Be Excellent To Each Other

Unshockingly, they're making a sequel to the sequel to the best selling game ever (or something).
So - who here is going to admit playing with an over-complicated tamagotchi?

/me puts hand up halfway, ready to pretend I'm scratching my head if no-one else comes forward

Never played any of them. They're for 12 year old girls.

Well, I certainly wouldn't vote for a twelve year old girl to be a Supamod.

I got the original. played it for a bit, got bored.

I've played both. I play them for a bit, then get bored, do a money-cheat, build a massive house, then get bored again. Not before seeing how many women my man can juggle (figuratively speaking) at once without going insane, mind. Then I get bored.

I played them both, didn't like them. My wife, however, loves them. So I know two things about The Sims 3.

1) - My wife will NEED it.

2) - Our PC won't be up to playing it.

I've played the Sims games a little (I can't remember which - it was on the XBox I think) but I got bored of having to shower/eat/pee/sleep/dance every three minutes - it made the game a drag.

I like My Sims though - I love the game to tiny little pieces, though the loading times make me and the Wii hamster power generator cry.

And that each task takes up an hour of in-game time, so your sim has to get up several hours before work, and is then too tired to do anything when they get home.

It's almost a requirement that you hire all the help services you can, and get another sim to do the cooking.

Hm. I'm coming across as having played this too much, aren't I?

The whole shower-pee-eat-sleep cycle thing is gone from the new version.

That'd definitely be an improvement - that was what completely ruined the Sims games as far as I was concerned.

I also do not like the voices and the fact that they all seem to just say 'shoo-shoor' all of the time.

once played Sims 2, and burned my house while cooking (must have got distracted while sexually harassing the maid).

Since i suspected i've seen the best the game had to offer, there was no reason to keep playing.

Only played My Sims on the DS, cute little game while it lasted, but I've not turned it on since.

Now, MySims on the Wii - that IS a game.

My Sims on the Wii and MySims on the DS are very different - the Wii version is huge - the amount that you can do is quite amazing.

Well I might pick it up next month when this is all over then, and the kids are still in school

Found the original SIMS game quite fascinating at first, but soon became bored/annoyed and found it was far more fun to find out fun ways to kill your Sims (ranging from the "classic" get a character in the swimming pool then remove the ladder so he can't get out - ho ho ! - to arranging all the furniture next to each in a domino-style fashion, starting a fire, and watching the ensuing chain reaction - ho ho again !).

I'm easily amused....

I tried the first one.
I like building houses, love it..but the people part bores me to tears.
The only amusement really lasted about ten minutes as I found new ways to kill these little people...

so whats making this version original or is the change in number and the losing of tasks enough?

The sims 2 could be fun, but it really depended on how you played it. It's rather telling that the manual gives you cheat codes for loads of money, for one thing - I first played it by injecting loads of cheat money into a house full of people, and as a result didn't get sick of having to babysit the useless numpties so they'd be in a mood to work, and instead had a house full of polyamorous artists and dangerous radicals, and had the entire house sleep with the hired bartender.

It can be fun. It can be a bore. It's a buggy pile of shit, but as long as you don't take it too seriously, the bugs can actually enhance the game simply because they make some amusingly weird and sometimes faintly creepy stuff happen (like the time a police car pulled up outside the house of Feh, and the officer got out and sprinted up to the door, and when someone went to open it, the policewoman and car froze and slowly faded into nothingness. Brrr).

Plus it's the one game that allows all insecure men to think and talk extensively about furnishing, fashion and interior decorating without having to worry about whether or not people will think they're gay. +2%.

I played the second one a bit, along with my housemates.

We each had a house. I can remember three amusing moments -

the first is when one of my housemates was playing, and then Mortimer (The old rich guy) came in and started making out with his man-sim. It took him somewhat by surprise (I'd spent part of the previous day starting that relationship). In the end, he ended up getting Mortimer to move in, stealing his millions of dollars and then chucking him out again.

Which leads to the second - Mortimers new house, Which was one wall and a sink. Lots of people came round to welcome him to his new house, wherupon they were greeted by an old man pissing himself and having a breakdown before collapsing on the floor.

And the third was changing the video files to a video of another housemate ineffectively chopping wood. So whenever TVs were turned on, this was what they watched. TVs were banned shortly afterwards. (Well, it was one of two videos, the other of which was Mortimer having his new housing issues.)

It wouldn't have worked if we weren't all playing in the same neighbourhood. But as it was, we found it all terribly amusing.

I did that new house thing. It was most amusing, not least as while living with nothing but a bed and a single piece of wall with a telephone at one end and a toilet on the other, he had no problems at all adopting a baby, which he quite happily left lying on the grass while he slept.

Oddly, when he was invited to move in with someone else, he left the baby behind.

Also that creepy old man in the red suit kept breaking into the house for the middle of the night to shout at us for no discernible reason.



It was a little alarming, especially when you're zoomed right in and turn the camera round and suddenly he's scowling in your face.

Then there was the time that two male sims got stuck in the rohypno-tub in a weird glitch that froze them permanently in place. I left them in the garden for a week or two as a rather macabre decorative piece, and then used a cheat code to delete it and see what happened. They disappeared for a few moments, and then re-appeared on the doorstep in their underwear, whereupon they both immediately fell over and died.

It's a weird game, but fun if you just fuck around and see how much you can break it, like all good toys.

Yes, he carried on doing that to all of us. Which is what gave me the idea in the first place. You expect Mortimer to appear and shout abuse. You don't expect him to appear and start making out with your sim. Particulary when said sims wife is watching.

Fuck me, you're making it sound awesome. I'm going to play it again now

Sims 3 is out on Friday.

I've preordered it

I know.

Ditto.

I haven't played the Sims since the first one. What's changed?

User content, not so based around needing to pee, you can get a taxi to work if you're late, work exists - it's not just a place off the screen, prettier, er... I'll tell you some more on Friday

They've gotten rid of the linear sliders for mood and personality etc. too, apparently. Now mood is dictated by specific things happening, not your rooms not having enough plants, and personality is chosen by picking a few adjectives from a monstrous list rather than adding points to a limited number of sliders.

8/10 in Edge this month. They also gave Fuel 8/10 too.

8/10 on Eurogamer.

off topic to the thread, but is there a decent sized fifa 2010 article in that issue?

Aw man, you'd have to ask now when I've just finished having a poo... I'll look later when the need arises again.

I really like The Sims, but my computers barely run The Sims 2, so this would undoubtedly bugger them to death.

Is there a nudey mosaic-remove-o-patch yet?

You'd have to wait until someone makes skins that actually have genitals, or you just end up with barbie doll eunuchs. And knowing nerds, the chances of more than 5% of these skins having pubic hair are slim. And the chances of all the men not being mutilated are comparably poor.

It's not so much that I want to see minge and wangs, but I do find it a bit ludicrous that a huge, obtrusive mosaic appears whenever someone goes to have a shower or bath.

I remember Helen's tattoo mag Skin Deep were complaining about the fact that now they publish in 'merica, they have to blur out arse cracks and even nipples on tattoos of nekkid wimmin.

It's even more weird seeing naked people with no nipples, and disturbingly featureless groins.

Also, normal looking people are funnier:

I found that having this huge pointless blur appearing and disappearing was more jarring than the split second glimpse of nippleless boobs/partsless groins that you got in the first two games as someone emerged from the shower.

I mean, given it's Barbie Doll nudity, why is it censored? Do the sort of people who demand this sort of thing make their children bathe in the dark or something, lest they glimpse their own naked bodies and be FOREVER CORRUPTED?

Actually, I already know the answer to that. And the answer is Janet Jackson.

Ha, fair point. I just found it weird having people with nothing going on down under. A mosaic removal thing will probably appear immediately - it'll be a tiny bit of code set to on/off, I'd imagine.

Puritanism, eh? What a load of old cunt.

Indeed. Why make something if you don't intend to actually show it? Japanese porn industry, I'm looking at you.

It's censored because Maxis thought it would be visually funny. At least, that's always been my assumption.

And because they wanted to sell the game in the states.

My copy has been despatched. I am such a girl.

Also, free trial of Amazon Prime, so it's guaranteed to be here tomorrow. I am such a girl.

More of the same so far. Haven't explored anywhere yet. I wish time was a bit slower, seeing as cooking meals still takes an hour — there just isn't room to do anything. I should probably have made a wife. I will woo the maid and get her to cook for me.

You haven't made lesbians? You fail at the Sims.

Have they implemented laundry yet? And the cooking thing is a bit daft, a lot of things (that need to go into the oven for a long time) don't force you to sit there the whole time... you could always sit in the kitchen and play on your DS or read a book or something.

I never do at first, for some reason.



I don't think they've implemented laundry. There's general cleaning of your house, though. Cooking still seems to force you to stand by the oven for X amount of time, and takes way, way too long. I haven't tried doing anything else, mind. I'll have a go in a minute.

The moodlets are good, as well as opportunities and achievements.

I'm "purchasing" a copy at the moment.

There's a Lifetime Rewards system in place — I don't know if this was in Sims 2. You get Lifetime Happiness Points for achieving things, which you then spend on Lifetime Rewards — they seem to be little bonuses to your abilities, like being able to go longer without needing the toilet, being able to clean faster etc.

Seems promising.

Er... you've always been able to leave something cooking and have your Sim do something else, with the usual result that the food is overcooked or indeed bursts into flames (as roast vegetables and meatloaf and such ALWAYS DO when you leave them in the oven five minutes too long, OBVIOUSLY). What I was saying is that it's stupid that the GAME forces a Sim to stand there or the food is practically guaranteed to ruin instantly when in real life many dishes are set in motion and then you don't need to attend to them constantly.

I agree the clock goes too quickly - it always does, especially when a Sim tantrums pointlessly over how tired/uncomfortable/bored it is when you're trying to fucking direct it to a bed/recliner/game system. I also felt the lifespan thing introduced in The Sims 2 was a bit short - it seemed impossible to teach babies to walk, talk and potty in the limited time (three or four days?) you had before they became proper children. Is that aging thing still the same?