True, but even that depends on the people, relationship, and situation.  In my real life, if my bf or I  ruined the mood every time we made a joke or found something funny, we'd never have sex at all.

Sometimes I wonder if we're all playing the same game.  I never use anything except the standing woohoo offer, and while sometimes they stand around tapping their feet (reminds me of Sonic the Hedgehog,) they always eventually find their way to the bed and do as they're told.


Exactly.  I wonder who the hell thought this was a good idea? Whoever it was needs to be shot. It's annoying, pointless, and turns the entire thing into nothing but a clickfest, and the only "surprises" that are even possible are apparently when one of the sims in question chooses to tell a joke or gossip at an inopportune moment, spoiling the mood, and causing me to have to start from the freakin' beginning. 

I've had a few react negatively, but my favorite was just...odd.  My sim was rummaging though a garbage can when another sim--not the resident of the home, just a random sim--happened to walk by. This random sim stopped and indicated he'd like to chat with my sim, who kept on rummaging.  The random sim stood around for another moment or two then whipped out his guitar and started playing.  Any audience will do, I guess.

I like AwesomeMod.
I like the one newspaper article that's about an airplane full of sims being detained because of suspected cases of Strangetown Syndrome on board. 
During marriage proposals, I like the expression the proposing sim gets on his (or her) face. It's one of the few times in the game that the facial expression fits the occasion, and it's hilariouis. 
I like the beaches.
Shoes. Shoes are good.
CAST.  When the stupidity of the game itself starts to annoy me I can entertain myself for quite a while just by building a house: I generate a random sofa and then base the decor of the entire house around that one starting point.  The more horrendous the original sofa is, the more challenging--and fun--the rest of the house is.
I like it when sims pass out because of someone using the "bore to death" interaction on them. 
I like the sound effects from the thief hideout.  They don't compare to the TS2 sports television channel (Howard Cosell!) but they do amuse me.
I like the theory of story progression, I just wish the reality weren't so stupid and soulless.
For the first time ever, I really like quite a few of the pre-made houses. 
I like the Wainwright family.  Their kids either look like Susan and are pretty, or they look like Boyd and have the unmistakable Wainwright hair.
I like marrying a technophobe to a couch potato, just to watch them annoy one another.

I've seen toddlers crawling along the sidewalk near the park a few times, though I've never thought to select them so that I can see where they think they are going.  They can move pretty quickly, but I guess I would too if I were about to be poofed.

Hell, sometimes I don't even know where my keyboard is.

I couldn't stand to play TS2 or TS3 without my scroll wheel.  I had to, with TS2, briefly, when my old trackball-with-scrollwheel died, and having to deal with the keyboard for moving around made me grumpy. With these two games, and some others, the only times I ever touch the keyboard at all is for cheats, or to name something.  If I wanna use a keyboard to play a game, I play Nethack. 

In some ways, it reminds me of the game "Bully."

They took out 85% of the humor, and (I suspect on purpose) about 95% of the "sexy," and I think that's where at least some of the "soul" of the game went.  I was never "turned on" by the TS2 sims (though apparently some people were,) but I could at least understand why the sims would be turned on by one another. TS3 text messages about so-and-so being alluring or irresistibly-whatever-it-is just can't compare to animations in TS2 for the make out actions, or the romance sims' walk.  I do appreciate the messages about one sim considering another sim's actions to be "extremely awkward," because yes, yes they are. 

I always hated the YA amble in TS2, but I'd love to have it back now, instead of the way sims of all ages charge about like sims-on-a-mission--which causes me to wonder: since it appears that many animations were taken directly out of TS2 and plugged into TS3, is it at all possible that modders might be able to do the same thing, and replace some new animations for actions with the old ones?  I am hating that damn walk more and more with each passing day.

I had a similar problem a while back (on Vista) and doing a system restore fixed it. I'm not sure why it fixed it, but it did.  Registry thing, maybe.

What I've had to do between each version is:
Remove old version.
Clear caches
Start up vanilla game, load family, and save.  Starting up the game and exiting without saving accomplishes nothing (for me.)  The save is crucial.
Exit game.
Put in new version of mod.
Play crash-free until next version of mod.

It won't work for everyone, but if it works for me, it's bound to work for someone, somewhere.

Another romance difficulty that may be gone is that in TS2 (and TS1, for that matter,) Sim #1 might be wild about Sim #2, while Sim #2 just wasn't that into Sim #1.  Unrequited love and all that.  I haven't checked it by switching households just to be sure, but, I have awesomemod in, so testingcheats is on. I've found that I can have two sims meet for the first time, slide the relationship bar all the way to the right, and the two sims are immediately best friends.  A few flirts, a confess attraction, a kiss, and some proposals, and they're married. This wouldn't work if feelings weren't automatically mutual.  It's made it easy to marry off a few random sims who I thought could make decent looking kids together, and I guess I like that--I keep doing it--but it's one more thing that takes away from any depth that might have existed in this game.   

This game makes me irritated for what it could have been, and is not.
The trees, flowers, and shrubs bend and sway in the breeze. The hair does not. This pretty much sums up where I think the focus in development of this game went wrong.  Everything else is just pure rant.

"Story progression" is actually sort of a neat idea. It's too bad it's a lie.  There is no "story." I've just spent some time checking out random sims in my neighborhood--a neighborhood in which my original CAS family is now on its sixth generation.  Here's an elderly sim with the "perfect garden" lifetime want, and the green thumb trait--and as a bonus, he loves the outdoors. He has no gardening skill. Across the street there's a family consisting of three grown siblings (only one of which had a mother.)  These three siblings have lived their entire lives together, and yet they are only the barest of acquaintances.  One of them has the lifetime want to be a master thief, and yet he's chosen the law enforcement career.  Another is a young adult whose "love interest" is an elderly lady.  Down the street lives a family consisting of two parents and two children.  The children are twins, and I am positive of this because I was playing that family when they were born.  Somehow twin one is three days older than twin two.  And on it goes.  Athletic sims who are adults and have no athletic skill, family-oriented sims approaching old age without so much as a friend, much less a love interest, outdoors-hating sims with tons of fishing skill, and on and on. 

If these sims, as EA indicated, are living their own lives, they are doing a piss-poor job of it.

I've come to the conclusion that the clone-babies with only one parent are actually not a bug, but intentional, and meant to mask another problem--sims rarely get married on their own.  I've never seen an announcement yet in the newspaper about a marriage between sims I actually was familiar with--and at this point I'm familiar with all the town regulars. Instead, I see an announcement about a marriage, immediately followed by an announcement that the same sims that just married, also just moved into town. Without the clone babies, there'd hardly be any babies at all, unless the player ran around switching families and marrying off sims.  A few do manage to have love interests on their own, but they don't seem to actually DO anything about it. 

There also seems to be the occasional sim whose existence seems to make no sense at all.  One household had a toddler in it whose family tree indicated she was the daughter of Mortimer Goth and Bebe Hart. That would be all well and fine except that Bebe Hart and Mortimer Goth had both been dead long enough that their other children had died of old age. In my main family's family tree there is a fellow named Johnnie who I've never seen since he was a toddler.  His portrait in the tree suggests that he is alive and well and is an adult or YA--and this has been so for about three generations now. He's not in any of the houses though, and he never appears at the park or any other public places. I suppose he might have moved away--and if he did, he apparently moved to a place where sims live much longer than they do in my neighborhood. 

It seems like even in houses I've played for long periods of time that the sims who live in them don't really get to know one another--much less become friends--unless I constantly direct them to interact with one another.  They just don't interact much on their own--but then, it takes an agonizingly long time for a sim to take a bath, but a few minutes chatting on the phone will raise the social bar to full, so I guess I can't blame them.  In TS2 (with ACR,) I know I can take a sim to a downtown club and be entertained just by continously maxing my sim's motives so I can stay and watch the antics of random other sims. In TS3, I can spend days in the park with a sim and very little happens at all. 

I wish I could drop ACR and my TS2 sims, with their looks and quirks and ability to get into hilarious trouble into the seamless neighborhood of TS3, with its ability to allow sims to marry, split up, and have babies on their own.  Then I'd have a game I really loved.   

My card is an HD 2400, and no, I've had no issues at all, and I do have all settings on high.  I was a little concerned when I read on here that some peoples' cards/computers were overheating, and mine is one of those little slender Dells with not much space inside (Inspiron 530S,) and nothing impressive in the way of fans, but I've run the game for hours with no problems at all.   

One thing might be worth noting though--or might be irrelevant, but I'll mention it anyway.  I upgraded my drivers a few months ago and immediately started experiencing problems with Sims 2.  I downgraded back to the 8.530 drivers, but not before reading some complaints that the new 9.x drivers seemed to be causing some peoples' video cards to run much hotter than they had before upgrading.  I have no idea if that was an issue that was fixed with subsequent drivers, or if it was an issue that was imaginary in the first place, but I'm still using the 8.530 driver and having no graphical issues with either game, and no overheating.

It is most likely the drivers, yes.  My ATI card was working fine* since I got this computer last spring.  Then the 9.x drivers came out. I upgraded., and immediately started up Sims 2.  Entire buildings would disappear momentarily and then return.  I downgraded back to the 8.5 drivers, and the problem was solved.


*Except the problem with triangle-shaped holes appearing in the chests of women wearing certain form-fitting clothes, or women who are naked.  This is why I immediately started up the game after I upgraded the drivers; I wanted to see if that was fixed. It wasn't.  Oh well. 

You mean like they've frozen over for the winter?

Try changing her clothes.

When the same thing happened to me it turned out to be a sim wearing a piece of CC that had gone bad.  Everytime she'd start to do a walkby, the game would crash.

True enough, but for me some of their OCD behaviors are highly annoying, some are sort of cute or funny, and others I can just ignore.  The SSX thing was one of my Top Three Most Annoying Sim Behaviors, and until I found a hack that fixed it (Inge's, I believe) I just refused to give computers to my sims.

The only problem I've had is that the ease with which I can now bin hair, bin and townify eyes, and townify clothing, has caused me to go on a massive downloading spree.

Now if someone would make a tool to automate the process of creating replacement and extra face templates, I'd have nothing left to even wish for. 

My game starts crashing randomly whenever I have 2 copies of the same mesh in my downloads.  I don't think I've heard of this happening to anyone else, but it happens to me--maybe because I'm one of the few who only has the base game.  The "crash" is actually a hard lock-up of the entire computer in this case. 

I used to get crashes with an error message followed by a crash to desktop occasionally.  Those turned out to be corrupted sims, but I haven't had one of those crashes since I stopped using custom skins by Navetsea--all of the corrupt sims were using those skins.  Could be coincidence, since I've never heard of anyone else having problems with those skins, but I suspect it might have something to do with the huge size of those skin files combined with the ancientness of my computer and video card. 

In both of the above examples, the crashes seemed random, but were actually caused by a sim using one of the files in question--Navetsea skin or duplicated mesh--preparing to do a walkby.  The crashes could be intentionally produced by using Inge's shrub or the Insim summoner to teleport the offending sim(s) to the current lot. 

I started getting random crashes not too long ago after I had upgraded my video drivers (ATI.)  That problem was resolved by switching to another version of the drivers.  These crashes really WERE random, so far as I could tell--they occurred just as often in the middle of the sim-night when I wasn't even moving the camera as they did when the lot was full of awake sims and I was moving the camera around and clicking things constantly. If there was something in particular that triggered the crashes, I never figured it out.  I didn't try too hard though, since the video drivers were the #1 suspect from the beginning.  In general though, that's the first thing I do--try to figure out if what seems random really IS random.

 

All mine are at .20, .45, or .75, so that they all have an equal shot at appearing, and so that I have to put no thought whatsoever into what number to assign them.  Seems to work fine and pleases the lazy streak in me.

That's why Alkaloid's "townie-friendly" eyes are among my favorite downloads.  Townies, NPC's, and random CAS sims will all generate with these eyes, you can have as many as you like, and the files are the size of normal eye files instead of the size of default eyes.

I'm also on the "eternal search" for new and better skintones.  I like Louis' defaults better than any others I've tried.  Otherwise, my skintone collection includes a few of Enayla's pixies, a few Oepu skins, a couple of Helaene's, a couple of Lastrie's "glam" set (which I like much more in game than I thought I would,) a couple of Barcelonista's, and one of Hysterical Paroxysm's.  Maybe a couple other miscellaneous ones I've forgotten.  I like some variety in skintones, but I really dislike the ones that make sims (especially the males) look like they are wearing make-up when they aren't.  All the non-default ones are geneticized at either .20, .45, or .75, depending on how dark they are, so that every skintone has an equal opportunity of turning up on a new baby sim. 

I really liked Navetsea's skins, but I had an odd issue a while back where sims would occasionally go corrupt and I'd have to flag them as dead in SIMpe to be able to play their homes again.  I realized at some point that the two things these corrupt sims had in common were that they were teens, and they were using Navetsea skintones. I deleted the skintones and never have had the problem since.  Coincidence? Maybe, probably.  I've never heard of anyone else having a problem with the skintones, so I dunno.  I suppose it could have been because those skintones are really big files, and my computer is something of a dinosaur.  Just one of those mysterious things, I guess.

My sims get that if they are looking out the window and there is nothing actually there--which is often because I don't do any landscaping unless some fortune sim demands it.  I had one that did it constantly so I finally relented and gave her a shrub, after which she'd look out the window and think of the shrub even when she was looking out a window on the opposite side of the house from the shrub. 

I sometimes play SC4 without any mods at all, just to prove that I can run a city successfully without going broke--usually I gotta have my mods though.  For me, it's more fun when I don't have to think about money--transportation and pollution are headaches enough--so I have a mod that allows me to start with some insanely high amount of money.  The mod also puts a big multiplier on the incoming taxes, and I wish it didn't do that, but I don't know how to change it.  I wind up setting all the tax amounts to 1% just so that it's not always operating in the black. (I got the mod at Simtropolis--can probably find a link for it if anyone who is tired of running out of money quickly wants it.  My version is for SC4 with RH, but I think there is one there for SC4 only, as well.

Actually now that I think about it, even when I don't have in the simoleon mod, I still have to have the network add-on mod and the fix to prevent the opera house from trashing the entire education system, so I guess I can't play with "no mods at all."  Hmm.

For me SC3 was the easiest of them all.  For SC2000 I had to use the funds cheat most of the time, but with SC3 it was just a matter of accepting a couple of the deal offers early on and demolishing them once the city could support itself.  I still liked some of the cheats though, particularly the one that caused ALL industries to be high tech.  And the "call cousin vinny" thing--I think that's SC3 and not SC2. 

You were playing at Christmas--did you get the snow?  The first year I had it I played on Christmas and there were these weird white blobs on my game and I thought my video card was crapping out and panicked and reinstalled the game, only to find that I still had weird white blobs in my cities.  Then I went to Simtropolis.com to see if I could find what the problem might be, and felt like an idiot.
My boyfriend pointed and laughed.   
This year when I wanted to play on Christmas I changed my computer clock so that it wasn't Christmas anymore.

As near as I can tell, when you move a sim into the city the game assumes the sim is young and broke.  As time passes the game assumes the sim gets promotions and wants to live in better parts of town.  This is part of what makes the feature useless.  A sim in a polluted industrial-based city will eventually want to move to the high rent district, and if there isn't a high rent district the sim will actually move out of the town.  I've also tried moving a sim into an already established, commercial-based city, with nothing but high rent districts.  The sim moved out very quickly--she couldn't find an affordable home.  Great feature.   

I'm with you on the U-drive-it missions too.  The first thing I do when I start a new city is to turn off the damned missions indicators.     

All in all though, SC4 is one of my all-time favorite games--and I can occasionally be caught playing SC3000 or even SC2000.  They each have their charms.