Yesterday my sims game came a gigantic standstill. My Ultimate Sim, Ana, was so broken she couldn’t leave the house. I was up until 4 am trying to fix it. I’ve been working on this challenge for MANY MANY MONTHS. In all caps. It was beyond frustrating. Test games proved that even new games, with one sim, In a tiny house, were still running at a snail’s pace.
So today….complete removal and reinstall. I’ve been working on this since 10:30. It’s 8:43 as I type this. Ok, there was a nap in there. But still. The sims 3 is a P.I.T.A. to reinstall. And with close to a 1,000 pieces of custom content, and many more? Oh vey. I’m still unsure whether Ana is going to be ok. If she’s not, I will cry.
All that and I still like the Sims 3 better than the Sims 4.
(That top pic is Ana’s face while she blows up old dishwashers. I love her.)
So they got married. And like most weddings, it was a bunch of worry and stress and money. But….love.
Then moved to a new town, and Ana became a witch and went back to school for her third degree. She decided that she would try the sorority. It didn’t really work out. They thought she was weird and nerdy.
So after her last final she had a massive, epic kegger, invited lots of cute nerds, and turned her sorority sisters into toads.
And here is how the party ended, shortly before dawn:
Oh dear. I missed yesterday because I went to bed early after taking cough medicine. I almost missed today, as I was so wrapped up in my sims game, I was honestly shocked it was 11:30.
It was the kittens who finally brought me out of it. They wouldn’t leave me alone until I realized it was time to feed them.
I will be unable for visiting, conversing, housework, meal preparation, bill paying and… pretty much everything until further notice. The Sims Medieval is released today. I can’t download my limited edition until 10 am PST. I imagine it will take a long time to download. And that pains me.
I broke down, liquidated some assets (so to speak) and bought the new MacBook Pro I’ve been threatening to buy since the Sims 3 came out. The last expansion pack rendered it unplayable on my old one. I couldn’t even play Civ V at all when it came out. And that’s one of the three. WoW, Civ, and the Sims.
It’s gorgeous. I’m in love with it. I play the sims on the highest graphic settings and it flies! 15 inches of glossy, graphic glory. I named it Persephone, but I should have called it Speed Racer. It’s all I can do not to smudge up it’s glossy monitor with smooches.
And before you ask (mom) while I might not be an ideal wife for the next few days, I hardly think Wil is one to begrudge me a few solid hours of game playing. Considering GTA, Fallout 3, Batman Arkum Asylum, GT5, Fight Nights 3 and 4, all of the Hitmen, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. As long as he has clean clothes for work.
He should lower his expectation for meal preparation. If that’s even possible, bless him.
Here is what I have been doing. Wil and I are playing the sims together. By together I mean each on our own computers. We are doing a legacy challenge.
Briefly, the legacy challenge is 10 generations, all created in one house. The game ends the day your 10th generation baby is born. There are certain conditions (you start on a huge lot which leaves you only $1300 and no house. All traits have to be randomly selected.) and rules. You get points for certain things and there is absolutely no cheating. Which is hard for me.
This has consumed our lives. It’s not a quick game. It takes many many hours to raise ten generation. You get points for being successful in things, like fulfilling life wishes, so it behooves your to raise them well.
I might be ahead in points, but Wil’s family is far more interesting and tragic. First, even though traits are randomly assigned, his sims have a strange proclivity towards Evil. His sims always seem doomed in some way. Insanity seems to pop up at least once a generation in mine.
I have made it to the 5th generation. I used to have a family plot of graves out back of my house, but after having 4 different ghosts takes up most of the beds in the house one night (you can’t get them off of them either) I had to move them all to the local graveyard. My sims had bad days the next day due to extreme sleepiness. Stoopid ghosts.
I’m not kidding when I tell you it has consumed our lives. We’ve had a bunch dinners that have consisted of sandwiches, cereal or “whatever you can find.” So not a lot to blog about unless you want Peabody family updates. If you are interested, you can read about the legacy challenge rules right here.
I did do a meme today, however, which I will post right after this.
I am ecstatic with the extra 9 GBs I got back after installing Snow Leopard. But I think it might have messed up my sims. To be honest, I can barely run that program as it is. I have some sims living in a beautiful house I downloaded that takes 1 min and 47 secs to redraw every time you leave the house and come back in, or go into design mode. That ain’t right. I had to up grade my computer to play the Sims 2, so I suppose I really need to upgrade it for the Sims 3. And by upgrade I mean get a new one because it’s not like I can upgrade the graphics card in it or anything. It’s a laptop.
But since I updated to Snow Leopard, I’ve been seeing this.
I don’t know WHAT is wrong with her hair. I think it has started falling out due the RADIATION THAT IS COMING OFF THAT FACE! Seriously.
Those two sims are actually the sims I created of Wil and I. I created one that is supposed to look like me, but doesn’t, to use as my avatar on my sims page. I went ahead and gave myself a husband named Wil while I was at it. It supposed to look like him. It has his penchant for cammy cargo pants. He is: genius, computer whiz, artistic, flirty. I am: bookworm, artistic, good sense of humor and friendly. We are both couch potatoes. He wants to build robots and I want to be an author.
I turned down the shadow detail and it seems to have helped. Here we are reading books in our starter home.
The Sims 3 is a different paradigm from the Sims 2. (-5 points from me for using a word so highly regarded in corporate buzzspeak.) Sims 2 was all about the neighborhood. Create as many families as you want, they will wait for you while you play in another household. I spent 4 years creating a custom neighborhood with multiple families and generations.
With the Sims 3, the world is open and dynamic. If you so choose, everyone in the neighborhood changes, evolves and ages right along with you, as you play your default household. You can add as many custom characters as you want, but idea seems to be that you focus on one household. And maybe because of that, you now can create separate “games.” Each game is a different world, unrelated to the other world.
I’ve had several issues with the game. Guitar boy, aforementioned crashes and an inability to update my game despite the fact I had installed no mods. (the forum kept telling me to uninstall my mods and then update.) What I did was deleted everything and reinstall. This meant I lost my family, which included guitar boy, but I was ok with that because something crazy happened to the triplets. Three girls, triplets, and when they aged from teenager to young adult, their faces stretched and they looked like a characture drawing of Dick Van Dyke.
It was unsettling to look at. I guess I like my sims pretty. So I created Poppy, a green thumbed natural cook and workaholic. This was the sim I was working with, collecting screen shots to tell you stories, she was going to be a Executive Chef, and was actually only two levels away from it, when the sims went BOOM. Again.
The Stepdot is visiting, and I set her up to play the sims yesterday. Once again, it is unusually hot here and the game crashed several times. She lost her household during one of those crashes, and when she went to save the new one, it gave her save over prompt/warning. I told her to go ahead, because I thought it was going to save over her last crashed game. But no. Apparently it was going to save over ALL GAMES.
No more Poppy.
I think the computer (a closed MacBook Pro hooked up to cinema display) was overheating again. Once she was playing without the cinema display, she quit crashing. Today I bought a desk fan to blow on my computer.
A couple of days ago, I came out of my Sims 3 stupor. I felt like I had been on a bender. (Only without the tasty beer – Wil) My new and fragile house keeping regime had fallen to pieces. I quit cooking dinner. Or willingly shopping for food. The house was getting sloppy again. Who cares if my dishes are done, it’s my sims dishes that are important! You should have seen my laundry hamper. It was overflowing everywhere.
But I expected this, really. I knew it would be like that for at least two weeks. I am getting a grasp on my own life again. Actually, for the past several days, I’ve been reading a great deal. So… that’s good.
When I found out that EA was releasing the Sims 3 as a Mac/Win hybrid DVD, I was thrilled. Aspyr seemed to have pretty much abandon the Sims 2, we don’t even have the last few expansion packs. Bastards. I was tried of seeing things I could not have because our game was translated and released by a seperate company.
That’s to say the Mac releases did not have it’s issues, this time around. I hate to say this, because I was/am so grateful to EA for finally getting on board with the Mac players, but the first few days were full of frustrations for me. I have had a handful of crashes. One major crash that resulted in the complete loss of all my families. I still had downloaded material. And I had the beginning versions of those particular sims, but the households I had been building were gone. Which pissed me off because Posey and Simon were due to have their first baby.
Extremely sluggish performance forced me to play using my laptop display, rather than the monitor I normally have connected to it. (I only use one display at a time so it’s not a dual monitor situation.) The sound would disappear after a few moments of game play when i was using my soundstick USB speakers. It was fine when using my headophones.
Miraculously, the sound issues has disappeared. And the performance issues when using my monitor improved, they aren’t great, the sims still stop and take long pauses between actions, but not like before. The only things that has changed since it wasn’t working is it is no longer 88 some odd degrees in our easy bake apartment. As near as I can figure, maybe my laptop was overheating? It is a very system intensive game. I turn every single application off before playing.
All in all, it’s a great deal of fun to play. And I will discuss some of my characters in depth later, for Fee. Who loves the Sim stories. However, I would like to leave you with one other bug. I gave my Sim, Clive, a guitar to play. It is now permanently attached to his body. No matter what I do, change clothes, take a shower, go to bed, workout, that guitar is stuck to his body. And it leads to some very interesting stylistic choices when he actually plays the guitar.
I got it. I’m playing it. I love it. But I’m having some unfortunate performance issues which are a bit of a joy suck.
Well…. I DID buy a brand new computer for the release of sims 2. Just sayin.
And in completely adorable news, Wil has started playing the Sims 2.
