The Sims/1
This page is about things specific to The first The Sims released in 2000.
“The game that gives new meaning to the term 'broken home'.”
The Sims is a debatably successful series of video games, TV shows and mobile ringtones, all of which were created by Electronic Arts in order to extract massive amounts of money from obsessed fans' wallets. The gameplay revolves around an overwhelmingly realistic simulation of the drudgery that is urban existence with metaphysical connotations of an epic Schrodinger-esque scale. Or not. Whilst there is no real 'aim' in the game (technically proving it useless), the player is granted control over a household of computer-generated lifeforms, or "Sims", and live their life for them. Critics say that this element of "live a better life than your own" is what made the games a success, along with the ability to torture and eventually kill them. The first game, itself titled The Sims, was created by lead game designer, Will Wright, and released in February 2000. It won numerous awards, such as Worst Game of the Year and Ugliest Graphics, prompting EA to make a sequel, which won more awards. This rather monotonous cycle makes up the history of the series.
| Sim | |
|---|---|
| Kingdom | |
| Phylum | |
| Class | |
| Order | |
| Family | |
| Genus | |
| Species | |
| Binomial Name | |
| Primary Armament | |
| Secondary Armament | |
| Power Supply | |
| Health | |
| Mana | |
| Strength | |
| Intelligence | |
| Weight | |
| Length | |
| Special Attack | |
| Conservation Status | |
Gameplay[edit | edit source]
In the first game, the gameplay was supposed to consist of crashing to the desktop every five minutes (this was a tried and tested formula in the games buisness). After receiving multiple complaints, Will Wright released the following statement: "The fact that you have 10 gigabytes of custom content, most of it hacked objects, has nothing to do with it, although an, erm, bug in the game prevents the interaction tree for 'Function - DeskCrash' to always return as $FALSE. This means that the interaction, 'Function - SUPER SYSTEM CRASH!', is always called instead." As most players tried to decode Wright's complicated computer lingo, others accepted the so called bug and continued playing.
Wright later announced that if you did happen to get The Sims up and running for more than five minutes (this does not include the loading screens which take up thirty minutes), you would be instantly addicted and would spend all your time trapping the characters in the houses you painstakingly built for them using an array of cheat codes and attempting to make Sims that look like your boss and kill them but ultimately failing, as all Sim characters look the same.
Once The Sims 2 was released, players discovered a moderately glitch-free version of the original. They were instantly hooked on the ability to do everything the first $20 they had paid was supposed to give them, and then some. In The Sims and its subsequent incarnations, gameplay is divided into three modes: Labor mode, Consumer mode and Die mode. The most popular mode, Die mode, is the one in which players gleefully kill their lovingly crafted Sims in a variety of unsettling and grisly manners. Consumer mode allows Sims to spend irregularly audited Simeoleons (the currency in the game) on authenticated Will Wright merchandise. Entering Labor mode loads spyware onto your computer, then allows players to erect labrynthine gauntlets for which the cattle-like Sims are lead to slaughter. Fans have praised this simple yet straight-forward setup.
The Sims[edit | edit source]
Created in 2000, the original The Sims was instantly a fan favorite. Its loading screens and crashes excited players, and, of course, this lead to expansion packs. The graphics consisted of an isometric landscape with box-like polygon Sims warily navigating their hellish purgatory.
Expansion packs[edit | edit source]
Expansion packs are accessory discs which promise to add something to the game. Each expansion pack enhanced the game with more confusing actions and different supernatural phenomena that rather bent Maxis' absurd definition of the word "simulation". These additions helped supply an exponentially accumulating library of game-crashing bugs and errors. The primary gist of these expansion packs was to generally charge people full price for content which was unusable without the base game, thereby making Maxis and EA ludicrous amounts of money on an embarrassingly shaky premise. The Sims' expansion packs were advertised as being able to turn your computer into a sauna. Despite being unable to do this, they fufilled their original purpose: making Will Wright richer (until he would sell the rights to Electronic Arts for the sequel).
The following list describes each of the expansion packs for the first game, in the order of when the abominations were first released.
- Livin' Large - This first expansion pack, which also displayed Maxis's alleged feelings for obese people, lets Sims have "fun". This was entirely new to the game, since in the base game children usually stayed kids forever, going to school even on Saturdays and Sundays for the rest of their shitty, worthless lives, and the adults were doomed to a life of social failure and glass ceilings. Also, this expansion pack gives you the chance to concoct slimy green potions that make your Sims feel horrible and get fined by the Nuclear Chemicals Department.
- House Party - This lets your Sims have chaotic lives every single night throwing totally disastrous parties, and depriving them of friends, with the possible exception of a lone mime. The pack's slogan was "Live your life all over again!" Drunken orgies moderated by dance cages and obnoxious lights allowed players to turn their Sims' very homes into virtual euro-gay discotheques.
- Hot Date - One of the only few expansion packs where Sims can actually leave their dismal homes and go to boring destinations and have terrible dates that barely affect their hopeless love lives. This would be a turning point for Maxis, as it provided their design team with excuses for even more loading screens, a trend which would continue to this very day.
- Vacation - Sims get to go to a place where the beach, the forest, and the snow-capped mountains are so close to each other, that it's geographically unfeasible. Also, they get to waste money on unreasonably-priced hotels and rigged carnival games with useless souvenirs. In fact, it is more relaxing for your Sims to stay home instead (until they set it on fire). This gave players something to do with the billions of Simoleons they'd racked up via cheating until this expansion pack was finally released, by blowing it on expensive hotel rooms to trash like celebrities.
- Unleashed - Ahhh. Finally, the people at Maxis thought of enlarging the neighborhood, and this is the only expansion pack where you can have shops in your own village without having to go out somewhere else. Gardening has been introduced here, to let your Sims eat nothing other than rodent-infested, maggoty harvests and sell them at the vegetable stands for ridiculous prices. Also, you can have cats and dogs as pets here, but you cannot control them, meaning that your Sims will get their garden full of excretement from neighbouring pets forever and woken each and every night by raccoons eating out of their garbage.
- Superstar - With this expansion pack, Will Wright and the folks at Maxis decided to torture the players even more by boosting their Sims' status to 'celebrity'. However, they just couldn't abandon their trademark Sims-lives-suck formula, and so in this pack your Sims will get chased by obsessed fans everywhere and live their miserable life berating every single one of them. Your Sim can also act out terrible B-movies to further simulate the Hollywood industry of LARPing.
- Makin' Magic - This pack was criticised for being too 'whacky', although it probably seemed like a good idea whilst being pitched: "Jump into a hole and choose from three magical destinations: clown, haunted, and forest. Have a difficult time as you collect all the items needed to concoct useless spells. Also, charms can only be used thrice and are a waste of space in your home. Well, the bright side is that it is here when you can finally make your children grow with the "Age of Instant" spell, but they turn into headless adults who get neglected, as they can not be selected as active characters and then die. Oh, and you can also grow a beanstalk here that allows you to climb up and see Will Wright." Nevertheless, the pack sold out soon, mainly because of rapid fan-related consumption.
- Give Will Wright More Money - The famed series of Sims 1 expansion packs that actually don't advance or improve gameplay at all ended with Give Will Wright More Money, a pack that does nothing whatsoever as claimed on the box, but really hacks into players' bank accounts. Also known as the "fucking waste of $30" expansion pack, critics have often dismissed it from their reviews as "stupid". However, Will Wright himself stongly encourages people to buy it.
The Sims 2[edit | edit source]
The Sims 2 was an alternate reality created by Will Wright in 2004 as an "improved" version of The Sims. Electronic Arts originally intended for The Sims 2 to be a means of communication with space aliens, but based on the information in this game, the aliens decided we were not a particularly intelligent species and focused their efforts elsewhere.
Since then, The Sims 2 has been turned into an amusement park for the 12-17 year-old AOL crowd, usually teenage girls who can't curb their desire for purchasing things and lonely middle-aged house mothers who don't know/refuse to learn how to play anything else but similarly desire crass consumerism. The Sims 2 features a new fully three-dimensional universe, advertised as giving players the opportunity to make more detailed Sims who resemble their friends, families and teachers for the purposes of sexing or killing them.
The Sims 2 is filled with addicting qualities like the ability to have lesbian Sims make out. Surprisingly enough, the lesbian angle has recruited a lot of girl gamers, a connection not many would have suspected. Some of the other new features which the Sims 2 offered in its base game was aging and memories, because nothing sells like the crushing ennui of growing old and being relentlessly reminded of past episodes where Dad drowned in the pool and Mom had an affair with the pizza delivery guy.
Expansion Packs[edit | edit source]
The Sims 2 is notorious for being the main transition from Maxis' quaint naivete to Electronic Arts' hoary abbatoir, leading down to an underworld nexus of their own devising. As such, it was no surprise then that the Sims 2 offered even more Expansion Packs under an even looser guise of charging people the same amount of money for progressively less in return. This was, in actuality, an essential move as the Sims 2 base game provided far less content at its release than The Sims had with its full array of expansion packs available at the time.
This list is only a handful of the many expansion packs sold by EA.
- University - Right away, the first expansion pack seeks to get players as far away from their Sims' homes as possible and send teens off to one of three colleges, none of which players will have time to explore in the hectic schedules of lecture classes that last all day and night and final exams every three days. The full experience of university life is here to depress players: eating ramen noodles for three meals a day, fraternity hazing, bad haircuts and spending the rest of their lives in debt. They can even burn their favorite teddy bear in a bonfire. To cheer each other up, Sims undergoing the torture that is University can dance around naked with the new "Streak" interaction and/or perform school cheers, which are well received by their school's mascot, the horny cow. Once they graduate, alumni Sims are allowed an insider list at specific jobs that only advanced education can get you such as Paranormal Research, which usually leads to Researcher Sims getting abducted and probed by aliens. This pack also introduces the Resurrect-a-Phone, that allows the player to resurrect and continue to torture their Sims by means of sleep deprivation or turning them into zombies.
- Nightlife - Maxis' most soul-crushing expansion pack enables players' Sims to go to nightclubs and attempt to get laid (but this is impossible without the aid of hacking), get drunk and get arrested for disorderly conduct. Sims can also "drive" automatic cars that not only allow their driver to fall asleep at the wheel without crashing (as well as talk on the cell phone they bought in University), but take six hours to arrive at any destination, provided that destination is in the same neighborhood. Sims are encouraged to become vampires and bite Mrs. Crumplebottom, who not only retaliates by soundly whipping the Sim with her purse, but also crashing the game.
- Pets - An expansion pack which creates Sim pets, and is identical to the Unleashed expansion pack released five years earlier (for the previous incarnation of the game). These pets come in all colors, and delight in destroying furniture, peeing inside the house, yowling, digging holes in the yard, howling, eating garbage, bringing fleas into the house, rolling in filth, disobeying commands, attacking their owners, and spreading lycanthropy. The slogan is "Once again, just like the real thing!"
- Open For Business - This pack lets Sims go bankrupt while they lose all their friends and become social outcasts trying to run their own businesses (like in real life) in exchange for shiny badges (unlike real life). Sims can experience all the fun and excitement of a minimum wage retail job (at the same time they're supposed to be in school), including handling upset customers, shelf stocking, and keeping the bathrooms clean. Your lonely Sims will no longer be lonely now that they have the new ability to make droids known as SexBots. They cook, clean and they won't laugh when you tell them you're going to Woohoo them up.
- Seasons - Seasons introduces weather, but mainly overblown hail, to the game. New activities like gardening, fishing, raking leaves, and being struck by lightning are thrown in to make it seem like the also overblown price tag is not too big. Sims love being struck by lightning, so they spend as much time outdoors in the hot tub and splashing in rainy puddles during thunderstorms as possible. The new juicer object enables Sims to enjoy tasty treats like pureed freshly-caught boot juice. Fresh-caught boot is also delicious grilled, boiled, baked, and fried, as it would be a terrible waste to simply hang this culinary delight on the wall as a trophy.
- Bon Voyage - Allows your Sims to go on vacation, just like they did five years earlier in The Sims Vacation, so that they can spend more money than they have on hotel lodging, get pick-pocketed, stung by bees, para-sail UNDER a flock of seagulls (with predictable results), contract a case of poison ivy, and return from the vacation with jet lag. The main feature of Bon Voyage is the five-hundred-percent more loading screens.
- Free Time - This expansion pack was originally known as "Get a Life" to remind the player that there really IS more to life than this game. In case the hardcore Sims-addicted player has forgotten about activities outside the game, this expansion pack features activities such as sewing, basketball, pottery, restoring old cars, blogging, and new careers. Of course, for most Sims, there is no such thing as free time between school/work, sleeping, and struggling to raise their mood score, which is still more rewarding than any of those pissant activities, though.
- Apartment Life - An expansion pack which comes with more useless junk, including a deadly Murphy bed that can kill your Sim (just like in real life). And if that's not enough, it comes with witches, that can purposely make a Sim be chased by bees. Players can enjoy having their underwear drawer rooted through by creepy serial-killer butane-addict landlords (are there any other kind?), woken up at three in the morning by neighbor Sims having noisy se...um, Woohooing, and of course pestilence spreads much quicker among Sims living in such disturbingly close and confined quarters. On the plus side, if your Sim's low on money to buy food, they can always eat a roommate (as opposed to buying groceries, again just like in real life).
- Hobo Life/Homeless - Originallydesigned as a simulator for future high school graduates but rejected as it broke EA's "No Kindness" rule, Sims can leave home and take it to the streets. They can beg for money, bathe in a pond, and eat out of a dumpster, and get new careers like giving blowjobs behind the local K-Mart for $5, going to prison and dropping pants for money. Includes special objects such as the plastic bag, the shopping cart and the cardboard box.
- Nuclear Holocaust - Comes with melt-down nuclear power plant neighborhood decoration which turns neighbourhoods a nice shade of green, hazardous waste barrels, and glowing uranium rods. This expansion pack modifies your game so that the showers and tubs are unusable in radioactive neighborhoods. Iin neighborhoods with the meltdown event enabled, flowers and plants will not grow, Sims with less than 10 body skill cannot leave the house except to go to work or school, and killer zombies created at random roam the neighborhood and attack citizens. Delivery people are on strike, and refuse to visit radioactive neighborhoods. Manual typewriters have replaced computers, since nothing electronic works except battery-powered radios. The mafia is more active than usual however, and takes 10% of everyone's take-home pay away every week. Elders in radioactive neighborhoods automatically become senile and are no longer under the user's control.
Stuff Packs[edit | edit source]
In case fans' hard drives weren't full and wallets weren't empty yet, a 2003 EA brainstorming session came out with "stuff packs" that don't really do anything except add more fancy stuff to "update" your Sim's homes with.
- Romance Stuff - This pack is geared towards older players with items such as the vibrating bed, a new "super-WooHoo" interaction, hundreds of new outfits, and many objects to support various alternative lifestyles. The censor bars that come when Sims do *stuff* are now out. In addition, the Sims are more anatomically correct in this version, so you can look at your Sims shower, and it feels the same as when you peek at someone taking a shower in real life.
- IKEA Stuff - In the pursuit of commercial sponsorship, EA created the IKEA expansion pack. All the new objects come packed and your Sims must assemble them. If a Sim with low Mechanical skill attempts to assemble an item, the Sim risks injury and/or death.
- Mansion and Garden Stuff - This stuff pack was deliberately designed to confuse users when their Apartment Life CD "stopped working" with the error message "wrong CD inserted, insert Mansion and Garden Stuff". Only a few players figured out that the game required this Stuff pack CD to continue playing instead of the Apartment Life CD. This stuff pack contains build-mode objects and buy-mode objects that are unaffordable to any Sims except the ones with mafia connections.
Aspirations[edit | edit source]
Now that Will Wright had realized how superficial Sims really are, he devised something to give Sims more depth and personality. That would be aspirations, and there are 8 of them, namely:
- Family Aspiration - Sims with this aspiration crave to have a lot of crotchfruit, whom they will also 'do it' with.
- Romance Aspiration - Sims with this aspiration crave to become sluts by Woohooing up with more than one person, although this is a very difficult task in the game.
- Murder Aspiration - The Taxi Driver of aspirations. Involves a lot of eating other Sims and being fired from work for throwing a hand grenade into Accounting.
- Knowledge Aspiration - Sims with this aspiration crave to be annoying know-it-alls.
- Fortune Aspiration - Sims with this aspiration crave to, well, get rich. Nuff said.
- Popularity Aspiration - Sims with this aspiration crave disaster. They love to throw parties that can cause anarchy and chaos.
- Pleasure Aspiration - Sims with this aspiration crave happiness, but will be sad as they can never get it. They are already beginning to realize, little by little, that they can never attain true happiness as with true happiness should come freedom.
- Grilled Cheese Aspiration - Sims with this aspiration crave to eat grilled cheese sandwiches all the time and talk about it. This stuff writes itself, folks.
The Sims 3[edit | edit source]
The Sims 3, also known as "The Sims 3: Ubercrash", is once again the same concept as the previous games, but with hazier graphics and a higher price. Having the innovative idea of one seamless neighbourhood shows that the morons at EA realized that four hours worth of LOADING PLEASANTVIEW then LOADING THE SMITH FAMILY wasn't a good idea. The game is much better than that as it simply does not work at all, as the RAM needed to process an entire neighbourhood with several hundred lives living simultaneously amounts to the number of atoms in the Sun.
With advances in computing making the game possible to play with a brand new computer, it was necessary to raise the bar by adding more features, and therefore more requirements for the game so that it would bring a new computer to its knees as well. First, EA Games sold a multitude of new objects, Sim clothing, and building features in their online store so that the "sensible" Sim addict must spend ALL THEIR MONEY getting ALL of the new sets NOW, never mind trivial things like rent, real life clothing, real life utilities and insurance. Players can also spend REAL LIFE MONEY on FAKE LIFE OBJECTS by visiting the store website and shelling out hard-earned cash on a fucking video game chair made up of 1s and 0s. This is also plagiarism as far as Second Life is concerned.
Expansion Packs[edit | edit source]
Money-hungry EA released a swathe of expansion packs for The Sims 3. They were marketed as having "better (title) quality than the previous packs".
- World Adventures - The first expansion pack is near identical to The Sims' Vacation and The Sims 2's Bon Voyage. It once again adds three new vacation neighborhoods for Sims to spend their money on, although the official description differs slightly: "Now your Sims can enjoy the rich vastness that other cultures have to offer, such as bestiality and bigotry. The experience becomes even more real as your Sims can contract such exciting diseases from traveling such as syphilis and cholera. Your Sims may die when terrorists hijack their airplane, but on the bright side it's never been easier to catch STDs now that your Sims can purchase mail-order brides from abroad! Buy now!" Each new country has something to offer for Sims: France offers the "Smells Like Feet" Moodlet, Homosexual WooHoo, Alcoholism, and booby-trapped mansions. Egypt offers Death by Drinking Water, Death by Terrorist, "Savaged by Crocodiles" Moodlet, and the Mummy Curse. China offers Death by Yakuza (Sims disappear after travelling to China), Martial Arts Training Dummies that fight back, and the "Government Interrogation" Rabbithole. New Bugs introduced in World Adventures: Pools become invisible, Sims cannot visit stores to buy food or books anymore, and Egypt is infested with Scarab Beetles.
- Late Night - This pack gives hopeless unloved Sims a chance to maybe actually have a life after dark. The additions of hot tubs, dance floors and party machines mean that now the game crashes without fail. And if that wasn't enough, Sims can now turn into vampires who get lynched by hordes of angry people with garlic and burn in the sunlight if they leave their homes during the day. On the plus side, you can make Edward Cullen Sims and kill them off repeatedly. New Skill: Alcoholism Enabler. New Creature: Ravers, Woody Allen. New Bugs: Less bugs in favor of whopping great lag for Cities. Rumor has it that the Sim vampire spiders got greedy and ate the bugs, then gummed up the works with their sticky webs.
- Ambitions - Sims are now able to create robots, and as if EA hadn't sucked all the fun out of the game already, they have to do laundry too! You can also make tattoos for Sims with low self-esteem. Sims can now be self-employed losers by selling dirty paintings or erotic literature or even just rude sculptures like penis topiaries. There are pawn shops however, which can be vital for families with too many children in them. New Bugs: Collectibles no longer spawn, Sims no longer attend work on their own, Ghosts no longer return to their graves.
- The Next Generations - As if Woody Allen in Late Night wasn't enough, pedophilia abounds as children and teenagers get revamps and can now join after-school clubs, like Dungeons and Dragons or Glee Club. Also, they can now remember and create embarrassing or messy moments. Yes, that is the entire extent of this expansion pack. EA included a message with the pack's CD case, saying that advanced players should make mods themselves to fix the exponentially multiplying bugs abound in the software they dare charge money for and then require you to get patched in order to play it. New Bugs: Memories spawn five times over, Photography now freezes your Sims.
- Pets - Pets once again return to Sims after being left out of the base game. To further appeal to women's inherent lust for bestiality, horses will now be a molestable animal in this expansion. Bugs? Those are just the special features! Sadly, this expansion does not include creatures like griffins, centaurs, and dragons. Rumor has it that they were omitted deliberately to include in a future expansion pack for Sims Medieval, to boost sales for that game. But EA fans, never fear, your Sim can now ride Unicorns! Yes, these magical animals shoot fire out of their hooves and have the ability to kill plants with sparkles - because the Sims is all about real life events.
- Showtime - Following the trend of promoting a popular rock star, this expansion pack was originally inspired by one of Katy Perry's albums. Fireworks shooting out from the Sims bodies were not included, since that already happens when Sims woohoo. In this expansion pack, Sims can make fools of themselves on stage by becoming an Acrobat, Singer, or Magician, usually resulting in them getting booed off the stage. The DJ career also returns so that they can annoy other Sims on the dance floor by playing the Macarena. Showtime also comes with a new 'town', which is a replica of every other town in the game, but this time it has palm trees (this contributes to $15 of the game's price).
Stuff Packs[edit | edit source]
Stuff packs are designed to reinforce the recurring concept of never-ending commercialism in this game. Like most stuff advertised on television, they promise much, but once you have it, you find it strangely unsatisfying after a while.
- High End Loft Stuff - EA admitted that the bathrooms and kitchens that came with the base game were boring, and put out this stuff pack to make the kitchen and bathrooms more attractive. Fortunately for Sim people, they don't have to do WITHOUT a kitchen or bathroom in order to update them since time stops during the renovation, as opposed to having to watch the floor and walls be torn up, new wiring and lighting put in, and pay good money just to get rid of that old energy inefficient fridge/freezer, dishwasher, and construction debris. (In the Sims 3, the dump doesn't charge a disposal fee, and remarkably doesn't fill up immediately.)
- Fast Lane Stuff - Deciding that there wasn't enough interesting stuff for young Sim boys to furnish their rooms with, EA created this stuff pack so that Sim boys could aspire to be race car drivers. Unfortunately, there are no such things as actual race cars or race tracks in the Sims, but apparently this myth is encouraged among young Sims, similarly to Santa Claus or the tooth fairy. On the bright side, there are some new cars for adult Sims to use, but again, none of them are race cars, and they don't get their Sims to their destinations any faster.
- Barnacle Bay - This stuff pack was designed as a practical joke to fool players who expected a DVD in the case, for when they opened it, there was none! The player might as well have simply have bought it as a digital download, since that is all this stuff pack is anyways. This pirate themed stuff pack includes a shipwrecked ship that Sims cannot visit, pirate clothes, and a new neighborhood in which all the Sims talk with a pirate accent, but the player cannot tell since they are still speaking Simlish. This stuff pack also requires a game update, but unlike the other stuff packs that come on DVDs, does not manually update your game. Instead, if the automatic game updater is broken, the player must buy the next stuff pack first, then install this content afterwards.
- Outdoor Living Stuff - Responding to complaints from players that square pools were boring, EA games added curved pools. Unfortunately, sharks and piranhas were not included. Also, for your rich Sims who inherited lots of simoleons, there is lots of yard improvement stuff, including a new outdoor stove, wrought ironwork to keep poor Sims from gawking in their windows, and new Sim fashions to clutter their closet with. Oddly enough, Sims give money to charity, but never clothing or household items. They also never hold garage sales, but mysteriously never have any difficulty selling old items.
Create A Sim World[edit | edit source]
Now players can enjoy an overly convoluted tool for creating their own neighborhoods in Sims 3 which even more lagging and computer-crashing power than the Sims 3 game itself! All the rigorous excitement of sitting for hours, placing walls, trying to get roads to line up or curve correctly, and just figuring out how the damn thing works in the first frigging place may detract from the less fun time of just playing the damn game already. As if the creating tool isn't more complicated than it should ever need to be in the first place, players can texture entire neighborhoods in pornography even though they won't show up in high resolution in-game (which would likely crash it anyway), they can also benefit from the reward of days of grueling tediousness only to find their Sim can't fucking figure out how to drive to their job at the graveyard. This does allow for the more "mature" players to distribute penis-shaped neighborhoods with inaccurate screenshots. Oh, the hilarity to be found on the Sims 3 website!
The Sims Social[edit | edit source]
First introduced as a ripoff of Kudos, then withdrawn within a month, the Sims Social was reinvented as a Facebook game. You win the game by spamming all your friends to beg for things like frying pans, mixing bowls, fury, cheese, speech bubbles and paintbrushes, then skilling up your Sim higher than your friends Sims, building a house larger than your friends Sims (three of your Facebook friends must help to build each room), furnishing the house with holiday or themed items from expired goals that are later stored when they become useless, and having as many Sim neighbors as possible (encouraging the player to Facebook "friend" strangers from the forums or create a second gaming Facebook account for self-gifting rather than alienate their real friends).
Gameplay is very much like the original Sims game for PC/Mac, except that there is no way to kill off your Sim except for blocking the application or closing your Facebook account. Also, your character has much more limited clothing items, you cannot rotate your entire house view, the artwork is more cartoon-like, and the face and hair are customizable without changing the entire head and can be changed without resorting to third party hacks. Like Sims 2 and Sims 3, you can change the tops and bottoms without changing the whole outfit, but you can also change the accessories, socks and shoes. You can also select personality traits for your Sim (such as Ninja or Insane). Finally, like the rest of the Sims series, you can choose your relationship with other Sims by your interactions with them, but the other player must approve of any relationships greater than "Friends". You can also bore your Facebook friends with which activities your Sims did together (whether it be watching TV, dancing, or woo-hooing). Mirroring life in a poor economy, Sims in the Sims Social all start out either self-employed or unemployed since none of the other companies are hiring. However, they can earn money for almost any activity, including making their own bed or repairing their own electronics. This is fortunate since they are not allowed to have roommates in the game, nor to live with their parents. Recent careers added, like artist or musician, let the player make a career of the game by requiring them to come back in a few to several hours to complete a task. These careers, along with gardening on four small garden plots, enable your Sim to actually lose money on a regular basis by the player forgetting to return in time. Not that the money actually does much to help your Sims with their goals. Like most Facebook game money (except the kind purchased with real money), it is relatively easy to earn with time, but mostly worthless in the context of the game, since you can't buy ingredients, building materials or energy with it.
Like most Facebook simulation games, the graphics lag, the theme and goals change weekly, and there is a reward for coming back to play every day. However, eventually it gets harder and harder to level up or meet theme goals without Facebook-friending lots of strangers (or alternatively, your entire high school's graduating class) or spending lots of real-life money to meet the game's goals. Odds are, some of the strangers will be far ahead you at your game, and they will typically be the ones spending money on the game or with another set of friends who spend money on the game. Either way, its a money maker for the game makers, and Facebook which of course gets its cut of the Facebook game credits.
The Sims 4: In Real Life[edit | edit source]
“Wow, it's like you're inside the game yourself!”
“Mogi mogi mogi.”
“Can this even be called a game? It seems so real that you can hardly even believe that it is a game!”
“Even with the updated graphics the game still plays like a potato.”
The Sims 4 will be released in an estimated four years from now and will be called "The Sims 4: In Real Life". It will take computer game realism to a completely new level. Here, everything will have become so realistic that you'll be able to play in the real world, without even using a computer! There is no need to install it as it is exactly like the real world anyway, and can be played in it. It will be highly detailed and you'll be able to do anything that you've done in The Sims and The Sims 2 and more, such as making and meeting friends, educate yourself, doing various physical exercises, eating food and drinking beer, torture complete strangers by singing karaoke off-key, get yourself a girlfriend/boyfriend, get married, vandalizing Wikipedia, start a family, buy a car, get a loan, get insurance and so on with all those other worthless activities for wasting time. In fact, it's also possible to turn on your computer - in the game - and actually playing another completely different computer game at the exact same as playing "TS4 - IRL", leading to a multi-layered reality! The soundtrack as well as the manual for the game will be the track "We Want Your Soul" by Adam Freeland, played constantly in an endless loop to tell you what you need to do. Since the game is so extremely realistic, there is no need for using Sim characters in it, as you can be your own main character and play as yourself. It will be feature ultra-realistic, authentic tastes and smells for all the food and drinks you consume inside the game. It should be remembered also that since the game is so extremely realistic and will take place in the real world, it's actually possible to hurt yourself as well as other Sims while playing it, so extreme caution is advised. In addition, the regular crashes can be fatal.
By the way, you can no longer get the option to restart the game without saving if ever something bad happens. The game gets saved every split-second. If the game crashes, wait another lifetime and start again.
Breaking News: Some nerd has gone and made a time machine, to tell you that as of 2015, Sims will have taken over the world. He has advised you to start mass-producing those damn green diamond things now, and start practicing your Simlish!
Sims Website[edit | edit source]
The gathering spot for "Simmers" (l337 in their native language). The forum is one of the top Internet sites for n00bs, trolls and MySpace Whores. Sad people from around the world "post" threads about things that no-one gives two shits about:
- Toddler pics - What have your Sims been doing to you lately? By P.I.Staker - The Simmer Below Me! - Sims 2 Discussion Thread: Cookies available! - ZOMFG! Found Bella!!!!!11111 - It's so annoying! - Picture Thread! - Question - Food Fight! - I hate Sims 3!!!! My family moved away!!!Sims look lk clay!!!11!1 - Wots a Legacy????**benes** - it is so kewl! - Shoes!!!!!!! - THE CAKE IS A LIE!!!!!
The currency is known as "benes". Simmers work their asses off trying to earn these for a change in their rank of pixelated hex codes (supposedly known as "l337 Uber Sims"). It takes a long time for some people to earn this rank, yet others (who wishes not to be named) have done it in less than a year. Sad.
The community is ruled by the tyrannical dictatorship of "Simmasters" and "Maxoids" who rule with perma-bans. If anything is posted that hints at life, you get banned. However, "Simmers" are known to worship their dictators like a bunch of little creeps, saying things like, "OMG thank you for disposing of the troll! Peace has been restored to our humble communion!" Then they have a food fight, which is completely pointless since there is no food involved. As Johnny Rotten said, "This is no fun - at all".
The website has been compared to the likes of Birmingham, MySpace and Russia.
Fortunately the badasses from JS2H (t3wt3lly n0t pr0m0t!ng...) fought the power. Unfortunately, SimMaster Anubis and her dyke friend SimMasters have given members of Jett's Sims 2 Hideaway bans for stupid things. Now, continue reading the article as if this was some kind of important message that fits in with the content of this section.
The Sims Themselves[edit | edit source]
The Sims themselves can be found at home, alone, often acting incredibly retarded (just like real people). Sims enjoy moving into perfectly decent homes, that were painstakingly built to provide for their every whim, and like most people, burn it down while cooking mac and cheese, or else rendered horribly ugly and awkward when you have to build a new box on the side of your house to fit your new crotch-droppings in. While the cooker and family members are burning, some undeniable force tells them to leave. However after exiting the house they refuse to further comply and return to the fire's aid. Sims will often stand near, point at, and yes, yell at the fire, in what is assumed to be an attempt to egg the fire on. Occasionally, the Sim will let its guard down and walk out of the house uncommanded. Soon however, the clever bastard will realize that he is in no danger and run back into the inferno, to continue its pointless screaming. After about 36 hours of this repetition (in Sim time) they die, much to the frustration of the confused and annoyed gamer, who didn't save since three hours ago and will not ever be able to recreate the house just how he had it.
Most Sims have unique realistic eyes. They are bland and plain, and have a peculiar glint. This usually freaks people out. Their fingers are square and stubby and only men have nipples, because all Sim men are, in fact, ludicrously homosexual. All of them completely lack body hair, or other sexual organs for that matter. This has caused much debate amongst gamers.
In recent years, Custom Content has caused Sims to grow genitals, smoke weed, get red eyes, masturbate, and have strangely detailed sex (woohoo-ing was so realistic though, I mean, everyone shoots fireworks out of their penis when they have sex, only to get out of bed and have a floating purple thing grinning above your head, no doubt jerking off to you). These things are seen as bizarre to Sims.
How to Kill Your Sims[edit | edit source]
'Cause well, lets face it, it's the most fun you can have on that game.
- Order the Sims to get into the swimming pool, take away the ladder and watch them drown...(only works with Sims 1 and 2)
- Lock them in a empty, doorless room and watch them starve...
- Lock them in a doorless kitchen, order them to cook until they start a fire, then watch them burn... cos, they can't run!. No seriously, they scream at the fire because that makes fires go out. Doesn't it, retarded sim I spent like a whole day perfecting? HUH? You just had to have that bloody turkey...
- Turn the game off. Thus wiping out their current existence. Muahahahahaaaa...
- Pick a sim with low mechanical skill and have him/her repair a television (preferably when hungry), then watch as they electrocute themselves.
- 99.99% of sims too are too lazy to even wash their dishes, so this can kill them when flies begin to infest their kitchen that should be condemned by the Toxic Waste Department and devours them...
- Death by mods: Download a Carnivorous Cowplant, a Pyromaniac Clown, an Electric Chair, a Poisonous Potion, the Upside Down virus, and an extra-potent VooDoo doll. One of these should do the job. Or, simply download more mods and custom content than your computer can take (2 GB to 30 GB should do the job) and kill the whole Sim neighborhood instead of just one Sim.
- Downloading a weapon and having one sim shoot another is always fun too! Made even better if the Sim holding the gun is you while the one you are shooting is one of your enemies :)
- Scare them to death! (If this freaking does not work, they'll just pee on their selves and perhaps die of embarrassment instead.)
- Bribe the Grim Reaper to take them. One Simoleon should do the job.
- Make them go to the pool on days when lightning strikes.
- Make them wear thongs outdoors on snowy days, and they shall die henceforth of hypothermia, in their desperation to try to heat things up on cold, snowy days.
- Death by guinea pig: Have them neglect the guinea pig, then try to play with it. The guinea pig will give them rabies, minus the foaming at the mouth. Unlike the zombie virus, they die before they are able to bite other Sims.
- !ONLY APPLIES TO RL! Sellotape a large emerald (as big as a cumberland sausage) rolled up to your head then walk up to the chosen unsuspecting victim and talk in complete fucking nonsense to them for however long they can stand it. When they walk off, attack them with a knife claiming they didn't acknowledge your disorders and as such need to learn Simlish bitches.
- Have them drink the cobra venom they acquired from the vendor in Makin Magic.
External Links[edit | edit source]
- Spore
- Second Life
- Virtually virtual reality
- Bella Goth
- City Girl Life
- Space Tycoon