How many Sims are you playing?
Sagana:
Wow, I play the game totally differently than it seems like a lot of you do. I'm very obsessive and very easily distracted - totally incapable of keeping databases or keeping the aging right on different houses or anything like that.
I get an idea, make a sim (or 2 or many), put them in their houses and get obsessed with them and don't stop playing them until I get distracted by something else (building, downloading or making things) or another idea or something (work, food, sleep, other fun and obligation breaks don't count). I can't imagine only doing 6 sim hours - she wouldn't have found a perfect match, he wouldn't have gotten a job and a bunch of promotions, the baby wouldn't be born (I almost never stop the game for anything in between the lullabye and the birth), the toddler wouldn't have learned to talk - I just can't leave them *now* ;)
When I get distracted, I just stop playing them and get obsessed with the new sim or thing. I've had a good number of sims in different neighborhoods, and I do get attached to them - some of them I remember fondly. For awhile I played a single mother who looked vaguely 20sish and her son, Random. She was my first sim to die and every time I see another one wearing that hat, I think it's her. I got distracted making 20-30ish clothes for them (and a paperboy if I remember correctly) and I dunno what happened to Random. I know he was a teen and I *think* I lost the house in the mess installing Uni was for me - but might have lost track of him before that.
My son wanted to play with a bunch of animal skins that he dl'd and created a neighborhood called Animatown. So I made Jeremy Danvers and his foster son Clayton and Elena Michaels and her foster family (2 households) to be werewolves. These are characters from the book _Bitten_ by Kelly Armstrong and I managed to keep them more or less on track agewise (Clay is somewhat older than Elena - she was in college and he was a visiting prof) tho I played with aging off a lot. Werewolves don't age, do they? Elena ended up with a sister (the foster family's real child) and they killed off her nasty fosterdad and she moved in with Clay and Jeremy. Jeremy got abducted and had a were-alien baby and Elena had quads - a litter of puppies. This was pre-Uni, so they didn't meet at college, and I know this one got lost in the reinstall. My son recreated it, but I didn't make the families again.
For Uni, I created a neighborhood Ethni City, with a bunch of multicultural sims and got obsessed with India - created my beautiful Indian coworker and friend and her husband, and a 2nd couple that were also some friends. Added some other downloaded cultures and my son added Chinese, Japanese and French. I believe we have a Thai section as well. I meant to do Italy but got distracted and haven't got back to it yet. I got way distracted building their houses and making clothes and looking for objects and didn't really play them that much. My friend sim and her husband had twin daughters and her friend and husband had a son.
I managed to get them sent off to Uni - "Watsamata U" with all the buildings and the like based on Rocky and Bullwinkle names (tho they're actually mostly stolen from the 3 Universities that came with - renamed and redecorated some.) I also didn't delete the other three when I'd finished stealing the buildings so my neighborhood (which I'm currently playing) is probably in danger of being eaten by too many iterations bugs - it has 4 attached Universities (tho only 1 has ever been played and the others don't have dorms or buildings in them, so maybe it's ok.)
Anyway, shortly after they got to campus, I got distracted again and created all the sims to live in "A Doll's House" (the graphic novel) by Neil Gaiman. I played them for awhile and got tired of Uni and quit playing... mostly because I was obsessed with the characters and wanted to play just them (not switch back to the neighborhood or even other sims) but was bored with the Uni stuff.
In an interlude - before NL came out, I got interested in building again and made a new neighborhood where I built houses and created some sims to live in them and was enjoying playing them. I never bothered to attach a Uni and it hasn't been touched since NL came out and I got distracted with that.
NL appeared and I was major distracted by that. I decided the Gaiman sims were perfect for vampirization (especially the Spider Ladies), so I picked up Ethni City, dropped them all out of college and dumped them all (after playing around a bit) into the House of the Fallen Trees. There's Hal (who owns the house technically), the Spider Ladies (2 of them), Gilbert, Barbie and Ken (who immediately got pregnant and had twins - my first NL birth) so 8 in the house. They explored DT, became vampires, got over being vampires and I just generally had a good time playing that many at once. After awhile Gilbert moved out, as it was appropriate and made room for the Spider Ladies (they have names - Zelda and Chantal) to adopt a child, so they did.... she's still a toddler...
And... I went and saw the movie Serenity and got distracted. So I spent a long time creating all the Firefly characters (not very well, I'm not good at making sims, but I did the best I could) and turned them into their parents so they could be born in game. Most of them, I just made the created sim male and female and set their personalities to what I thought was fun. I made Zoe's mom a single parent, Simon and River's father is a criminal money sim and their mother's a society b*tch, and Inara's mother is a dumpy housewife who ignores the kids and her father leaves them for a beautiful romance sim. A few of them aren't in game yet (Wash, Sepherd Book) - Mal was just born.
But I got distracted with Kaylee's family. Her father should have been a farmer, but I couldn't really do that and support them, nor could he teach her mechanics that way - so I made him a country dr. and her mother stayed at home and had 6 kids (I *barely* got them in without elixer or turning aging off - I dunno how people have so many in a normal adult sim lifespan, 'cept twins and we didn't get any). Kaylee has 1 sister and 4 brothers - Stella, Delbert, Eldad, Kaylee, Derbie and Rufus. Rufus just turned toddler and Stella went to college (with 1 day left before she aged).
So I followed Stella to Uni. She met a guy she's crazy about, and I played him and his brother a bit so they'd be older than her (they're all 1st semester sophs right now, but the brothers are just slightly ahead in the semester), and they all moved into a house together - 'ready set up for Stella's brothers and sisters to follow her to school. 'cept I haven't touched the family since, so I keep telling myself I'll quit when she gets through her sophomore year and go back and play Delbert until he goes to college, so they'll stay the right distance apart. And then when Kaylee is ready for college (she just transitioned to teen), I'll have to go back and actually bring up the rest of the Firefly crew so they're older than she is.
So, I currently have - 2 families in the neighborhood (Ethni City) with 4 sims, 2 houses with 9 sims (and an abandoned countess who moved in and got deserted if she counts) in Downtown Ethni City based on the Gaiman and 5 Firefly-based houses with 18 total sims, some have been played a lot and some just put in houses, 3 Ethni City kids that went to college and got abandoned and I don't even remember who they all are, and one house from the Firefly crew at Uni with 3 sims in it that I'm playing (and hoping to have a 4th when the other brother finds a gf). I count 37 in the neighborhood I actually play - but I'm only really *playing* 3 of them :)
It seems I can manage 2 households and keep them together-ish in ages, and I love having lots of sims in the same house. I don't have any problem with grandma and granddad, parents and lots of kids in the same house either (I've done this and left them out up above somewhere) nor playing the same house until ingame born sims die and new ones are born and grow old (or move them to a bigger house, just the same sims). But I don't switch around well.
I love the toddler mirror (or whatever other ones) and will allow money cheats to buy one as I can't stand not being able to fix up the toddlers. Same with shop at home options. I *really* want my sims to wear the clothes I make or download for them.
windy_moon:
Quote from: sagana on 2005 October 18, 23:03:04
Wow, I play the game totally differently than it seems like a lot of you do. I'm very obsessive and very easily distracted - totally incapable of keeping databases or keeping the aging right on different houses or anything like that.
I get an idea, make a sim (or 2 or many), put them in their houses and get obsessed with them and don't stop playing them until I get distracted by something else (building, downloading or making things) or another idea or something (work, food, sleep, other fun and obligation breaks don't count). I can't imagine only doing 6 sim hours - she wouldn't have found a perfect match, he wouldn't have gotten a job and a bunch of promotions, the baby wouldn't be born (I almost never stop the game for anything in between the lullabye and the birth), the toddler wouldn't have learned to talk - I just can't leave them *now* ;)
Our styles aren't that different, other than a couple of points.
1) You've got way more creativity, imagination and energy than I do! :o
2) My loose ends scream at me to be tied up...even if I'm so mightily distracted by the next shiny baubble that what I do mostly is create even more loose ends
The part of your post that I relate to is getting an idea and just running with that until it runs out of steam. The idea might be mine or it might (more likely) be originated by Sims. (I know, they are pixels, they don't really have ideas but it sure seems as if they do.)
If the plot is good enough, I very well might play a Sim house for a Sim week or more, straight thru, without visiting another house. OR, the plot may involve several different Sim households, in which case I might play them alternately for a Sim week or more. I won't go to the bathroom with a pregnant Sim on my computer, much less switch out of the house!
Distraction, though, can set in at any time. All I need is a glimmer of a shiny new juicy story, and I'm off and running. Playing this way, with liberal use of Elixir and almost no Sim deaths means there are a lot of Sims tapping their feet, waiting for me to get back to them.
(And I can't stand my aging getting out of sync, generationally I mean, not actual number of days. Can't stand that... the more Sims I get, the bigger a *itch that is! )
hyperCat:
Quote from: windy_moon on 2005 October 17, 01:20:46
So, when I was growing up, my mother said to me, over and over..."You never finish anything you start!"
Same here. I'm also a perfectionist so I've reinstalled and/or restarted neighbourhoods from scratch at least 30 times since I bought the base game in September 2004. In fact, I did a reinstall for the NL patch just last week (Edit: I know it's not necessary but I do it anyway). :-[
I think I started out creating me and my husband, got frustrated and moved on when I accidentally named our last child "Baby Boy" (before I figured out how to change names). Thereafter I mainly played and restarted Pleasantville, though I did enjoy a brief stint with Strangetown. I think I quit just as I had graduated all the player sims from La Fiesta Tech. Recently played a vampire for awhile but got bored because she didn't want children and you can only go clubbing so many times before it gets old. I kept wishing for a mod that would allow vampires to drain and kill their enemies.
Started again today with a new legacy family, deletedallcharacters and carefully selected/renamed new townies and NPCs. I'm trying to just go with the flow and enjoy myself because my last legacy family involved a script for the entire 10 generations, with the first 2 alone taking up five pages. Got boring and overwhelming because things would always deviate from the script and, well, we can't have that, can we? The last straw was when the vanishing memories bug showed up in the 2nd generation's uni-educated wife.
I think my play style sounds a lot like sagana's. I can easily clock in 8 hours a day, barring work, and mainly stick with one family the whole time (I really hate playing and aging other families to keep them in step with the main one). Then I get frustrated with, say, a lack of clothing options and go on a downloading spree for another 8 hours. I also tend to go on theme kicks--there was the Victorian England neighbourhood, the British-Asian neighbourhood, the ultra-hip gay neighbourhood, the hillbilly neighbourhood, etc. But I never stay with them long enough to fully enjoy the tons of work I intially put into them.
I also stay up really late during the first few days of play... Is it 2 am already?
Sagana:
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You've got way more creativity, imagination and energy than I do!
LOL I doubt that seriously - most of my ideas come from books or stories or something and then the sims run with them (I agree they have ideas of their own ;) That's why I usually try to do secondary characters or start them as children or something. They can end up whatever way they want without me getting annoyed they aren't staying "in character" or frustrated by something that can't be done in the sims (I can't imagine trying to do Buffy when you can't stake vampires. That would annoy me.)
And yeah, distraction comes anytime (tho pregnant sims are a mighty strong pull). I don't mind the generational stuff so much tho - I really don't mind with the townies, tho I know it bothers others to have the same sim friends with 3 generations of those. I just set up justifications for it in my mind - well that's not *really* the same girl, that girl died tragically and the parents had another and gave her the same name and she's kind of unhappy trying to live in her sister's shadow... or that boy is really the nephew of the one my older sim knew and the parents loved their brother soooo much they named their firstborn after him but when he dropped out and moved to Alaska to find himself, they got kind of annoyed so he has a new different nickname. Or something :)
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Then I get frustrated with, say, a lack of clothing options and go on a downloading spree for another 8 hours. I also tend to go on theme kicks
Yes! Exactly! I'm playing along and my sim transitions to child and I suddenly realize I don't have any "country-style" (or whatever I'm doing) clothes for a male child, and next though I know I've spent a week downloading. And I'm also looking up and downloading designs or patterns or clothes that aren't made yet and thinking, "well I'll just make this one and that one" as I can't find them anywhere. And then I never do, so I have folders full of examples all over my harddrive :) Half of them will be named "can't resist" as I got distracted by some neat furniture that fit the idea and they don't have anything at all to do with little boy's clothes and most of them would require new meshes and I don't even have a 3d program of any kind, let alone know how to use it :)
I think the journey is actually the fun part anyway, so I guess it doesn't matter if I never really "arrive".
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I also stay up really late during the first few days of play... Is it 2 am already?
Yup, yup - this too. I keep telling myself (and my husband) I'm not going to be tired at work tomorrow, I'm going to bed. In just half an hour, 15 more min. just a bit. And then it's waaaaay toooo late :)
Kala:
I'm playing over ten families at the moment. Most of my families consist of 2-4 sims. I usualy play 2-3 families a sesion. I've played more than ten families at times. My new focus is to get past the secoond genoration.
Brynne, your pictures are funny as hell and they remind me of the new sims comercial I saw earlier tonight.
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