Sims 2: Bon Voyage (a review)

Sims 2: Bon Voyage is a lot like the vacation expansion for original Sims, so maybe next in store are Sims 2 version of the Hollywood and Magic expansions, a couple of my favorites. You get a new annexed neighborhood, or actually three of them if you go with the defaults, which I did.

Unlike previous additional neighborhoods your sims can sleep there (note: there are hacked beds on download sites that will let you put beds that can be slept in anywhere in case you want to build a hotel in your main town or keep your overworked sims on the job longer). They get there by scheduling a vacation on the phone. They can take neighbors but they will be passive vacation partners similar to dates. They can also take family members, who are controllable and not passive. If they have babies or pets they need to either move in a housesitter or hire the nanny to stay with them.

It looks like all the new furniture is mainly for the vacation area, but there are some wall and floor textures that can be used anywhere, and to my delight, the grand piano (in both black and white) is included and can go in any type of lot. There are extra large hot tubs surrounded by boulders and steam. There are some new games, log spinning and mah jong (which can also be played for money, giving gambling sims something to do besides sit at the card table, but I still miss the slot machine from Sims 1, can't have a proper casino without those). There are a few new hairstyle meshes and outfits. Also, sims can wear jewelry now – rings, bracelets, necklaces, earrings and facial piercings. And the “turn ons/turn offs” have been expanded to include skills and all the nonhuman varieties – vampires, werewolves, zombies, and something intriguing involving humanoid plants, so sims can now harbor desires for sims who are logical, or creative, or good cooks, or robots, or werewolves.

I like this feature because I had sort of an issue with the turn ons/turn offs in the first place. I like to let my sims run for long periods of time unattended just to see what happens, and they were striking up all too many extracurricular romances, which can be cute depending on the sim, but the last thing I want is to come back to a bunch of sims harboring major crushes on the robots, or happily married sims getting busy with half the town. So most of the time I didn’t use them, or cued them to seldom used functions like formal wear and cologne. Except for party animal sims, who were all set to turn on to swimsuits and either beards or makeup, making lots of exciting drama after turning them loose on the beach or in college dorms with pools.

I do have a major gameplay gripe though. As I mentioned before, I had a simpocalypse when I forgot to backup my neighborhood before uninstalling the version of Pets that I got from the horrible, buggy, intrusive, pain in the neck digital downloader from EBX, which I will never use again, and installing a second version I purchased because I hated the downloader so much. So while I know my previous version of Jackalope Valley is hidden somewhere on my computer, I took the opportunity to start from scratch, because my previous town was full of custom content, and I blamed it for the fact the game was taking forever to load and I was getting occasional blue screen crashes that would restart the computer when changing lots.

So at the moment, other than a handful of custom colored skins, I have no non-EA custom content except for one item: a hacked burglar alarm that gives every sim on the lot maximum motives. I restored this item after having major trouble building a business up to level 10 for a sim who needs five of them for her lifetime want. Now I can just force everyone to stay at work until their business is successful, even if it takes a week, but since they have max motives they don’t really mind. This thing is also wonderful for making sims movies, because you don’t have to get your whole cast green before you shoot a scene. Also for “leave it running all night long and come back to see how people are getting along” simming, especially now that they will be a little pickier about who they fall in love with.

This new expansion has convinced me that it wasn’t my mods that were making the game lock up, because the bluescreen crashes are even more frequent, especially in vacation land. I get one with about ever third or fourth lot change, although things are perfectly stable if I stay on the same lot. However, the point of vacation is to change lots frequently, unless you’re one of those lazy tourists that never leaves the hotel. The game does save when it does that, so it’s not as annoying as it could be, but it still is frustrating. No doubt something’s overloading the RAM in the visual department and I suppose I could go through the long boring chore of tweaking the video settings to see if that could make it stop. I’m peeved about this though. My computer’s not all that wimpy, it’s got dual processors and a lot of RAM and a pretty good video card. Unless this is a bug that EA can patch, I’d recommend people with slower computers bypass this expansion until they upgrade.

But at the same time, I’m glad the mods weren’t causing the problem, and I’m looking forward to putting some of them back so that my neighborhood can once again have humvees and Twi’leks with lightsabers and some of the other bizarre touches I had going on pre-simpocalypse.

As I’ve mentioned before, my MMO habit has turned me into an unrepentant power gamer with regard to Sims. Most other Sims players I talk to have a main family or two and invest a certain amount of personality in their main sims. As for me, I have a hard time “bonding” with individual sims (which makes it relatively easy to do things like killing them off just so I’ll have a complete collection of ghosts). So I like to have a big town with lots of specialized buildings. I’m only partially rebuilt from my previous masterpiece – although this time I’m being more careful about zoning, so that all the main buildings can be captured in a screenshot and all the shops and residences and civic buildings are in their own areas. In addition to houses and buildings, I’ve got a stadium, a city hall, a concert hall, a zoo, a cruise ship, a tropical island, a couple of farms and a laboratory so far. On the “to build” list: a cathedral, a police station, a hospital, an army base, a couple of schools, and the rest of the shopping district, which so far has a toy store, a gym, a grocery store and a clothes shop. And a bunch of houses and apartment buildings (and a trailer park) inhabited by forgettable sims who only exist to keep the dating pool large.

My main legacy family pretty much fast forwards through achieving their lifetime goals and popping out the next generation just before retiring. They haven’t done this yet because I came up with a sim whose lifetime goal is “five top-rated businesses,” and since getting those business without cheating is ridiculously complicated, I’m having other sims start the businesses and then sell them to legacy sim. So far I’ve got four out of the five I need.

What I’d really like is a static house with a non-aging sim family in it, where I can just focus on the details, but I can’t seem to pull that off without being tempted to max their skills out, breed them and then move on. So I actually had trouble finding sims to send on vacation, especially sims with kids.

Fortunately I have one that seems to have a little more personality than most: blonde bimbo Lorelei Lye, hack journalist turned disbarred lawyer turned con artist, who returned to the field of journalism and is now a media magnate. So I sent her to two of the three vacation spots to report back.

There are three vacation spots, based on Hawaii, Asia and a mountainous place sort of like Colorado or Canada. I haven’t gotten to that last one yet, although I understand they have log rolling and sasquatches. Plus you can make your own all inclusive vacation destination, which no doubt I will end up doing.

Sim Hawaii is a great place, just like real Hawaii. The landscaping outside the lots has a lot of rocky lava coastline, making it look more like the big island than Waikiki Beach. Finally, an appropriate place to reconstruct the sim version of the Moana Surfrider that I built a couple of simpocalypses ago, maybe even with the Royal Hawaiian next to it (a lot of people don't like Waikiki but I've got a particular fondness for those two hotels due to my fascination with weird old-ish buildings; last time I was there I spent a week in the Surfrider hoping time travelers would wander along and zap me back fifty years so I could watch little Shirley Temple learn to surf or something).

Sim Asia has a Japanese name but some of the other buildings look a little more Chinese, and the food is Japanese. There are some great new building elements that add to the effect, including a tea ceremony tray and a rake-able sand patch.

All the vacation spots are populated by randomly spawned locals. In Sims tradition, the random NPCs are ethnically diverse. So this means there are lots of blondes with European names cast as kimono-wearing Asians, and similar multicultural weirdness. This kind of thing used to seriously bother me in Sims 1, and I actually bought a mod that would let me customize all the NPCs, so I could have a downtown populated by rastas and drag queens and hookers and cops and suits and skateboarders and hiphoppers and muslims and yuppie joggers, instead of having to fit randomly generated African-American guys with blonde heavy metal hairstyles and Indian names wearing glittery disco shirts with army fatigue pants and similar people into my simulated world. Plus I had sims of my most and least favorite celebrities wandering through the Hollywood section, and at any moment you could run into George Bush and Osama Bin Laden having a fistfight in the local convenience store, or a local beat cop wearing Star Wars stormtrooper armor, or Mulder and Scully chilling at the alien-themed diner, or Xena and Gabrielle pawing over the merchandise at the flea market.

I haven’t seen a similar mod for Sims 2 yet, and unlike Sims 1, where if you killed the NPCs they went away forever, in Sims 2 they repopulate, which means you could get ten different sims named “Goopy Gray” or “Sandy Bruty” (I take it the names are salutes to people who worked on the game) wearing mismatched clothes and bizarre hair. I mean, I’m all for diversity, but sometimes the utter randomness makes it look like my sim town is a lunatic refuge full of people I’d never see in real life, people who wear baseball caps with their evening gowns and blonde cornrows with their cowboy shirts and fifties skirts with eighties hair.

Once you figure out who is a local and who is just another tourist, you can talk to them and learn the greeting of their native land, which for the island sims is the “hang loose” and for Asian sims is the bow. When you first acquire the greetings your sim is very sloppy with them but the more they practice, the smoother they get.

There are also some mini-games hidden in the vacation destinations. One is to collect points based on what you learn while exploring – new massage techniques, greetings, exploring ruins, and so on. I guess you get something marvelous if you complete them all but I’m not there yet.

Another one has to do with hidden lots. I found one last night while sending Lorelei on a tour of Asia. After doing a tour with a tourguide (during a tour your sim vanishes off camera for an hour, then you get a dialogue box with a choice similar to the ones that happen connected with work), you have a random chance of getting a map. I got a map, which led me to a secret temple on a hill populated by an Old Man, which gave me a small SWG flashback.

The Old Man challenged me to find an emote that he wanted me to do. I’m not going to give it away but it’s not too tough to figure out, and after I got it, he told me a little story as dramatized in an animated window above his head, and gave me an item I could use to tell the same story to others. Now THAT part was great, and got me right into that “suspension of reality” effect that is probably why I’m fascinated with these games in the first place.

There are a couple of extremely cool new props. One is a pirate ship (you can buy them at home too). It’s full sized and there is a whole submenu of emotes you can do – fence with a dummy on the main deck, steer the wheel, climb the rigging, hoist the jolly roger. The other is an actual swimmable beach, with waves, which is something I’ve wanted for long time (and have frequently approximated with pools adjacent to water, with lilypads and reeds and hacked textures to hide the seams).

Sims can also enjoy local food, like ramen or teriyaki mahimahi. They can dig for treasure and rake sand and have tea ceremonies. When Lorelei went to the island she got a suntan, darkening her skintone for a few days after. She also got what I’d call “buffs” in WoW – a little selection of post vacation mods to choose from that do things like increase learning or improve relationships with other sims.

If it weren’t for the operating problems I’d say that this is my favorite Sims expansion yet just based on the swimmable beach and the storytelling item.

I think one of my issues with Sims lately is just the amount of time it takes. Sort of similar to WoW – heading into an instance means you’re stuck there for a couple of hours. SWG instances were much shorter, you could get through them in maybe forty-five minutes. In Sims 1, you could put up a house, decorate it and fill it with sims relatively fast. But with the amount of customization in Sims 2 (earrings? nose ring? formal hairstyle? zodiac sign? life goal? winter outfit?) and the greater detail in the houses, it takes much, much longer to get a starter sim going, and usually by then I’m bored or falling asleep. Sad, because what I like to do most is make starter sims. Or because I’ll pull up a sim family intending to get them all a new outfit and realizing that I also need to paint their interior walls, landscape their lawn, train their dog so it’ll stop running into the coffee shop and eating the furniture, and uh oh, looks like dad’s got a crush on one of the robots, better break that off before he and his wife are beating each other up in the supermarket.

Then it reminds me more of the housework I’m busy avoiding by playing video games. And if I’m going to do housework I might as well turn the computer off.

I realize that a lot of my annoyance could be avoided by just using the pre-made sim houses and businesses but I really don’t like a lot of the premade lots. First of all, it’s obvious that a lot of the time they’re just like me, drawing a big blank and leaving large sections unfinished. And I don’t blame them, because it can take a couple of hours to get the exterior looking good and by then you don’t feel like doing anything at all to the interior, and then spending another hour creating a sim and establishing its career and friendship ties turns it from a few pleasant minutes of gaming to a list of chores.

Also, I tend to give my sims lots of room, because I don’t like the screen looking too cluttered or having palm trees and columns and things blocking my view so I can’t find small things on the floor, like plates and dog toys. So a lot of my buildings look bulky and blocky next to the premades. Pre-simpocalypse I had a mixture of premade lots, downloaded lots and ones I built and it was visually a little distracting, not to mention I didn’t really like playing the premades for the above reasons.

To me a perfect sim building is one where you can see the whole interior in a longshot, without obstructions (those go in the back, or on the side), without having to chase individual sims all over the property, or move furniture around every time they get trapped, or go into overhead camera mode to discover the reason none of them will go upstairs is that a book from the bookshelf is lying on the floor tile at the base of the stairway. It looks different from all the other buildings – why do ya think I live in San Francisco rather than some housing development where there are two or three blueprints and a palette of exactly six colors approved by the homeowners’ association (*breaks into cold sweat at the thought*). It reflects the personality of the inhabitants – no grand pianos in my trailer park please, and I don’t think my artist sim would want a retro floral wallpaper that looks like it belongs in Archie and Edith Bunker’s house. Ideally, if I ever get off my butt and do storyboards or movies, I can get five or six shooting locations in the same lot – garden, living room, front porch, backyard, etc.

Anyway, sometimes I’d just like to start Sims up and run it for an hour or so without stressing out over too many choices. I’d like to just send a sim to college without feeling like I should make them an assortment of classmates or worrying that they’ll fall in love with an NPC who dresses funny – I’d like to customize the NPCs and give them their own look and personality -- or give them all Village of the Damned glowing eyes, or make the people who live in Asian vacation land look like Asians. Or open a restaurant without feeling like now I have to make a full assortment of waitpersons and buspersons and their houses.

I’d like to see pre-made suites of rooms. There’s a sauna in Bon Voyage that I adore, especially since I’ve painstakingly built two or three saunas already, improvised with EA stock furniture. What if there were bathrooms, or kitchens, or bedrooms, that you could just snap in and recolor with a few mouse clicks before you’re good to go? What if you could group a series of props so that you could instantly put down a couch with endtables and coffee tables and TV and lamp and a magazine on the coffee table and a console game by the TV, and repeat that for several houses? Or save rooms the same way you save an entire lot?

One of my favorite shortcuts has been the apartment building, and sometimes I furnish the apartments but usually not, as long as there’s a bed, a kitchen, a bathroom and a phone they’ll be fine. I can keep the apartment building in memory and place as many of them as I need to house sims that I want wandering around my world yet don’t necessarily want to play. Another is the cheat house, which contains nothing on the interior except one of those hacked burglar alarms and a phone, but the exterior looks great. And there’s the bot house, which requires no living accommodations whatsoever and is inhabited by a single robot. And the one room shack, where the wino used to live when I didn’t have him keeping the park open all day while I was working.

Of course, I could blame all this impatience on the fact that MMOs have warped my brain and turned me into a total power gamer, and I should just learn to relax and slowly piddle around with the same old sim family for a long time, like everyone else. I’m having similar issues in WoW, where getting a toon to 70 just makes me want to get a new toon to 70, while all my friends are enjoying focusing their skill building on just one. Maybe it has to do with the fact that I’ve been playing Sims for years and years and have built a great many sim houses, to the point where a sim family doesn’t hold nearly as much interest for me as a whole sim town. Maybe I should really be playing Sim City instead of focusing on the individuals who live in it.

Anyway, other than the bluescreen crashes and my idiosyncratic power gaming addiction, I highly recommend Bon Voyage, and if they patch it to make it crash less, I’ll recommend it even more enthusiastically. I think it’s got more cool extra features than the previous expansions and that swimmable beach just rocks and makes me want to re-build my see-through glass house and stock it with mermaids. And I spent a good portion of last night really enjoying watching Lorelei learn enlightenment from the Old Man. So what if I haven’t been bothered to fix up her crappy house or train her cat or give her a boyfriend or anything?