A Sims-induced Coma

There are only two video games that I really play consistently and obsessively: Pokemon and The Sims. I've played The Sims in every version, more or less, since version one, although I don't but every single expansion pack. But yesterday I was buying my poor, toothless brother Spore and Ambitions was on sale and I was like, "Hey, why not?"

Good choice, except now I've been playing for two days straight. But the town that Ambitions ships with is based on the Louisiana bayou and it's just a lot of fun to play. Fog effects <3!>

I jumped right in and made a new sim just to test it out, a fiesty Chinese girl named Sally Chu. I played through the whole firefighter career with her (exciting!) and she was very successful at it, but part of the fun in the Sims is seeing where the genetics go, so once I was done with that I paired her off with a Townie and gave her a second career as an inventor. And so ended generation one.

I grabbed her daughter for the next generation, and played the Private Investigator career for a while while figuring out where I wanted to take the genetics next. The last patch changed the way skin tone inherited, so I decided to pair her off with the darkest guy I could find, just to see how it works (when I play the Sims, it turns into a mendelian eugenics experiment pretty quickly), but then I got bored with the family so I switched to a branching line of the family tree and decided to check back later.

After mucking around in the parallel branch for a bit and ensuring it would continue for another generation (I get kinda bonsai on my family trees when I like them - I've noticed that when you don't constantly maintain them, the population tends to experience mass bed death and not reproduce.), I decided to really test it out by importing a pair of pre-existing sims into the new town. And so Fish and Dwayne moved to Twinbrook.

This got a bit tricky, because they were made for the base game - their lifetime goals are, like, Leader of the Free World and Editor in Chief, but I've played through those paths a few times with these guys. So instead I mucked around with their traits a tiny bit, totally disregarded their lifetime goals, and made Fish an angler and Dwayne a sculptor, which are fun things to muck with. I'd never had a reason to actually figure out the fishing system before, but now that I've bothered I've gotta say it's pretty neat.

One of these days I'll go back and remake Fish and Dwayne to actually fit the EP. I think their face sculpts are way off model, too. (Fish has an ugly nose, Dwayne is too thin and doesn't look particularly distinctive.)

And then I wound up quitting before I checked back on my genetics and inheritance experiment, but the family preview image looked promising for the new inheritance patterns. So tomorrow we shall see.

I totally just wrote a really long blog post about The Sims 3.

Uh.

Yeah.

I've got nothing.

Leez.