The Sims 2: Another poster child for the fate of PC Gaming?

I’m a devoted viewer of Shamus Young and his blog, Twenty-Sided. After reading a post on it about how people ripped him on the BioShock demo(you can read it here: http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=1875#more-1875), I decided to talk about another of EA’s properties, namely The Sims 2.

I love that game to death. Well, I wouldn’t call it a game so much as a storytelling tool. Anyways, that software spawns millions of stories which I read on a forum. However, after recently installing the newest expansion pack, Apartment Life, I began to understand how Shamus said “the pizza is covered in insects.”

I have no problems with the lag, except when I record the cinematic videos and the music de-syncs, or whenever the game pauses to load up some data. What bothers me are the huge amount of bugs in the game.

One legacy story comments on the fact that it crashed and the story was ruined 30 times, and as the story (called the Tom Servo chronicles) went through the motions again, many bugs and glitches cropped up. I haven’t seen most of those, and thankfully I did not get the lot crashing glitch yet, but the graphics tend to glitch badly – usually giving my toddlers upper teeth hovering in their mouths like alien dentures.

And then I discovered that some of the ring menus that use interactions don’t work or have missing options – for example, in one house I got the alert that the baby was ready to age up, but when I tried to use the birthday cake to age her, it gave me “Clean Up” instead of “Bring XXXX to Cake.” I had to hack the baby’s life bar so the interaction would work properly.

After seeing all these glitches, I wonder if Maxis, when they were acquired by EA, were told not to fix these problems because they wasted money. If so, this could indeed prove that computer game developers in big-name companies have to suppress their beliefs that the customer is important, and it just “time is money.”

And while I fear for EA and Maxis’s future, I can’t stop playing and boycott The Sims 2. It is a great tool for telling stories. If you went over to Boolprop.com’s forums and posted saying “You need to boycott this game until EAxis agrees to release an end-all patch that will fix everything, you’re wasting your money with the bugs in it!”, I think they would ban him. Why should we stop using a great storytelling aid just because there are a garbage-truck load of glitches that could crash the game and wipe our hard drives? It ain’t happening.

I don’t think we’ll ever see the end of this. As long as we pay good money through the nose to play an interesting experience, despite all the bugs, we are feeding the corporate machine. The only way to make a difference is to force everyone to stop playing the game and burn their copies, which ain’t happening any time soon.

Stinky grumps: The Sims 2 and “The Obsession Legacy”

I’m so sorry about not having the next blogs of Episodes 5 or 6 of The Next Food Network Star. Recently the power went out, then some nasty incident forced us to live without the Internet for a whole week. I wasn’t able to put up any blog last Monday. I’ll try to put up a compilation of my thoughts on the last two episodes.

In the meantime, here’s a little story: Once upon a time, a princess called Lucy got bored of her posh life, so she downloaded The Sims 2 on her posh computer and loved the ordinary peasant Sims and their lives. But since her daddy gave her a TV and the Harry Potter books, she became a crazy Trekkie and Potterhead who also was a fangirl of a really lame action TV series about terrorism called 24. In her rabid fangirly rage, she booted up the Internet on her computer, learned about the Legacy Challenges for playing The Sims 2, and started her own legacy with Sims named and looking like her favorite characters from her obsessions, naming it… The Obsession Legacy. (rim shot)

She was so vainglorious and obsessed with certain characters in the series she loved, she made many Sims that looked like her and now one of them is married to a Sim based on Remus Lupin.

I never watched 24. A TV series about terrorists never appealed to me. All I know about it was that this guy was supposed to pretend to be dead for 24 hours(the name of the series is based on the 24-hour time period of faked death) and there were a lot of explosions and car chases. Yawnsville.

I have watched episodes of the original Star Trek and The Next Generation, and read about characters from the other two series(Deep Space 9 and Voyager) – I know who the Borg are and how they threatened the Star Trek universe, so I have some experience there.

The most experience I have is with Harry Potter, as I have read all seven books and seen all the movies, two on DVD, three in theaters.

So, what do you get when you turn Sims into characters like those from those three series? Hilarious chaos.

You see, the Legacy states(but I may be wrong) that you are forbidden from dictating your Sims actions. These virtual dollies must act under the randomized control of the computer AI. While the Sims of Sims 2 are far more intelligent than their ancient predecessors, they still tend to go and do stupid things.

For example, in Chapter 37, Lucy whines about the autonomous reaction Sims do whenever a fire breaks out – they run to it and scream and flail in horror, while the ashy fire decimates their needs like hygiene and energy. I have sigged her rant in a forum that dedicates itself to Legacy challenges.

A legacy is where you start with a Sim, marry them off and make them have three or more kids and raise them to adulthood. Then you pick which kid is the heir, move the other children out to the SimBin, and start over, rinse and repeat until you hit the quota number of generations.

The Obsession Legacy is an Alphabet Legacy, meaning that the quota is 26 and each child in each generation is alphabetically named with names starting with that letter. “A” generation babies are named Alice, Ashton, etc.; and B-generation babies are named Betsy, BooBoo, etc

The founder and any family members can remain untill they die from old age or are kicked out.

I applaud the hard work, Lucy. I’m just sure you started this last November, but this story is great. It’s sadly also unfinished, as she tends to play through the game to a point, pausing for photo moments.

Go to the address I gave in my last e-mail. No not that one! The other one! Go and vote if the vote opens.

Also be sure to read the Legacy story, if only for the crazy dialoge, chapters you can skipp, and what not.

Fraulein bosch devau? (trans: Oh ****, I’m doomed)

In the words of the great Shamus from Twenty Sided: “I have now acquired the tool through which I may orchestrate my own undoing. Behold, and despair:”

(Of course, it would have had more impact had I done this post two days ago… oh well. 🙂

Actually, I had an old copy of The Sims 2, but I have to get rid of it because Sims 2 Deluxe’s special Nightlife expansion is already hard-coded into the disk with its copy, so the two disks aren’t compatible.)

What in the name of all that is Arceus inspired me to go and risk my sanity with these Silly People? (Fraggle Rock reference, iirc) Well, several threads popped up on a place I like to frequent, the Let’s Play forum of the Something Awful Forums. (I recommend it to people who like video games, but don’t want to play them.)

These threads were play-throughs of The Sims 2, where the author asked people to contribute characters to the Sim Families that the author would make, and then the author would catalog what happened during the days of Sim Life. Well, they were really funny.

After I had to reinstall the game, I decided to ditch the families I had made. Somehow, I discovered a trick to getting a male Sim laid/engaged that is so ridiculously easy I’m surprised that none of the hardcore fans thought of it first… they probably did, but didn’t dare use it because it was “cheating” on the par of the cheat codes that Maxis itself put in the game as debug codes. The families I had ditched included two spectacled guys who had proposed marriage to dream women, including a man called “Ratchet”(yeah, the real Ratchet would probably bash my skull to pieces with his Omniwrench for making his human counterpart a sap) after using the “cheat” to get them to seduce the girls.

I started a “goon house” and watched two females and three males randomly generated from a fiction generator(not the Randomize function of the game itself, mind you) set fire to the kitchen and mope and gripe. Then I decided to create a storyline character, so I created a male in my image(50% in my image, and it has my real first name) and, after two Sim weeks, he had already made out passionately with two blonde women and gotten both to max relationship levels. I ended up having the Sim propose to the cooler woman, and then had him abducted by martians. (Sadly, the game didn’t get him pregnant – yeah, you read that right – and I had to cheat him into bearing a child.)

Chris, my Sim, now has had an affair, is almost ready to marry a sexy blonde with green glasses, has joined a couple of clubs, and is now nursing a baby alien boy.

The sick thing about it all is that I’m living through this Sim. I guess it’s an appropriate game for me, one where you can live out crazy romantic adventures with sexy women, seduce them(I saw the hot tub WooHoo cutscene, the engagement cutscene[thrice, see above], the alien abduction cutscene, and the baby birth scene[when Chris birthed his new son C.J. Max – thankfully the game is careful not to show actual birthing or I would get even more disgusted at being addicted to this) and even get pregnant as a guy, something many fanfiction writers love to do to male video game characters.

This must make me the craziest, nuttiest loser on the face of the god-green Earth. Pray for my dear corrupted soul, ladies and gents. Pray for it! 😦