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Sep. 16th, 2004 02:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hkellickAlright, I've only had the chance to play Sims 2 for a couple of hours last night and another hour and a half this morning (I didn't sleep), but I want to give my impressions of this game for any and all interesting parties.
In Short: This Game Rocks!
Slightly Longer: This Game Really Really Really Really Really and did I mention REALLY Rocks!
A little longer:
OK, so I got the game yesterday at lunch time, brought it home and installed it (it took a while to install, what with four CDs, but that gave me time to make dinner :D So it's all good) and sat down to play the tutoroials, which were pretty quick and fairly dry. After that, as per the suggestion of the Strat guide, I decided to play an already running family, the Curious family in Strangetown.
I was VERY amused to see the situation. The Curious family are three brothers, all who are interested in Knowledge (they want to know everything). One had been abducted by aliens and impregnated and was just about to give birth. He wanted his two brothers to be abducted as well, so they could experience the miracle of.. whatever they do up in the spaceship...
Meanwhile, one of his brothers wants to look in the telescope. Wham! He's abducted. :o
Meanwhile, back on the ranch, the first brother gives birth.. and, oh.. it's a cute little alien girl. Since at the time it looked like the Curious brothers were named after scientists, I dubbed her Curie. Daddy is excited and exuberant. He's got a baby! Oh, also work calls and tells him he has three days leave from work to watch the baby. (Just enough time to get the baby to turn into a toddler.)
Meanwhile, I'm a little overwhelmed. See, the curious brothers have an awful looking house that seems a bit (alot, really) cluttered, and with four or five floors (though, all but the first leads up towers to go to the high powered telescopes). It's difficult to keep track of not only the needs of three sims, but their wants and fears. First brother wants his brothers abducted by aliens, Second brother wants to meet aliens, so does third. Also, second brother wants to cheat death (be saved before dying) and to meet a ghost.
Meanwhile, while examining second brothers wants and fears, I see something amusing.. all of his needs are jumping back and forth while he's on the spaceship! I find that vastly amusing :) I'm starving! *glip* No I'm not. I need to go to the bathroom! *glip* Not anymore. Now I do. Now I sorta do. Now I don't. :)
So second brother returns (I got a decent in-game screenshot of the brother being tossed out of the UFO and into the street. Next time, I'll try to be more ready and get a GOOD or GREAT screenshot. :D ) and he's feeling OK, but exhausted (go fig), so he goes to bed.
Meanwhile, we've hired a nanny to help around the house because one brother was pregnant, the other was recuperating from being pregnant and the third was bringing in the money to PAY for all of this. Unfortunately, no one seemed to get along too well with the nanny.. or the maid. Hmm.. maybe they're all cranky.
Finally, I decided in part because I was being overwhelmed by everything and in part because I really wanted to do a sim family based on me, to quit the family for now and work on one of my own.
So I tried a new portion of the game, designing my own family.. two adult sims based, physically, on Kristen and I. Sadly, all sims in the game still have the same height. (well, all sims of the same age group.), so that made it harder to design Kristen. Also, they didn't REALLY have a hairstyle with curly hair. The me wasn't too bad, considering.. not a perfect representation, but closer, at least, than Kristen. The Howard Sim had aspirations for knowing everything and was a Leo (that meant I was a little lazy, a little dirty, a little grumpy, VERY outgoing and a little serious.) The Kristen Sim had aspirations for having a family (go fig) and was a Sagittarius (I don't remember everything she was.. I think she was very playful whereas I was very outgoing)
Then I decided they'd be married already. The plan was.. it'd be neat seeing the Kristen and Howard Dork (Yes, I made the family name Dork) sims have a baby and see what it would look like, play out, etc. Basically, it was going to be my introduction to the game. Sadly, because neither Kristen nor I were terribly friendly, we didn't make friends with any of the people we met and I knew, looking at the sims traits, I knew why and figured I'd try again later. The two of them did get along fairly well, though and I began to get a feeling for what being a family aspiration sim means. It's more than just wanting a family, it's wanting a home.. kristen's sim wants a microwave, a decent television. She wants to learn to cook and clean (I'm not making this up!) On the other hand, my sim wants to learn logic, cooking, mechanical etc.. wants to get kidnapped by aliens so he KNOWS and see a ghost so he KNOWS.
I gave up at 9:30 and went to bed. Sadly, I still did not sleep as well as i might have liked and was up by 4:30. I tried to go back to sleep. I swear I did, but I failed.
So I was up again and playing the Sims. As I said earlier, I wanted to restart the Dork family with more "Realistic" (to us) families. My character was STILL ougoing, but more well rounded. Kristen's character was still playful, but also very nice. And then I did up a new home and started playing.
This time around, we made friends much easier. The same three people appeared and before the end of SimDay 1, Howard had made friends with Pollination Tech#6 and, by the next day, Kristen wanted to be friends with Nervous and... I forget the "normal person's" name. (I put it in quotes, because this is Strangetown and no one is normal. That's why I put the Dork family there ;D )
A couple of amusing things happened...
Remember how I said I made friends with Pollination Tech#6? Well, this actually happened on the phone. The same day we met them, we bid them goodbye so that I could try to spend some quality time with Kristen. (She wanted to fall in love :) I (I, the player) wanted the same thing. I haven't seen a Sims2 weddin' yet ;D ), however, I need to go to the bathroom and the shower is lookin' pretty good. And wouldn't you know it, five minutes into the shower, the phone rings and Pollination Tech#6 wants to talk to Howard. Isn't it always the way? ;D
Sadly, as I talk to Pollination Tech #6, Kristen, who is tired, goes to take a nap on the couch. I use this time to learn some cooking (SOMEONE needs to cook around here, preferably without starting a fire :p Besides, the real me likes to cook, so why not? :D)
Sadly, this begins a chain reaction when both of us start working where she collapses in bed right after work and I stay up for a while. This makes interaction between the two of us difficult. I had to force to try and keep Howard awake to chat with Kristen, but that didn't work too well. I ended the game with them both scrambling to get ready for work. After work, I'll send Howard to bed early so that he sleeps about the same time Kristen does and maybe we can get some romance brewing! ;D
So... a couple of hours actually playing Sims 2, what do I think? Read above. This game just totally rocks my socks off. It's everything The Sims, but bigger. My sims can FINALLY be livin' large.
The reason I wrote about my experiences above is both to give you context for the actual review, but actually to show you some of the things you can do now. I spoke of aspirations... Sims have aspirations now.. they want to have money, knowledge, popularity, romance or a family. So far, most of the wants I've seen have been easy to fulfill: they want the next level in a skill they've been working on or to get a job in a certain field or to buy a certain object.
Above I spoke of Howard and Kristen. Howard wants knowledge. His wants, while playing him, included learning a skill, learning the next level of a skill, making and serving a food (remember, I'd taught him cooking, so this is what he could do to show off his skill), kissing and flirting with Kristen, having a baby, meeting aliens and seeing a ghost. Kristen wanted a family. She also wanted to kiss and flirt with Howard, and also wanted a baby but she wanted to learn how to cook and clean, wanted a microwave and a decent TV, wanted to play with Howard's telescope and stargaze. Most of these were easy enough to do and left my sims rather happy for it. They were getting what they wanted and I was the one giving it to them.
Though, being the evil and naughty person I am, I could just as easily give them what they DON'T want, What they FEAR! And then when that happens, they start getting neurotic. Hurt them enough and they just collapse and require the help of a therapist to get them up and moving again. *evil laugh*
Then there's the whole aging thing. Time in the original Sims was.. odd. There was no weekends. Sims never aged. It just sort of looped on a 24 hour schedule. That's changed. Now the Sims have days.. including most jobs (as I've seen so far) have two days off, not necessarily consecutive or weekend, but.. hey.. day off, right? Always good. Also, I BELIEVE Sims now can get vacation days too. Woot, extra day off! :D Also, work now has maternity leave, so, if you are pregnant, you now get three days off to take care of your baby (trust me, it's enough. Give me a second to explain.)
And.. as far as sims never aging? (Well.. baby to child, but how much does that count?) Sims now age.. baby to toddler in three days.. toddler to child, child to teen, teen to adult, adult to elder (30 days), elder to... mourned.
That means that your sims now actually have a set lifespan. It also means that you can start your neighborhood with one couple and within a few Sim months, be able to start populating that town with their children and their families. (It would make sense to start with a couple of couples so there isn't TOO much intermarriaging, but.. hey.. you can always hit on the maid, the gardener, the pizza delivery person, the repo man, the newspaper girl.. the nanny. Mmm.. nanny nookie. o.O ANYWAYS.. because they actually have personalities and interests too.
And speaking of.. interactions. Interactions are so much more interesting in three dimensional with working faces. You can watch your sims look happy, grumpy, bored, restful, dreamy... they show it in their faces. And there seem to be a few new interactions now too, including new games and a new favorite entertainment of mine: the dirty joke (The first time around, Howard and Kristen enjoyed telling dirty jokes to each other. What amused me was that I had instructed Howard to tell a dirty joke to Kristen.. and realized, the moment I'd clicked, that she was telling one to him! Go Kristen!)
Now, because time isn't standing still, that means that you really gotta work hard to make it all the way up the career ladder, right? Well, of course. You still have to have a prerequisite number of friends (Luckily, as so far, making friends seems to be easier than it was in the original) and a prerequisite number of skills, but now you get more chance cards.. that is.. events that happen that can help make.. or break your career. An example of one of these chance cards that happened to Kristen was: She found a room that was a mess and she asked herself.. should I clean it up or call the janitor. I told her to clean it up. Sadly, this took far too much time and despite the fact that it WAS the responsible thing to do, because it took so long, I got docked a days pay for never really showing up. D'oh! And yet.. still amusing. :)
And then there's houses... houses can now be bigger and more extreme.. you have a few new options that you never had before, including having up to four floors (well, five with some "cheating" by adding a cellar or a working attic.), a new deck tool and a new stair and railing tool. (Ask the real Kristen how amused I was that I could create a gated garden next to my house, if I so chose. :D ) Sims can finally move around them better, pushing chairs under the table, getting around each other better in narrow hallways.
Also, alot of the furniture now comes with options so that you can play interior designer. There aren't always ALOT of choices, but if you want, you can easily redesign and match your rooms so that the furniture and walls actually match, more or less. It's not perfect, but it does give you more options than you had before. :) An example of this is.. let's say Howard (just growing up and all) bought his furniture in all sorts of colors and wood types (very likely. The real Howard has no eye for this sort of thing.) Then let's say the real Kristen plays the house (after all, she's in it too, right? :) ) and decided that (as I just said) my interior decorating skills suck goat balloons. She can now go to numerous objects and actually change the color, type of wood, fabric, sheeting etc. and can also take up and repaint the walls and redo the floors.
What else to talk about?
So, in review, Sims 2 is everything good about The Sims.. but bigger, larger and better :D
Honestly, I only played for a few hours. All this is based on that play. The more I play, the more I'll notice and the more I'll have to talk about.
And... looking up. I've talked quite alot already.
So.. I'll stop. :)
In Short: This Game Rocks!
Slightly Longer: This Game Really Really Really Really Really and did I mention REALLY Rocks!
A little longer:
OK, so I got the game yesterday at lunch time, brought it home and installed it (it took a while to install, what with four CDs, but that gave me time to make dinner :D So it's all good) and sat down to play the tutoroials, which were pretty quick and fairly dry. After that, as per the suggestion of the Strat guide, I decided to play an already running family, the Curious family in Strangetown.
I was VERY amused to see the situation. The Curious family are three brothers, all who are interested in Knowledge (they want to know everything). One had been abducted by aliens and impregnated and was just about to give birth. He wanted his two brothers to be abducted as well, so they could experience the miracle of.. whatever they do up in the spaceship...
Meanwhile, one of his brothers wants to look in the telescope. Wham! He's abducted. :o
Meanwhile, back on the ranch, the first brother gives birth.. and, oh.. it's a cute little alien girl. Since at the time it looked like the Curious brothers were named after scientists, I dubbed her Curie. Daddy is excited and exuberant. He's got a baby! Oh, also work calls and tells him he has three days leave from work to watch the baby. (Just enough time to get the baby to turn into a toddler.)
Meanwhile, I'm a little overwhelmed. See, the curious brothers have an awful looking house that seems a bit (alot, really) cluttered, and with four or five floors (though, all but the first leads up towers to go to the high powered telescopes). It's difficult to keep track of not only the needs of three sims, but their wants and fears. First brother wants his brothers abducted by aliens, Second brother wants to meet aliens, so does third. Also, second brother wants to cheat death (be saved before dying) and to meet a ghost.
Meanwhile, while examining second brothers wants and fears, I see something amusing.. all of his needs are jumping back and forth while he's on the spaceship! I find that vastly amusing :) I'm starving! *glip* No I'm not. I need to go to the bathroom! *glip* Not anymore. Now I do. Now I sorta do. Now I don't. :)
So second brother returns (I got a decent in-game screenshot of the brother being tossed out of the UFO and into the street. Next time, I'll try to be more ready and get a GOOD or GREAT screenshot. :D ) and he's feeling OK, but exhausted (go fig), so he goes to bed.
Meanwhile, we've hired a nanny to help around the house because one brother was pregnant, the other was recuperating from being pregnant and the third was bringing in the money to PAY for all of this. Unfortunately, no one seemed to get along too well with the nanny.. or the maid. Hmm.. maybe they're all cranky.
Finally, I decided in part because I was being overwhelmed by everything and in part because I really wanted to do a sim family based on me, to quit the family for now and work on one of my own.
So I tried a new portion of the game, designing my own family.. two adult sims based, physically, on Kristen and I. Sadly, all sims in the game still have the same height. (well, all sims of the same age group.), so that made it harder to design Kristen. Also, they didn't REALLY have a hairstyle with curly hair. The me wasn't too bad, considering.. not a perfect representation, but closer, at least, than Kristen. The Howard Sim had aspirations for knowing everything and was a Leo (that meant I was a little lazy, a little dirty, a little grumpy, VERY outgoing and a little serious.) The Kristen Sim had aspirations for having a family (go fig) and was a Sagittarius (I don't remember everything she was.. I think she was very playful whereas I was very outgoing)
Then I decided they'd be married already. The plan was.. it'd be neat seeing the Kristen and Howard Dork (Yes, I made the family name Dork) sims have a baby and see what it would look like, play out, etc. Basically, it was going to be my introduction to the game. Sadly, because neither Kristen nor I were terribly friendly, we didn't make friends with any of the people we met and I knew, looking at the sims traits, I knew why and figured I'd try again later. The two of them did get along fairly well, though and I began to get a feeling for what being a family aspiration sim means. It's more than just wanting a family, it's wanting a home.. kristen's sim wants a microwave, a decent television. She wants to learn to cook and clean (I'm not making this up!) On the other hand, my sim wants to learn logic, cooking, mechanical etc.. wants to get kidnapped by aliens so he KNOWS and see a ghost so he KNOWS.
I gave up at 9:30 and went to bed. Sadly, I still did not sleep as well as i might have liked and was up by 4:30. I tried to go back to sleep. I swear I did, but I failed.
So I was up again and playing the Sims. As I said earlier, I wanted to restart the Dork family with more "Realistic" (to us) families. My character was STILL ougoing, but more well rounded. Kristen's character was still playful, but also very nice. And then I did up a new home and started playing.
This time around, we made friends much easier. The same three people appeared and before the end of SimDay 1, Howard had made friends with Pollination Tech#6 and, by the next day, Kristen wanted to be friends with Nervous and... I forget the "normal person's" name. (I put it in quotes, because this is Strangetown and no one is normal. That's why I put the Dork family there ;D )
A couple of amusing things happened...
Remember how I said I made friends with Pollination Tech#6? Well, this actually happened on the phone. The same day we met them, we bid them goodbye so that I could try to spend some quality time with Kristen. (She wanted to fall in love :) I (I, the player) wanted the same thing. I haven't seen a Sims2 weddin' yet ;D ), however, I need to go to the bathroom and the shower is lookin' pretty good. And wouldn't you know it, five minutes into the shower, the phone rings and Pollination Tech#6 wants to talk to Howard. Isn't it always the way? ;D
Sadly, as I talk to Pollination Tech #6, Kristen, who is tired, goes to take a nap on the couch. I use this time to learn some cooking (SOMEONE needs to cook around here, preferably without starting a fire :p Besides, the real me likes to cook, so why not? :D)
Sadly, this begins a chain reaction when both of us start working where she collapses in bed right after work and I stay up for a while. This makes interaction between the two of us difficult. I had to force to try and keep Howard awake to chat with Kristen, but that didn't work too well. I ended the game with them both scrambling to get ready for work. After work, I'll send Howard to bed early so that he sleeps about the same time Kristen does and maybe we can get some romance brewing! ;D
So... a couple of hours actually playing Sims 2, what do I think? Read above. This game just totally rocks my socks off. It's everything The Sims, but bigger. My sims can FINALLY be livin' large.
The reason I wrote about my experiences above is both to give you context for the actual review, but actually to show you some of the things you can do now. I spoke of aspirations... Sims have aspirations now.. they want to have money, knowledge, popularity, romance or a family. So far, most of the wants I've seen have been easy to fulfill: they want the next level in a skill they've been working on or to get a job in a certain field or to buy a certain object.
Above I spoke of Howard and Kristen. Howard wants knowledge. His wants, while playing him, included learning a skill, learning the next level of a skill, making and serving a food (remember, I'd taught him cooking, so this is what he could do to show off his skill), kissing and flirting with Kristen, having a baby, meeting aliens and seeing a ghost. Kristen wanted a family. She also wanted to kiss and flirt with Howard, and also wanted a baby but she wanted to learn how to cook and clean, wanted a microwave and a decent TV, wanted to play with Howard's telescope and stargaze. Most of these were easy enough to do and left my sims rather happy for it. They were getting what they wanted and I was the one giving it to them.
Though, being the evil and naughty person I am, I could just as easily give them what they DON'T want, What they FEAR! And then when that happens, they start getting neurotic. Hurt them enough and they just collapse and require the help of a therapist to get them up and moving again. *evil laugh*
Then there's the whole aging thing. Time in the original Sims was.. odd. There was no weekends. Sims never aged. It just sort of looped on a 24 hour schedule. That's changed. Now the Sims have days.. including most jobs (as I've seen so far) have two days off, not necessarily consecutive or weekend, but.. hey.. day off, right? Always good. Also, I BELIEVE Sims now can get vacation days too. Woot, extra day off! :D Also, work now has maternity leave, so, if you are pregnant, you now get three days off to take care of your baby (trust me, it's enough. Give me a second to explain.)
And.. as far as sims never aging? (Well.. baby to child, but how much does that count?) Sims now age.. baby to toddler in three days.. toddler to child, child to teen, teen to adult, adult to elder (30 days), elder to... mourned.
That means that your sims now actually have a set lifespan. It also means that you can start your neighborhood with one couple and within a few Sim months, be able to start populating that town with their children and their families. (It would make sense to start with a couple of couples so there isn't TOO much intermarriaging, but.. hey.. you can always hit on the maid, the gardener, the pizza delivery person, the repo man, the newspaper girl.. the nanny. Mmm.. nanny nookie. o.O ANYWAYS.. because they actually have personalities and interests too.
And speaking of.. interactions. Interactions are so much more interesting in three dimensional with working faces. You can watch your sims look happy, grumpy, bored, restful, dreamy... they show it in their faces. And there seem to be a few new interactions now too, including new games and a new favorite entertainment of mine: the dirty joke (The first time around, Howard and Kristen enjoyed telling dirty jokes to each other. What amused me was that I had instructed Howard to tell a dirty joke to Kristen.. and realized, the moment I'd clicked, that she was telling one to him! Go Kristen!)
Now, because time isn't standing still, that means that you really gotta work hard to make it all the way up the career ladder, right? Well, of course. You still have to have a prerequisite number of friends (Luckily, as so far, making friends seems to be easier than it was in the original) and a prerequisite number of skills, but now you get more chance cards.. that is.. events that happen that can help make.. or break your career. An example of one of these chance cards that happened to Kristen was: She found a room that was a mess and she asked herself.. should I clean it up or call the janitor. I told her to clean it up. Sadly, this took far too much time and despite the fact that it WAS the responsible thing to do, because it took so long, I got docked a days pay for never really showing up. D'oh! And yet.. still amusing. :)
And then there's houses... houses can now be bigger and more extreme.. you have a few new options that you never had before, including having up to four floors (well, five with some "cheating" by adding a cellar or a working attic.), a new deck tool and a new stair and railing tool. (Ask the real Kristen how amused I was that I could create a gated garden next to my house, if I so chose. :D ) Sims can finally move around them better, pushing chairs under the table, getting around each other better in narrow hallways.
Also, alot of the furniture now comes with options so that you can play interior designer. There aren't always ALOT of choices, but if you want, you can easily redesign and match your rooms so that the furniture and walls actually match, more or less. It's not perfect, but it does give you more options than you had before. :) An example of this is.. let's say Howard (just growing up and all) bought his furniture in all sorts of colors and wood types (very likely. The real Howard has no eye for this sort of thing.) Then let's say the real Kristen plays the house (after all, she's in it too, right? :) ) and decided that (as I just said) my interior decorating skills suck goat balloons. She can now go to numerous objects and actually change the color, type of wood, fabric, sheeting etc. and can also take up and repaint the walls and redo the floors.
What else to talk about?
So, in review, Sims 2 is everything good about The Sims.. but bigger, larger and better :D
Honestly, I only played for a few hours. All this is based on that play. The more I play, the more I'll notice and the more I'll have to talk about.
And... looking up. I've talked quite alot already.
So.. I'll stop. :)
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(no subject)
Date: 2004-09-16 12:23 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-09-16 12:52 pm (UTC)And I can't make it stoooooooooooooop.