Sims 3 Hacks, Arthas (oh yeah, and I got a BLUE DRAGON woot!!!)

Well, let’s see. My identity thief has a hearing next month. One of my friends, who happens to be roughly the size of a teenage tauren, has gallantly offered to escort me to said hearing, and I’m deliberating over whether I want to actually lay eyes on her. Other than that, RL is back to reasonableness.

As far as Sims 3 . . . according to the new expansion, the game play is going to be more questy and first-person like.

Which made me groan. If I want quests I’ll log into WoW and do Argent Tournament dailies. What I want to do with Sims is build the digital equivalent of a basement full of model train layouts. I especially don’t want to be a first person sim. Sims are vapid, shallow, materialistic creatures who need to be reminded to pee. Why would I want to live amongst them when I can be an overpowered troll priestess with a 10k smite and a blue dragon?

I’d rather make a whole town, which is what I’m doing now.

I made this vampirish sim whose mission is to max out everything maxoutable. Just for kicks. But anyway, while he’s doing that, I’ve been letting the town progress. The vampire just keeps eating ambrosia and working on his palatial manor, and adding new careers to his resume, while the town grinds to a halt.

Yesterday, I deleted most of the tombstones.

I left Mortimer Goth and Bella Bachelor. They can spend eternity in the crypt together. Everyone else – outta here.

My rationale – I have read that Sims 3 crashes when your population is too high, but also that if you kill off the resident NPCs, no new ones respawn. You just get “homeless” NPCs that spawn in response to career demands, pizza delivery, stuff like that. So I figured if I depopulate the town I’d have enough space to put up 23 households. One for each career. That gives me enough sims to have all the personality traits. I can devote unused residential lots to bizarre theme restaurants and other diversions and otherwise play with the new build mode. Which is kinda what I really want to do, with just enough characters to populate the place but not so many I can't keep track of them. And I might even have room left over for a “player sim” to interact with them all and go on exciting quests to become a mummy in this new expansion, which hopefully will include a lot of Asian and Middle Eastern build features. Or I could just log into WoW and kill mummies for gold. While talking to people. Hmm.

My vampire sim has already bought all the businesses, which allows him an income of about 70k a week and also lets him rename them. Sayonara, Doo Pease Corporate Towers.

Now if you’re into some really hardcore game rearranging, you might want to investigate this other, um, mod I found. At More Awesome Than You.

Please note the caveats about the fact that it might kill your game stone dead. I have not installed it myself for this reason. However, I was really tempted. This mod allows you to do everything from revert to Sims 3 style aging, remove the blurs, force-overload a house, eat raw meat (OM NOM NOM!), randomize the NPC vocal range, all kinds of nifty stuff. It has a whole series of “anti bus” commands – off the shelf, Sims 3 occasionally has your sims die off screen, without your permission, without even leaving a tombstone so you can rez them as ghosts. In other words, they got “hit by a bus.” Some of the “bus” actions include sims getting fired, fat or homeless without your permission.

I mean, seriously. You create an athlete sim, spend many sim hours training him, then the minute you take your eyes off him he gets fat and quits his job. That would suck.

Anyway, my rich vampire sim only has a few neighbors left, and in the meantime, I have bulldozed all the empty houses, which must free up SOME space, and have built a few residences for my carefully groomed allotment of 23 sims. I made new Sims 3 versions of Graceland and the Psycho house, and could have used a few more architectural options for the latter when trying to get that crazy peaked semi-mansard roof with the more traditional roof around the 2nd floor cupola, but the textures came out very psycho-like, and the weed and bramble and dandelion filled yard made a nice touch. Hooray for Sims 3’s courage to include ugly plants alongside the rosebushes. (And can we please have some plumerias and banyans from the first 2 versions?)

I’m still grumpy about my inability to rename the streets, but I’ll bet there will be a mod for that soon, if not already.

Meanwhile, in WoW,

I might have mentioned a (cough) blue dragon. From heroic Malygos. I won the roll. I think it’s actually an Azure Drake. It rocks. I’m having fun with WoW lately. More dino mounts and pets, more stuff to grind for, and the new raid instance is deceptively seductive – an arena, with a boss.

And every week there’s a new boss. We’re up to this evil pack of butchers including an especially despised paladin. When you wipe, the Alliance king calls you a scrub, and when you win, showers of wonderful purple lewt appear.

Also, I read that bestseller about (warning spoilers in link -- no spoilers here) Arthas. I was going to do a full on review here in my blog about it, complete with early 21st century style snark and negativity, but I checked myself. People who write like that are old and bitter and need therapy, and retraining my perspective to exclude that kind of thing is part of why I’m a WoW addict.

The prose is not something that would get a passing grade in your typical English lit program. The style is plain, aimed at a teenage fantasy novel sort of market, and there isn’t much description – if you’re reading it, you probably have some notion of what Durnholde Keep looks like, and if not, there’s a handly little “come check it out online!” blurb on the last page.

The characters . . . a snarky reviewer might call them simple. Their conflicts tend to revolve around passionate family rivalries and grudges, but then, so did the conflicts in Hamlet and the last Gulf War. There are three female lead characters, an old school traditional princessly one and a typical new school traditional headstrong tomboy who reads a lot, and the character who will eventually become queen of the Undead, who gets victimized in an elaborate, justification-for-future-ass-whooping sort of way. The male lead character, Arthas, well . .

It’s a simple story whose job is to summarize all the elaborate WoW backstory in straightforward fashion so we all know exactly what all those cut scenes in Caverns of Time are about. Which is nice to know. It helps me appreciate the game a little better.

Other WoW gamers who have read the book and mentioned to me they liked it usually focus on Arthas’ character development. Arthas is indeed a bad guy, and the main story is how he becomes that way. One bad decision at a time.

Which is, I think , how most bad guys eventually end up there. Some of these people who mentioned it contrasted it to the absolutely crappy job George Lucas did with explaining how Jake Lloyd became Darth Vader.

Gamers don’t really care about prose, or technique, or how some asshole floored the English department by scrambling the cut scenes out of sequence. They care about story. How do we get from point A to point B, and does it make logical sense. In this sense, the Arthas book succeeds where a great many fail. Arthas is a tragic hero with noble intentions, and everything he tries to fix just gets worse.

Arthas is also struggling with gamer-related issues. He commands an army of the undead. When they encounter the other kind of army, they conscript the casualties, and since they are undead and do not march on their stomachs (unlike the other kind of army), they exponentially scale until they become totally OP.

Yet the more obsessed he becomes with being OP and winning, the more humanity he loses.

Which is a paradox that most of us gamers come to terms with at some point.

The really interesting thing that Arthas does, though, is tie all the storylines together. Which I find fascinating because typically you have something like
Prequel -- Story -- Sequel -- More Sequels As Market Will Bear

But this takes place before WoW, and explains how the last expansion fits into the grand scheme of WoW, making it sort of surround the core lore like the chocolate around a cherry. Only a thoroughly computerized mind, I think, could have come up with that kind of literary circumnavigation. Most novels are written by the exceedingly right brained, people who like to wallow in the sensual nature of syllables, but here is one written from an exceedingly left brained place, with lots of facts and details and three-dimensionality, but not a lot of allusions and wordplay (and, praise the lord, a total lack of illogical unsequenced stream of consciousness postmodern interludes and whiny emo analyses of dysfunctional childhood as motivation for all future behavior -- I can't wait until novels for grownups finally get there).