Fun Activities. Apparently, there aren’t a lot of activities that by default give your Sims fun. This fixes that.
• Higher bills. Just to keep my Sims from getting rich too quickly. I use the 2.6% version, but am considering switching to the 5% one.
• Faster Gardening

I think that’s all I have so far, but I may have missed something. If so, I’ll update again in another post.

Pros & Cons

I played Sims 3 last night instead of getting my pictures ready for the next Pine Hollow update, so today I’ll just write about what I like about Sims 3 and what I don’t. I’ll get the Pine Hollow pictures ready tonight and hopefully get a new post up tomorrow morning before I go out of town for a couple of days.

This post contains what you’d probably consider spoilers, if you don’t want to know too much about The Sims 3 before playing. Just warning you.

I remind myself constantly that The Sims 3 is not The Sims 2 and not to expect them to be the same. I know they’re different and I’m okay with that. Also, I remind myself that this is just the base game. The Sims 2 base game didn’t have all the features that I now use constantly. Remember The Sims 2 base game? No college, no downtowns, no vacation spots, no owned businesses, no weather, no apartments, no pets, no vampires, no werewolves, no witches, no zombies, no plant Sims, no servos. Can you imagine playing The Sims 2 now without all of the features and items from expansion packs that you’ve grown used to? *shudders* So I’m hopeful that additional enhancements to the gameplay will be added in later expansion packs.

(That said, the one thing I’m really happy about with development on The Sims 2 now over is that I don’t have to hunt down all of my mods to get the latest versions for a new expansion pack anymore. That makes me happy.)

Anyway, I do have certain things so far about The Sims 3 that I like and certain things that I don’t.

What I like:

• The changing neighborhood. I still think it’s awesome to find out that some other Sims in the hood have gotten married, moved, or had a baby. I like seeing who is hooking up with who. That’s one of my favorite things about ACR for Sims 2, that the uncontrolled Sims could initiate romantic interactions on their own and form couples without my input. I manually move townies that have fallen in love into homes around Pine Hollow/Arcadia and let them get married and have a couple of kids, but I like that I don’t have to control that in Sims 3. The other Sims will do it all on their own.
• I like the buttons for “View my Sim” and “Go home.” I like that I can just click on the View My Sim button and I’ll zoom back to that particular one even if I was previously viewing something on the other side of town. And I like that I can make my Sim go home with just one click without having to figure out where in town they are at the moment.
• Toddlers seem to sleep longer. Thank you!
• The traits add new dimensions to the Sims. I mostly like them.
• I really like the camera tilt buttons so I can get my camera into an angle I like for playing easier.
• While I was playing one night I suddenly heard this weird sound going on among all the other household sounds. I turned up my volume and said, “Is someone SINGING?” I looked around and finally figured out that one of my Sims was singing in the shower, LOL. Just a tiny feature that doesn’t make a difference in gameplay, but I liked it.
• I like how you can tell your Sim how to behave at work or school via the drop down choices, to either help them get ahead or let them slack off.
• The in-game camera is actually good and so we don’t need a screen capturing program to take decent pictures. Which means I don’t have to remember to check that FRAPS is turned on before playing. (By the way, I was never able to get Snag-It or Irfanview or anything else that other people suggested to work with my new computer and Windows Vista. Even after updating drivers and changing settings, screen captures in Sims 2 always come out black with anything other than FRAPS.)
• I really don’t mind the opportunities that pop up every now and then. They give my Sim something to do to vary the usual routine that I might fall into and could be incorporated into storytelling. For example, one of Sims had the opportunity to investigate a gnome smuggling ring the other day. Change “gnome smuggling” to whatever you want it to be and it could be used as the basis of a story thread showing the Sim going around town following people and talking to informants, which can then be developed however you want it to go even after the opportunity has been fulfilled. I see them as like in-game Random Occurence Scenarios!
• I like that you can set different lifespans depending on how fast or slow you want time to move.

Things I don’t really like:

• The option for changing active households is hidden and not obvious. I had to pull out the manual and figure out how to do it. I would have liked to be able to change households the way that I do in Sims 2, by just clicking on the house from the neighborhood view. Also from what I can tell, if I last played house X but I want to play house Y the next time I start up the game, I have to first load house X and then change active households to play house Y. There isn’t a way to switch households from the start (unless I’m missing something).
• Everything takes WAY too long to do! I send my Sim off to shower and a Sim hour later he’s just finally getting out? I can already tell I’m going to be downloading every mod I find that cuts various action times down. My Sims aren’t even able to use the bathroom, then cook and eat breakfast before the carpool arrives.
• As you all told me seeds aren’t buyable, can only be found. I’m not interested at all in hunting around town for seeds among having to go to work, wait for my Sims to take their hour long showers, skill for hours, tend to kids, and make sure other Sims in the household don’t do something incredibly stupid around town. I’ll just plant the fruits and veggies I can buy at the store instead and pretend seeds don’t exist.
• Other Sims in the household can do something stupid while you’re not watching. I love the integrated hood and the way Sims can control their own lives even more, but I feel a bit overwhelmed trying to keep an eye on everyone in my household. One person will be at home doing something, another at the park doing something else, and a third arguing with random people in town and making enemies.
• The hydrophobic trait is pretty annoying. Hailey has to complain for several minutes before she takes a shower. Then cry after she gets out of the shower. Every time! I’ll never voluntarily give that trait to another Sim. (Hailey’s personality was randomized.)
• You know how in Sims 2 you could set camera angles by holding Control and numbers 4 through um, whatever it is? 7 or 8? Anyway, then you just have to hit the number for the angle you want and the camera will snap back there. I use that all the time in Sims 2 because sometimes my camera angle is way off after zooming in to take pictures. You can do this in Sims 3 too, except the camera positions start at number 5. My problem with the Sims 3 camera settings is that you apparently can’t set individual camera angles for each household. I set camera angle 5 to a spot focused on Hailey’s house. When I went to play someone else’s house, I discovered that if I hit 5 in that household, my camera snapped back to Hailey’s house. So that means you can only set 4 (or is it 5?) camera angles for the entire hood instead of on a house to house basis like you can in Sims 2. This does not make me happy. I prefer to set up camera angles that I like for each lot and not having to keep changing them depending on what household I’m playing.
• Also, I hate that the 4 is now a speed setting instead of a camera setting. I keep accidentally hitting 4, trying to snap my camera back into place and instead I make the house go into ultra-fast speed, causing me to miss things.
• Edge scrolling in cameraman mode works too well, at least on my computer anyway. I go into cameraman mode to zoom in so I can take pictures and the camera swings wildly around while I’m trying to get a good angle whenever I move the mouse. It’s much easier to control in Sims 2!
• Most of the community lots are rabbit holes. I’m hopeful that an expansion packs gives us back real community lots and ownable businesses like in Open for Business. They already did it for Sims 2, seems obvious that it should be a feature for Sims 3 also.

Overall, I like the game, but I am in NO WAY ready to stop playing Sims 2. It’s going to be a while and require a lot of enhancements and mods before that happens. Speaking of mods, my next post will list the mods I’m using so far, which will be helpful to me in remembering where they all came from.

I think the biggest complaint about the Sims 3 is that it’s not the giant step up from Sims 2 that we had hoped for. When I first saw advertisements for Sims 2, I got REALLY excited about it because it was such a great improvement over Sims 1. I knew that as soon as Sims 2 was out, I’d stop playing Sims 1 entirely. And I did. When I installed Sims 2, I uninstalled Sims 1 and gave my games away and never regretted it. But from the very beginning, Sims 3 didn’t give me that same level of excitement. The biggest improvement is the changing neighborhood, but that seems to be it (at least in my opinion). I’m not giving away my Sims 2 games, not uninstalling them, and for now, I’ll probably still spend more time playing Sims 2 than Sims 3.

In the beginning

So I originally created this sim:

Her name is–or was–Hailey Matthews and she lives in Sunset Valley.

I looked at a lot of Sims 3 blogs before I started to play the game, trying to decide whether to play Sunset Valley or Riverview. I finally decided on Sunset Valley because I liked the scenery better.

Hailey has changed a bit since I started playing. She’s now married and is a mother. She married Leighton Sekemoto actually, who is one of the Maxis made Sims and lived around the corner from her little house. I usually don’t like playing with Maxis made families, but in this case I just decided not to worry about it and let her marry the first guy she liked.

I’m not sure that I want to blog about Hailey though. I’m thinking that I may play through a generation or two, let the town change around them, develop some histories, and then maybe pick a few Sims to follow. I still don’t really feel an attachment to these Sims like I do with the residents of Pine Hollow, but maybe it’s just that I’m still learning and getting a feel for the game and don’t really know these Sims yet. That’s why I think I may want to wait and feel a bit more settled in. There are plenty of things I’m still figuring out. Such as, is there any place to buy seeds in Sunset Valley or do I need to go look around somewhere and try to find them? Hailey has the green thumb trait and she had a few seeds in her inventory when she started, but I haven’t figured out where to get more.

Introduction

I’m still not entirely sure how much of a Sims 3 blog I want to make, but I did have some things I wanted to say and share without cluttering up my Sims 2 blog. So here we are, Pictures of You. A title I chose while listening to my iPod–”Pictures of You” by The Cure.

I decided to use this title because I thought it might make a good “story” hood title if I decided to go that route since I don’t want to do an actual legacy challenge and I didn’t want to just call it “Sunset Valley Sims” or something like that. Sunset Valley doesn’t feel like it really belongs to me, you know? Not like Pine Hollow does.

So stay tuned and we’ll see what develops.