Yet another sim story…

It was last year that the third installment of the now-10-year-old series has been released. It was an eventful year, despite the uneventful period in which the game was released. I was 18 at the time, legally an adult. I don’t know how much that affected how I treated my newer, improved, adult sim-me. In any case, I think I took a more mature way of living with him.

Triple happy times!

I started him small, and although I did do small improvements here and there, I always tried to keep expenses at a minimum, saving money in case it was needed, something I do now too, mind you. I always tried to keep him on an upward slope to greatness, and although he never got there because I never played long enough to, he did become quite a successful man.

Gone was the fascination with building massive houses, gone was the fascination with trying to do wacky things with my sim. It was the only game of sims I basically left there indefinitely as a testament of time. I added in a girl in town, got her to slowly but surely become sim-me’s friend. Then more. That’s the way it ended.

But before this there was something else, quite strange. My sim, having the genius trait applied to him, liked to just wander off, exploring. So one day I made him take a day off from the job and left him frolicking in his own free will. He had the usual way of being, going around the house, reading, playing video-games, eating specialties he learned to make from a book bought at the bookstore, then talked a bit to his girlfriend. And wandered off.

Left the house.

Left the lot.

Left the neighborhood.

Kept walking until he stopped and found something. It was a stone of some kind. I remember I stated something like “hmm, nifty!” while I watched him slowly get back home. The new thing with Sims 3, you see, is the incredibly dynamic neighborhood. It’s not like the other games, not like the original one where you couldn’t control your sim in another lot, but only the sims in that lot, not like the second one in which I can’t remember the mechanics. Gone was the loading time between the neighborhood and your house, everything was just… seamless. I admit that from a gameplay standpoint it didn’t make that much of a difference, but looking back to it, it made a hell of one. Sure you still couldn’t see how your sim worked, but now everything was put in perspective.

You could actually see the neighborhood as the sum of its parts, as a living, breathing society with proper ranks and be polite to. Perhaps I didn’t notice at the time, not being able to look past the monotone grey world of normal sim way of life, but this game is much more complex than it implies.

I think Will Wright saw his vision made in Sims 3, and although it’s not perfect, it’s not something that is meant to be either. It’s life, in a wacky gibberish, kinda way.

Oh yeah, and there was Woo Hoo.

Another Sim Story

It was only natural, at the time (2004), that a sequel was to be played the moment it was available. Of course, three or four days after release, I already had it. Bad thing was that I was a 13 year-old at the time, puberty making my hormones move like crazy. So you can only imagine when the teenage me created an adult avatar, mostly personalized to be just like him, but in-game, just to make him get laid. He introduced another personalization of someone he (or me) wanted, and placed her next door.

Look Bob, I squashed it!

Typical porn movie setting, and perhaps affair as well. Consider little Darkie look at big sim Darkie with glee as he built his house up to some high place in society, then meeting said girl-next-door. Now consider him just trying hard to get that girl to actually bond to big sim dude, because apparently the girl didn’t like him. Not one damn bit. Eventually though, she endeared to him (considering his big house and huge TV, no wonder). They started to enjoy chatting, joking around, eventually flirting and fooling around. It did not take long until girl sim was pretty much in love with my own, something which made her move in with my sim.

That complicated things slightly. I barely had a king size bed, but that was it – no second bathroom or other things. I didn’t have to worry though. Why? Read further.

It rapidly got apparent that I was a teenager intent on getting laid at the time. The moment I figured out the basic formula to get my sims to… “WooHoo”, I made them do it. And then again. And again. And again. True me was giggling with glee. Sim me was slowly getting exhausted. Again and again and again I clicked that word in the menu. Again and again the bedsheets jumped around like crazy. Its novelty would’ve worn off, but something weird and pretty curious happened.

The girl got off the bed and promptly died.

Of hunger.

Regardless to say, Sim me begged Death not to take her away, but I guess dying of hunger is reason enough to make Him not hear me when I had to say all the nice memories I had of the Sim girl – namely sex. I turned the game off and never played again.

You should take something out of this little story – feed your sims food before you feed them sex, kids!

Sim stories

I can’t say that I’ve been an avid Sims gamer, nor fan, for that matter. Sure, the game is pretty much awesome if you get into it, but I’ve had my fill of it, and because of how similar the sequels are to the first one, I can’t say that I can get much more juice out of the series than I already have. I’ve played all the three vanilla versions, some addons, built a ton of houses, destroyed hundreds of simulated lives and built up several others (in some cases both, in different order). So for the occasion of the 10 year anniversary of this highly successful game series, a retrospection.

See this? Means I'm happy.

I can’t question the quality of the Sims games. Even the first one is a technical masterpiece. The second one only took everything in the realm of true 3D, while the third one put everything in perspective allowing you to actually get a feel for the neighboring buildings while not detracting from the overall experience. I’ve had a bit of gaming time with each of the vanilla versions, and a little bit of the expansions as well, but I can’t say I have played any as much as the first one. It had all the right things for the nine-year old me. It had funny gibberish, nice animations, and plenty for me to play… let’s say dollhouse, with.

I can’t say I was fond of dolls, but I liked making house plans with sticks on the floor and use stuff like modeling clay to form stuff for my GI to do. He would get money, and with the money he would get food, which would keep him healthy. I sort of considered it Sims 0.5. The “working GI” thing went on until my bigger brother got annoyed one evening and ripped the poor workaholic GI to pieces. It was gruesome, head ripped off, arms halved and quartered and legs tattered, me crying my soul through my eyes. This was slightly before the first Sims.

When it actually came out and I got my hands on it, I was enthralled. I loved building houses. I loved building up my sims to build those houses. I loved to make structures which would support that little lab rat of mine. It was a lab rat, one with which I would make hundreds of experiments in order to get more out of the experience. Eventually, the items and people I could interact with went thin and overused. I found out about the cheats present in the game and that gave it a slight second wind.

The expansion pack gave it some much-needed content, but even that only managed to lengthen my wanting to play the game for just a little longer. Eventually I fell out of the expansion field, their numbers becoming so many they wouldn’t even fit in my hard-drive.

Before this, however, I got the first sim you control, the tutorial Bob Newbie, and gave him an overhaul. I put his wife thing in a walled off room and Billy Bob in a thing I called “Traininator”. Basically I sold everything poor Bob and his woman thing had and used all the money for training benches, bookshelves, chess sets and so on, all used to improve this little redneck kinda guy with a bald head and rich beard to perfection.

His wife thing died of hunger and exhaustion eventually, not before yelling for about 3 days about pork chops and beds. I think she wet herself once or twice in the meantime, so I guess it was an ugly death, standing hungry and exhausted in a pool of her own urine… Apparently I was really sadistic at the time. On the other hand, she was actually quite happy about the little picture I placed in the death-room. And about the window. Light improves the Room rating, see?

Bob had a different fate – he had no bed anymore, actually his only natural needs satisfiers were an espresso machine, a toilet, a shower and a fridge, out of which he would get a snack if he was hungry. It took him a while to get trained to perfection, about three weeks of drinking coffee instead of sleeping, working out to get body points, playing chess by himself to get logic points and reading. He read a ton. If that bookshelf of his wasn’t infinite, I think that he would’ve finished it plenty of times by the time he reached the level of perfection I wanted in him. After this I created a bunch of dudes to live in the neighborhood with Bob and to be his friends. Bob was happy about this.

Then I got Bob a job. As the assistant of an assistant teacher or something like that. The idea is that he started low. It only took him about two weeks or so to get from the assistant to the assistant, to awesome laureate of the I don’t know what prize. I guess being awesome pays off eventually. After a few months during which he exercised his perfection by going to work in a limo, Billy Bob Newbie decided he needed a change of pace, a new job. So from awesome Laureate he became a bit less of an awesome cook. Then I decided to buy him a pool. As he was swimming in it, I removed the ladder… accidentally. I watched him die… swimming around like the fit beardy fiddle he was. Well, at least he had his fun. Then I stopped playing.

Damn… mighty huge article here. I guess I’ll call it the day with this one today. Check out tomorrow for the sequel’s success story and ultimate demise.

Refresh

It’s been a while since I’ve written here. I guess it’s time to bring back the old daily writing and get some more stuff written on this blog. I’ve been thinking of quite a few things to do, some of which are pretty specialized digg-like articles. One idea I have is to do a sequel comparison article. Seeing as fully half the new titles released last year and this one (that’s a hyperbole) are sequels, I’ll have plenty to talk about. Also, new IP under review would be another idea. I guess I’ll see to it.

There’s also going to be more of the usual Darkie’ style introspection stuff. Whether it will prove revelatory or simply stupid, it’s up to how you read and understand it. So on we go.

It’s gonna be a wild ride.

Tonight I write…

There are some moments in life in which you simply start doing something. Well I’m announcing that I’m writing. Tonight – 3 reviews down the gutter for all of you to see. If you don’t hold to this vow, I’m a bad man. And I’m not a bad man. So I’m going to write. Yeah. I haven’t written anything on my damn site since May, it’s about time I started again. Now then, see you later on GREDb for reviews of Zombie Shooter 2, The Saboteur and Batman: Arkham Asylum.

PS: I didn’t hit the deadline. Guilty. It’s 6:03 AM and I’ve only managed to write two of them. No worries, Batman is coming later today.

PPS: I’m a bad man anyway, I don’t always clean my plate.

XPS: I’ve reviewed The Saboteur and Zombie Shooter 2.

Visiting Arkham

In the past two days, I’ve been busy beating up Joker’s henchmen, Poison Ivy’s plants, as well as working out Enigma’s riddles in Batman: Arkham Asylum. A very fun experience, dare I say, and while all of it is clearly polished to a shine, the thing I’ve had most fun with was the latter, the riddles. This game is the only one I actually did all the collectibles because I wanted to. There are multiple reasons to that. First would be the fact that there is a map of where the general area of the secrets is. Second, the rewards you get for the collectibles. Third:  some of them are actually clever.

Administering pain since 2009

So get a grip on this game and play it. It’s pretty much one of the best games of 2009 and, in my opinion, the best Batman game ever.

PS: Merry Christmas!

Playin’ Irish

Now I haven’t met an Irishman in my life, but because of the character that Sean Devlin is in Pandemic’s The Saboteur, I’d go have a drink with one at the local pub any day. It’s not about the English accent, or about the fact that they like drinking as much as I like playing video-games, it’s about the fact that they just seem such a warm people in a stereotypical style. Besides, they’re lucky and like the colour green, which not many people do, so take a pint on St. Patrick’s day, sit down, and play The Saboteur. I loved it, why wouldn’t you?

I'm not French, I'm Irish!

“Luck is a lady… apparently she’s a bit of a slut where I’m concerned.”

PS: Irishmen are also immune to lead poisoning. ‘Tis based upon observation of Sean sponging up enough bullets to fill a bloody tank.

Different place, different lifestyle

So I moved. It wasn’t a slow move though. In my life’s terms, this move occurred at light speed. It made me realize that, even with the help I get from what I get around me, I can live so well that money would not be an issue. This itself made me realize that when money is not an issue, I can concentrate on the other part of me, beside what we all do for money – work – which is my life.

I look at my old me where I’d take everything I looked at as an important part of the knowledge we have – the fact that the girl from next door had a nice shirt that day, or other miscellaneous things – and see that I was wrong. Looking at something as small as a smudge is unimportant to us, but to someone higher up, the fact that someone lower down is struggling to make do with what he/she has is just as unimportant. If you are intelligent and manage yourself both financially and as a lifestyle, you’ll live better, and with much less of a bore as a result.

It’s a whole other level that I must get to, and it’s not that I must grind the experience to get there, but it’s the fact that I can barely wait to reach it. Until then however, I have to grow, in age, mind and body, so I get to show the world what it is that makes me tick, perhaps showing the rest that way that the way I tick is the way to tick. So I guess that I have to occupy some of my gaming time with some visits to the theater, reading of some books, and generally trying to get myself to be a better person culturally, because if you really look at it, Romania is a beautiful country, with beautiful minds inventing beautiful things to marvel at.

 

We have arrived

The move was complete, no surprises there. Just a little bit of nerves taken from the usual humanness of the situation. Like when you call the next door neighbor and he doesn’t open the front door. It’s this kind of things that kind of make me cringe, thinking that I live in a place like this. Nevermind.

On another note, everything here is completely awesome. I’ve even been so lucky to use my poker playing friend’s laptop to connect to the internet (clandestinely) and through a clever LAN connection, share it between our computers.

The place is full of lights and looks luxurious, much more so than I’ve ever had in my life, so all’s well.

There are still many basic needs to be fulfilled though, like soap, toothpaste and stuff like that, but tomorrow is another day. I guess I need to live better from now on, simply by matter of need.

Heroes!

Yeah, I played Heroes of Might and Magic 3! And damn that was fun. I played with my roommate, eventually prevailed through pure luck because of incredible artifacts strewn upon my land.

You should pick it back up again. It is a very loved game, and for good reason. Addictive and awesome!