A while back, like 2 years ago, I posted about a ressurected interest in the PC game The Sims after I bought an expansion pack (Hot Date) and could do all sorts of new things...what's more, the game had built up a quite energetic fansite community and all sorts of new objects and skins were available for free download.
Back then, if you remember, I had just become reaquainted with my own internet connection again after the worst of Koyanisqatssi had taken it's toll and left me, literally, disconnected, for about 2 years, give or take a few malware infected (or should I say, infested) months in Spring of '04 at Cypress Springs (aka Ranchero de Cucaracha).
Well now it's the Sims 2, somewhat the same game but enhanced graphics and some cool aspects like characters aging and and eventually dying of natural causes. (good, because it always caused me a little pang of guilt whenever I had to murder a character I was tired of (ya, right)).
The game came with pre-installed neighborhoods, one featuring a couple of the pre-installed families from the first game like the Goths. In this game, the wife of Goth family patriarch Morimer has died "mysteriously" and her ghost is seen in some locations.
I've been spending lots of time with this neighborhood and here's what I got so far...
Mortimer lived in his smallish (compared to some of the doozies I've built) but nicely outfitted mansion with his grown adult daughter Cassandra and his young son Alexander.
Cassandra was set to get married to Lothario but somehow the wedding date kept getting pushed back.
The trellis and buffet set up for the big event in the Goth backyard instead was used by Mortimer when he accepted a proposal to Gina Caliente, the gold digging blond who lived down the street. Alexander then had a birthday and became a teenager.
Cassandra and her new step mom hated each other and got into a terrible fight.
A day or 2 later, Mortimer's life graph was very near the end and he was coughing more frequently. Feeling good enough to show off his Level 9 cooking skills though, he began preparing a nice pancake breakfast, but somehow Alexander entered the kitchen and distracted him. He really was totally showing signs of old age as he stood there looking at Alexander and the pancakes turned to brown, then black on the stove.
The fact that I then paused the game, went into Buy Mode and "accidentally" removed the doors to the kitchen without replacing them and re-entered Live Mode was not so good an action for the health of these 2 sims.
The fire first consumed Mortimer and after the Grim Reaper beamed him up to SimHeaven, I decided to spare young Alex and made him use a fire extinguisher to put out the remainder of the fire. But, likely due to the fact that he was just a young teen lacking skills, he failed to put out the fire and was soon fully engulfed in flames.
After their deaths, both Cassandra and Dina were a mess...Dina became a bit wacked and started playing pirate in the upstairs bathtub at every opportunity.
So sad.
Dina eventually moved back in with her sister and as a result gained only the default 20,000 simoleans rather than inheriting Mortimer's nearly one half million.
But with the 20 Gs, she did buy some new furnishings for her and Gina, and also a hot sports car!
Another wedding took place the day after the Goth ceremony, at John N.'s mansion. After much wooing, he finally married me. (As should have been in real life decades ago...Sim life corrects the Universe at last:)
But things between us have been a bit rocky. We got in a big fight a few Sim days ago and are slowly mending the rift. John is still a bit upset with me. I don't remember the reason but it might be when I went downtown and started flirting with Don Lothario (who may not be as straight as he seems...hello Cassandra?) and Jeremiah Gaylord the husband of Nathan who I had an affair with (including one night of YooHoo)...but I thought all of that was before I created and started going out with John. Oh no, now I remember, John and I had a pool party a few days after the wedding and I flirted with Jeremiah again, including attempting WooHoo in John and My bed! GASP! I'm such a whore. Serves me right for playing drunk (in real life) and making bad decisions. And John's the romance sim. I'm a knowledge sim.
Here's a rundown of a few more of the families in the game:
Jeremiah and Nathaniel Gaylord, a bi-racial gay married couple. They were one of the first I created. I moved them into the "doule-wide trailer style" house next to the pre-fab Broke family.
I'm playing both them and the Broke family without the motherlode cheat, so they have to make their money the old fashioned way...they have to earn it.
Ric is in there in a pretty fair replica of his condo. Remember a couple years ago when I posted the Sim screenshots of his (then our) house in the original game. Looks better now. I even included the whole pool area, jacussi, clubhouse on his property. His house and furnishings were created with just enough money from the motherlode cheat, but now he has to show off his fortune aspirations and make money in his business track career. Embarassingly, his character and mine have a crush on each other...GASP...how NOT like real life.
Aliscion and Albert are in the game. They also are being played as non-cheats. Their characters kinda look like them...so scary.
They live near the Pervy family.
Oh yes, how sick am I...
Uncle Tim Pervy aka Father Tim O'Flagellate somehow was able to adopt 3 young teenaged boys, despite the fact he is a registered sex offender arrested for diddlin' with his altar boys. Wonder how he will treat his smooth, virile young "sons"? How good of a "Daddy" can he be?
Oh, ya, I went there!
As an homage to one of my favorite TV shows as a kid in the 70's...The Brady family is here. Their house, at least on the inside, is a pretty good recreation (within the game's object and building option limitations) of the famous home. In mine though...there are plenty of bathrooms.
But not as many bathrooms as the Tudors. Having recently seen the movie Elizabeth: The Golden Age, I resurrected Queen Elizabeth the First, her hand maiden 'Beth and the man they vied for in the film, Sir Walter Raleigh. I threw in a court jester for good measure. The four of them, dressed in somewhat appropriate period costumes, live in splendor in a huge 4 story castle complete with a moat and English hedge maze.
Among the 45 rooms are a conservatory, ballroom, library, 3 kitchens, 2 formal dining halls, a throne room, a meeting hall, a chapel, a gambling hall, a pub, 6 bedrooms, several parlors and 14 bathrooms. No dungeon. This is a happy kingdom. (Besides, methinks Uncle Tim will build a dungeon in his perverted home)
Not quite as opulent as the Tudors' castle, I pain-stakingly recreated one of the most famous mansions in the world. The White House. But in my version, it's already after the 2008 election and the tenents are none other than President Hillary and First Gentleman Bill Clinton!
Oh what joy they feel being back in the saddle again!
I built only the main house, no West or East wings, and eliminated the ground floor so that it would be 2 floors. The first floor has acurate representations of the Blue Room, Red Room and Green Room, The State Dining Room and East Hall. The upper floor includes my rendition of the President's living quarters, the Queen's Bedroom (that's what it's called...not Hillary's bedroom), and the Lincoln Bedroom, complete with cash register. (No just kidding about the cash register, but, now that I think of it I could probably bring over a cash register object from Downtown...hmmm, that'd be hilarious).
Oh, since I didn't build the West Wing, I put the "Oval Office" on the second floor and placed TWO desks in there. ('Cause you know it will be like having 2 for the price of one!)
Remember Crocket and Tubbs from Miami Vice? They have a sweet 1980's minimalist-style pad in the Little Miami section of town. Complete with pink neon flamingos, all-white furniture living room, top-floor disco and, of course, a slick silver "Ferrari".
Another TV re-creation: The winning father/daughter "team" from this past summer's reality show "Big Brother 8", Evil Dick and his once-estranged daughter, Barbie-doll wannabe Jennifer. They have a cool rocker-pad just next door to the Caliente sisters.
Last of my own creations are the Collins, Barnabas and Elvira. They moved into the little one-room shack near the water tower after I moved in the pre-fab Oldie family and killed them off via starvation. The Collins have added more floor space, and a second-story loft. They get the occasional haunting from the ghosts of the Oldies, but they don't mind, they like the occult. After all, it should be pretty obvious that I am gearing for them to be bitten by the Vampire Lord or Lady to bring them into the Fold of the Undead.
Back then, if you remember, I had just become reaquainted with my own internet connection again after the worst of Koyanisqatssi had taken it's toll and left me, literally, disconnected, for about 2 years, give or take a few malware infected (or should I say, infested) months in Spring of '04 at Cypress Springs (aka Ranchero de Cucaracha).
Well now it's the Sims 2, somewhat the same game but enhanced graphics and some cool aspects like characters aging and and eventually dying of natural causes. (good, because it always caused me a little pang of guilt whenever I had to murder a character I was tired of (ya, right)).
The game came with pre-installed neighborhoods, one featuring a couple of the pre-installed families from the first game like the Goths. In this game, the wife of Goth family patriarch Morimer has died "mysteriously" and her ghost is seen in some locations.
I've been spending lots of time with this neighborhood and here's what I got so far...
Mortimer lived in his smallish (compared to some of the doozies I've built) but nicely outfitted mansion with his grown adult daughter Cassandra and his young son Alexander.
Cassandra was set to get married to Lothario but somehow the wedding date kept getting pushed back.
The trellis and buffet set up for the big event in the Goth backyard instead was used by Mortimer when he accepted a proposal to Gina Caliente, the gold digging blond who lived down the street. Alexander then had a birthday and became a teenager.
Cassandra and her new step mom hated each other and got into a terrible fight.
A day or 2 later, Mortimer's life graph was very near the end and he was coughing more frequently. Feeling good enough to show off his Level 9 cooking skills though, he began preparing a nice pancake breakfast, but somehow Alexander entered the kitchen and distracted him. He really was totally showing signs of old age as he stood there looking at Alexander and the pancakes turned to brown, then black on the stove.
The fact that I then paused the game, went into Buy Mode and "accidentally" removed the doors to the kitchen without replacing them and re-entered Live Mode was not so good an action for the health of these 2 sims.
The fire first consumed Mortimer and after the Grim Reaper beamed him up to SimHeaven, I decided to spare young Alex and made him use a fire extinguisher to put out the remainder of the fire. But, likely due to the fact that he was just a young teen lacking skills, he failed to put out the fire and was soon fully engulfed in flames.
After their deaths, both Cassandra and Dina were a mess...Dina became a bit wacked and started playing pirate in the upstairs bathtub at every opportunity.
So sad.
Dina eventually moved back in with her sister and as a result gained only the default 20,000 simoleans rather than inheriting Mortimer's nearly one half million.
But with the 20 Gs, she did buy some new furnishings for her and Gina, and also a hot sports car!
Another wedding took place the day after the Goth ceremony, at John N.'s mansion. After much wooing, he finally married me. (As should have been in real life decades ago...Sim life corrects the Universe at last:)
But things between us have been a bit rocky. We got in a big fight a few Sim days ago and are slowly mending the rift. John is still a bit upset with me. I don't remember the reason but it might be when I went downtown and started flirting with Don Lothario (who may not be as straight as he seems...hello Cassandra?) and Jeremiah Gaylord the husband of Nathan who I had an affair with (including one night of YooHoo)...but I thought all of that was before I created and started going out with John. Oh no, now I remember, John and I had a pool party a few days after the wedding and I flirted with Jeremiah again, including attempting WooHoo in John and My bed! GASP! I'm such a whore. Serves me right for playing drunk (in real life) and making bad decisions. And John's the romance sim. I'm a knowledge sim.
Here's a rundown of a few more of the families in the game:
Jeremiah and Nathaniel Gaylord, a bi-racial gay married couple. They were one of the first I created. I moved them into the "doule-wide trailer style" house next to the pre-fab Broke family.
I'm playing both them and the Broke family without the motherlode cheat, so they have to make their money the old fashioned way...they have to earn it.
Ric is in there in a pretty fair replica of his condo. Remember a couple years ago when I posted the Sim screenshots of his (then our) house in the original game. Looks better now. I even included the whole pool area, jacussi, clubhouse on his property. His house and furnishings were created with just enough money from the motherlode cheat, but now he has to show off his fortune aspirations and make money in his business track career. Embarassingly, his character and mine have a crush on each other...GASP...how NOT like real life.
Aliscion and Albert are in the game. They also are being played as non-cheats. Their characters kinda look like them...so scary.
They live near the Pervy family.
Oh yes, how sick am I...
Uncle Tim Pervy aka Father Tim O'Flagellate somehow was able to adopt 3 young teenaged boys, despite the fact he is a registered sex offender arrested for diddlin' with his altar boys. Wonder how he will treat his smooth, virile young "sons"? How good of a "Daddy" can he be?
Oh, ya, I went there!
As an homage to one of my favorite TV shows as a kid in the 70's...The Brady family is here. Their house, at least on the inside, is a pretty good recreation (within the game's object and building option limitations) of the famous home. In mine though...there are plenty of bathrooms.
But not as many bathrooms as the Tudors. Having recently seen the movie Elizabeth: The Golden Age, I resurrected Queen Elizabeth the First, her hand maiden 'Beth and the man they vied for in the film, Sir Walter Raleigh. I threw in a court jester for good measure. The four of them, dressed in somewhat appropriate period costumes, live in splendor in a huge 4 story castle complete with a moat and English hedge maze.
Among the 45 rooms are a conservatory, ballroom, library, 3 kitchens, 2 formal dining halls, a throne room, a meeting hall, a chapel, a gambling hall, a pub, 6 bedrooms, several parlors and 14 bathrooms. No dungeon. This is a happy kingdom. (Besides, methinks Uncle Tim will build a dungeon in his perverted home)
Not quite as opulent as the Tudors' castle, I pain-stakingly recreated one of the most famous mansions in the world. The White House. But in my version, it's already after the 2008 election and the tenents are none other than President Hillary and First Gentleman Bill Clinton!
Oh what joy they feel being back in the saddle again!
I built only the main house, no West or East wings, and eliminated the ground floor so that it would be 2 floors. The first floor has acurate representations of the Blue Room, Red Room and Green Room, The State Dining Room and East Hall. The upper floor includes my rendition of the President's living quarters, the Queen's Bedroom (that's what it's called...not Hillary's bedroom), and the Lincoln Bedroom, complete with cash register. (No just kidding about the cash register, but, now that I think of it I could probably bring over a cash register object from Downtown...hmmm, that'd be hilarious).
Oh, since I didn't build the West Wing, I put the "Oval Office" on the second floor and placed TWO desks in there. ('Cause you know it will be like having 2 for the price of one!)
Remember Crocket and Tubbs from Miami Vice? They have a sweet 1980's minimalist-style pad in the Little Miami section of town. Complete with pink neon flamingos, all-white furniture living room, top-floor disco and, of course, a slick silver "Ferrari".
Another TV re-creation: The winning father/daughter "team" from this past summer's reality show "Big Brother 8", Evil Dick and his once-estranged daughter, Barbie-doll wannabe Jennifer. They have a cool rocker-pad just next door to the Caliente sisters.
Last of my own creations are the Collins, Barnabas and Elvira. They moved into the little one-room shack near the water tower after I moved in the pre-fab Oldie family and killed them off via starvation. The Collins have added more floor space, and a second-story loft. They get the occasional haunting from the ghosts of the Oldies, but they don't mind, they like the occult. After all, it should be pretty obvious that I am gearing for them to be bitten by the Vampire Lord or Lady to bring them into the Fold of the Undead.