Fun With Sims 2

Kenshu left a comment that he wasn’t in WoW last night because original Sims ate his brain until he experienced that “uh oh, I’ve been playing this HOW many hours?” type feeling.

A feeling I know all too well . . . because last night I also bailed out of WoW to go play Sims 2. I was just not having a good day with the twitch. Too many premature deaths, too little interest. In SWG when that happened I’d go off and decorate houses or craft things or just chat with people but in WoW, although there’s socializing, there’s only twitch combat, or helping others through twitch combat, and I was more in the mood for rearranging things and taking long afk breaks.

Earlier that day Sims was being discussed at rlmmo, and in response to a thread where some guys came up with some lame sentiments like “who cares, that’s just a chick game” (uh, actually it’s the biggest selling computer game ever), and “all there is to do in Sims is download perverted mods” (yes, you can download anatomically “correct” sims and make your own sim porn if you’re that special kind of user, although my extensive sim modding has led me to believe sim pornographers aren’t anywhere near a major part of the user base).

Once when I was playing Sims Online I ran into a girl who said something like “yeah, I had the original sims. And I built a house, and made the perfect family to live in it. And then I got bored because there was nothing else to do.”

See, I don’t mind the fact that people with no imagination exist, I just find it sort of annoying when they go around insisting they’re normal and denying that the rest of us exist. Or running game companies. Or running their mouths, period. Because really, compared to people with imagination, they're very dull.

So, in that particular thread, I benevolently posted my instructions for making a great haunted house in Sims 2, which sort of leads to this compilation of weird Sims 2 tips, because I’m playing again and need my memory refreshed, and because Kenshu said he’s getting into it, and because I haven’t played out WoW yet but it’s not as consuming/addictive as it was a couple months ago.

The Ultimate Haunted Sim House

1. Make or download a residence for your ghosts, which can be a standard haunted house, or just temporary buildings for committing your murders. Note that you can have a graveyard/simetary as a community lot, and you can batch move all the tombstones there. Simetaries are great for picnics and first dates, especially for knowledge sims that get points from seeing ghosts. However, you need to do the actual killing on a residence lot, not a community one.

2. Create or download sims of dead people, or people you wish were dead. I mentioned having ghosts of Elvis and Jimi Hendrix haunting one of my older neighborhoods. Other good choices: knights in armor, people in old fashioned clothes, skeletons, demons.

3. Try to get one ghost of each type of death – the ghosts have special animations depending on what killed them.

Drowning is easy, just take away the swimming pool ladder.

Put a sim in a fenced off enclosure full of cheap armchairs and a BBQ for a quick and easy death by fire, but beware, ghosts of sims who burned to death often start fires themselves.

If you want the sim to starve, just don’t put anything else in the fenced off enclosure. Takes about three sim days.

A sim can die of overwork if she’s got the employee morale raising skill and tries to use it when her motives are too low. If you don’t feel like putting a sim all the way through running a successful business just so you can kill it, move it into a house with a successful business sim who can teach the skill.

Death by elevator is difficult to achieve and only happens when the elevator breaks while the sim riding in it has low motives. It’s so rewarding when it finally does happen though.

Have a sim with no mechanical skill try to fix a broken appliance and you may get death by electrocution. This can also happen when you get struck by lightning or fly the Evil Kite (these are sometimes accidentally made with the toy making machine).

Have your lazier sims just sit around staring at the clouds and or stars and eventually a chunk of satellite debris will fall on them and kill them. The debris, which perpetually emits a stream of smoke, is a cool decorative item too. See my section on cloning items if you’d like to make a bunch of them.

EA has an official downloadable pair of scissors. You can have a sim run with scissors until accidentally stabbing himself to death.

Death by flies is awesome. Build a maze, put in a sim and a fridge and have the sim snack on potato chips until there’s trash every where. Then run the gauntlet through the trash filled maze until the flies get together and sting the sim to death.

Make your sim eat spoiled food until coming down with food poisoning, then force it to run around until it collapses.

Note that you can’t starve kids, teens and pets, the authorities will just come to take them away if they get too hungry. You can burn them though. And kids and teens drown just as well as adults.

If you feel guilty about being a psychopathic sim killer, have one of your college educated sims enter the paranormal field (which requires a degree, unlike medicine or science). The career reward is a special phone that lets you call the Grim Reaper and bring deceased sims back to life.

But if you’d rather have them stay dead, a haunted house or a haunted simetary makes a great tourist attraction.

Sim Genes

I went all the way to ten generations and couldn’t get any sims to inherit anything besides the eyes/hair color/skin of their parents. Personality is also inherited. Sometimes all the kids in one family will have the same personality, sometimes they’ll each get something different from the parents. I experimented with all kinds of skin and eye colors though and couldn’t get one to skip a generation.

You can breed large sim dogs to small ones, but the family tree won’t show the different sized ancestors. Breeding animals is a big pain because they have to be friends with each other before they’ll make puppies or kittens and often a pet will die of old age before bothering to make friends with another pet. If you fence the animal pair in their own separate pen with food and beds, they’ll be forced to get all their social needs from each other and usually will become friends, although sometimes they end up hating each other instead.

Cloning the Inanimate

Some sim items, like satellite debris, are a pain in the neck to replace and some, like diplomas, can't be replaced. However, if you want a bunch of them, here's what you do.

Get a house with the item in it, and a sim. This sim will die. If you don't want it to, move in a disposable sim and move the real sim out to a safer residence.

Kill your disposable sim using any of the above methods. Now you have an empty house full of furniture.

Go into the neighborhood and put that house in the building inventory. You can now put down all the copies of it that you want. Move a sim into the copied houses, snagging the desired item and putting it in her inventory. Repeat until you have enough of them. Then move the collector sim into the house where you want all the items and remove them from inventory.

Sims Without Humans

My last sims neighborhood was a huge sprawling place with lots of characters roaming around. I used to like to leave the game running all night so they could have random interactions. I’d come back and find them with new friends and enemies, occasionally love affairs.

I did this by making a sim bum. Whatever sim you use will go a little bit crazy from the simulated abuse you’re about to put them through, and I thought this was perfectly in character for a sim wino, wandering through the park ranting with a permanent bad personal hygeine cloud surrounding him.

Next you need a community lot. It’s best not to have one that needs a lot of employees because they tend to leave when they get tired. Parks work great, especially if they’ve got a lot of things that tempt the sims to interact with each other, like hot tubs. Put a coffee stand and a bar in the park. The coffee keeps the sims from collapsing due to exhaustion, the bar keeps them from dying of starvation. You’ll also probably need a bathroom with a shower, although your main sim probably won’t use it too often.

Have your sim visit the community lot. Then go to work, or sleep, or out to the movies or some other place IRL. When you come back, your main sim will be a foul tempered, ranting mess. Take them home so they can shower and sleep and eat (in preparation for another fun night on the town). This saves all the interactions that happened while you were AFK.

Then check out one of your regular sims, who probably visited the park to socialize with other sims while you weren’t watching. They probably have many new acquaintances, along with some new friends and enemies and possibly even lovers.

If making your lot-visiting sim suffer is just too cruel for your tastes, you can get modded items from places like simslice.com that will either let your sims restore all their motives to full green in a special shower, or you can get a burglar-alarm-like device for the wall that will keep all the sims on the property happy until you get back.

Fun With Cheating

I’ve decided not to use mods on my current game, but there are a few cheats built into the game that make life much easier. To open the cheat enabling window, do Ctrl+Shift+C. You’ll get a prompt at the top of the screen.

aging off
Will make all your sims stay the same age forever (note they can’t have babies, kittens or puppies with aging turned off, although they can conceive them).

aging on
Makes aging resume, and I’ve also had it reset everyone’s age timer all the way back.

If you want to make only some of your sims stay young, use the aspiration reward water cooler, which dispenses elixir of life that will turn their timer back. There is also pet food of life for any pets whose lifespans you want to extend.

moveObjects on
Will let you override the game mechanic that restricts you from placing or removing items. With this enabled, you can do things like place windows and doors independent of walls, put cars all over the property so your sims can run a used car lot, use floor tiles on all squares of the property, place trees and other objects outside the property, delete dirty dishes and homework, move the invisible portals that make neighboring sims walk onto your lot, make flowerbeds with several layers of flowers, and so on. Careful, you can also move sims with this enabled, which might end up scrambling their relationships or histories. However, if one gets stuck somewhere (like in an elevator) this is sometimes the only way you can get them out.

moveObjects off
Disables it.

kaching
Grants one thousand simoleons.

motherlode
Grants fifty thousand simoleons.

I’m trying to avoid money cheats in my current game but the other night I had a sim from a rich family that I wanted to move into a house I created just for him. The house cost $30k, and new sims all start with only $20k, so I could have spent an hour playing him in a starter house earning the cash, but instead I went ahead and cheated. His family can afford it. One way to get around money cheats, though, is to make several single-person families and then move them into the same lot. If you don’t want the extra sims after the cash has been consolidated, you could always make ghosts . . .

There are many, many other built-in cheats, including ones that let you change sim height (all sims default to the same height), adjust the TV volume, change a lot’s zoning specification (useful when making dorms or greek houses). There’s one that lets you turn off the limits when making sim faces, so you can come up with exaggerated caricature-type features. You can give birth to some extremely monstrous-looking sims using this though. Try searching for Sims boolprop if you’re interested.

And this is not really cheating, but there’s a way to put your own music files in the game, so if the simlish version of the Pussycat Dolls’ timeless hit “Don’tcha Wish Your Girlfriend Was Hot Like Me” gets on your nerves you can replace it with something else. I had this going in my original sims game, where all the sims were forced to dance to songs performed by my last RL band.

Fun With Building

I really hate sim garages.

That’s because in Sims 2, the houses can have foundations. However, there is no way to attach a “with foundation” section to a “without foundation” section, although by spending a long time monkeying around with elevation and “moveobjects on” you can often get pretty close.

In order to have a garage, you need a driveway and a driveway extension (which goes inside the garage), and the door can only go between the two. The driveway and extension can only go on the ground floor, “without foundation.” So if you have a garage with a garage door, it won’t link up to the main house if it’s built on a foundation. And not only that, but garages/driveways can only go on the left hand side of a property due to the driveway’s orientation.

Which means that if you’re looking at the first floor of a house with a foundation, the (adjoining but not attached) garage will have its walls all the way up, thus getting in your way and blocking your view.

Some ways around this: build car ports instead of garages (great, then you can’t use the garage door). Or build a house with no foundation. Which is bad because it will be prone to bugs. However, it can be good for raising puppies, because puppies can’t climb down stairs, which means if you have puppies in a foundationless house you have to get a sim to carry them outside to pee. Doesn’t apply to kittens, they use litterboxes.

You can also use terrain warping cheats and techniques to make a driveway that descends into a sunken garage, I’ve seen this done but have never attempted it myself. I’ve also seen it done to make arched roofs. I do know that you can pull a wall into many interesting shapes by modifying the terrain around it after building it,

You can also put down just a driveway and an extension, then use moveObjects on to cover them with floor tile that looks like dirt or grass, something I did with a car modded to look like an antique horse and wagon.

Elevated pools can be fun. First you need to elevate the ground where the pool goes. Build your pool, then use the terrain tool to drag the ground down so that the water is exposed. By combining this with moveObjects on and spray-on terrain I’ve seen people make cool looking lakes and waterfalls that sims can swim in. I used it to make an aquarium-theater in my zoo, surrounding it with a wall with plate glass windows set in it and theater seats, so an appreciative audience could watch my mermaid and lizard sims swim around.

You can make basements, but getting them to line up is a pain and so is maneuvering the camera so you can see inside them. These days instead I prefer underground lakes, so my sims can go down in the basement and catch a catfish for dinner.

Indoor gardens are a piece of cake. Build house. Remove one wall panel (might have to remove some foundation too if your house has one). Make garden. Replace wall panel. Don’t forget to water them!

Sim Reflections

For those who have never played, Sims is more like a Lego set than a game. Although there are “games” within it, play mainly consists of building houses and managing the lives of the simulated people who live in them. As such, what you do with Sims is limited only by your imagination. You can do machima movies, storyboard “comic strip” type stories, you can build houses or design sims (or their clothes and hairstyles), you can make clones of your friends and family and run their lives the way you think it should be done, you can experiment with different color schemes and furniture arrangements for your RL house, you can focus all activity on one main sim or family of them or you can just sort of do what model railroad enthusiasts do: build a big intricate model and sit back watching it run.

That’s kind of how I play it. I’ve always got it in the back of my mind that I’m going to eventually make a fabulous machinima movie with it but the fact that hasn’t happened doesn’t keep me from building elaborate sets in case some day I wake up inspired.

Sims2 is the game I left Star Wars Galaxies for, the first time. I took three months out of SWG when it launched, only to get frustrated with bugs, so I went back to SWG, upgraded my machine and then resumed simming once SWG was no longer holding my interest (on more than one occasion I found myself playing Sims2 while my forlorn SWG avatar stood idly in a field).

Then, around the time I was considering leaving SWG for WoW, I got caught up on the Sims 2 expansions. I think I’m missing a Christmas collection one but I have Pets, Seasons, the one with the shopping district, the one with the downtown district, the college one and a “mini-expansion” with upscale furniture (the mini-expansions are slightly cheaper than the regular expansions and add only items rather than modifying the game, I believe there might be more out there or pending release or something).

Amazingly, I’m still not bored with it. It’s the only game that’s managed to hold my attention for this long, and indeed, it changed me from the kind of person who would get a strategy or quest type game, play it until I beat all the scenarios or got all the way through the quest, then toss it aside and never play it again to a gamer that sticks to one particular franchise, replaying it endlessly until it’s time for a traumatic breakup. I’m not going to blame this entirely on Sims, it also has to do with the gaming industry’s move toward console and MMO games rather than the standalone PC games I’ve always preferred. But these days my preferences are to have only one or two games going, three at the most, so I can switch around from button mashing action to building things, or whatever else I’m in the mood for.

Sims has a mindboggling amount of user-made content available. I went hog wild on this with my original sims, which grew into a bloated surrealistic nightmare, with streets where you might run into Xena or George Bush or Osama Bin Laden or Hitler or Tupac or Luke Skywalker or Britney Spears or whatever celebrity had my attention at the moment. I had mods for everything, including a particularly detailed one where you could customize every sim in the game as far as job, name, appearance and so on, so my city police dressed like Star Wars stormtroopers, and downtown was full of gangbangers and crack hoes,

I followed the same path when I switched to Sims 2 but a couple of things happened. First, because Sims 2 is just more demanding from a graphics standpoint, a bloated game takes forever to load. And second, I picked up a nasty power gaming habit from my final adventures with Star Wars Galaxies. Leveling in that game was so godawful boring that I just got in the habit of letting my mind wander while repetitiously performing whatever task would get me to the next stage and it became an activity sort of like knitting, or factory work.

So, to this day I tend to approach games with a “what will it take to get me to the coveted endgame the fastest?” type of attitude, something I’m consciously trying to break when playing Sims2. Still, I frequently catch myself fastforwarding sims through their dull lives in pursuit of some promotion or financial goal while utterly neglecting aesthetics and socializing and serendipity and “playing” the game rather than “trying to win it.”

That attitude is probably why I was the guild’s first level 70 in WoW (it also helps that WoW combat is pretty easy compared to what I’m used to). However, in WoW there’s really nothing to do besides try to win the game (i.e. chase after high levels, cash and goods), other than helping others trying to win the game. It’s not like you can build and furnish houses or be creative or anything. It’s a puzzle game, and in fact I like it when my guildies get into riddle competitions and the like, because there are so many of us that really enjoy puzzles.

But right now I’m getting sort of bored with endlessly slaughtering murlocs, and while I don’t intend to leave WoW or give up working on my priest, who is now level 48, I’m slowly rebuilding my sim metropolis, and I’m quite pleased with it so far.