Let's face it, The Sims2 came out in 2004 (thanks jade). That's approximately 4 years ago. For someone who has been with the game since its debut, eventually there are only so many times you can reach the top of a career or have a sim have ten children or mysteriously lose a pool ladder. So what do you do when you reach the point where keeping happy little sims perfectly made and played becomes stale?
For some, the answer is to play challenges. I've tried challenges. I actually played an Alphabet family through to the eleventh generation, before they added those silly rules about having three children each generation, etc. I've played a legacy through to the fifth generation. But in challenges, I always feel like I'm playing towards someone else's goals and ideals. When I have to kill off a certain sim just to get a full set of colors of ghosts, there's something wrong with the world. Really. Think of the pixels, people!
There's really three options at the point where the game becomes routine. You break from the game completely, you turn to custom content creation, or you do everything you can to mix things up. Well, I like the game too much to break from it. I'm mediocre at custom content creation, and am really only inspired to create what I need for a given situation. So what did I do? I basically stopped making the big choices in my sims' lives. I use a program called Random Stuff made by Hook. It's a really simple program that you can use to code decisions into. I use it to roll aspirations, name babies, answer yes or no questions, pick turn-ons and turn-offs, even to pick base face templates and genetics for CAS sims.
So let's take a particular sim. When this sim is born, I use Random Stuff to give me a name. Name - Ocean. Ocean will be a Fortune sim who likes vampires and cologne, and doesn't care for fat sims. Ocean would like to go after the Law career line, but he is not allowed to go to college, meaning that he can't be in that career line unless he works in it as a teen (I have a hack that tightens career requirements).
It's through this randomization that I get sims like Bastion and Brionna. Honestly, I don't really care for Pleasure sims. I don't care for repetitive lifetime wants like dating X sims. But that's what I got, so that's what I played. And they did grow on me, much more than yet another family sim who marries their highschool sweetheart and proceeds to pop out a few babies and top the Business career track.
Monday, March 3, 2008
Keeping things fresh
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
Excellent post, Zazazu. Excellent. I just wrote a post about Simprov, which is how I keep the Sims rut at bay. It's in Backtalk on my site.
I do find that randomness really makes Simming interesting, which is why I created the ROS (that is now rolled into the Randomizer). Using Die to roll different outcomes can make for great play.
Playing this way mean I always have something going on and I never know how it is going to end.
By the way, the Sims 2 came out September 2004. Still, long enough.
Finding ways to keep the game fresh is like a game unto itself. After getting over a Sims 1 addiction, I actually resisted going near Sims 2 until 2006, and even with my late start at it, I'm already bored with the careers, LTWs & permaplat Sims.
I'm enjoying reading your blog a lot, I like the mix of story and gameplay discussion.
Post a Comment