In Case Your Sims Long For Wal-Mart I made a Wal-Mart-like dept. store for my sims. I named it Mega-lo-mart after the store on "King Of The Hill." I know that many of you are not in the States and don't have any idea what I'm talking about, but anyway, maybe you might be curious to see what shopping is like in small-town USA, because there is at least one of these stores in every town. (Wal-Mart, Target, K-Mart, ect.) If you do download it and like it, will you let me know? Because this is the 1st lot I have ever purposely created for sharing. http://thesims2.ea.com/exchange/lot_detail.php?asset_id=55527&asset_type=lot&user_id=124521 I had a weird happening there tonight while playing. I actually had a sim die on the community lot!!! I had my sim get into the taxi to leave, when I noticed the grim reaper standing over another one of my sims. The game then acted like the Sim I was playing was asleep. It started running on "Ultra Speed" and my Sims values dropped, but it never went back to his house. Other sims in the store gathered around the urn and mourned, which was pretty funny. I didn't know they could die on a community lot! Well, maybe that's why it stopped being playable at that point. I had to exit to the neighborhood screen without saving and just go back to the Sim's house that way.
Do you recreate those places because you like them or because you want your Sims' lives to reflect your own? I try to make my neighbourhoods as utopic as the game will allow, making people live in forests instead of proper houses, or making them live in huge beautiful gravity-bending mansions, and making everything open and free, and few people (only the Fortuners) work, everyone else stays home painting and writing and loving freely and moving from house to house. My Sims all have huge, hilly gardens full of trees and water, and open-plan houses which are several buildings interconnected by wooden walkways over the trees. I just can't bring myself to play in the way that is so often described, creating abusive families in ugly square houses built along RL architectural lines which raise unhappy children with memories full of pain. I understand how this could be fun, but I anthropomorphise my Sims far too much for me to ever be able to enjoy anything other than making a situation as utopic as possible within the confines of the game (i.e. neccessarily private individual houses; the game encouraging families to be arranged on essentially conventional lines; 'Community' lots being reducded to being either Parks or Shops (very few social activities possible outside of private property; Sims being unable to be homeless/nomadic; game still pretty much based around (though to a significantly lesser extent than TS1) the mainly material advancement of Sims via jobs (this assumes playing without the cheats); etc etc etc).
Hummm, I never really thought about it. I would suppose that I am re-creating a neighborhood as I see my reality. Small rural town, tight-knit families, community lots that resemble places I would either shop or visit with my family. Your neighborhood sounds great and very challenging when you think about the way the game was designed to be played. In Sims 1 I had an oldfashioned neighborhood based on historical houses and plantations I had visited or read about, and I tried to re-create life the way I imagined it was. It was also very challenging in the confines of game play. The sims hated using outhouses and cooking outside, and were always bored because I forced them to garden and do yardwork instead of sit and watch television like their modern counterparts in my "normal" neighborhood. So, I can imagine how hard it would be to create a commune of sims who live in a more "tribal" setting. I'd love to hear more about your gameplay: it sounds very interesting.
Wow Zoty Zoot! I had never thought of aking waklways over trees but it sounds so great I am going to have to try it. Do you have a problem with having appliances and things outside? I thought you needed solid rooms with walls for some objects? If not, I'll be bulldozing the boring houses I now have and building forests filled with elves!!!!!
Only toilets need walls I think, and Sims need privacy to use them so you have to build a little outhouse, but that's okay. Also, there are some issues with Sims being woken up by stuff when they go to sleep, but these are all minor and don't detract from the coolness of living in the middle of a bunch of trees without any walls. It is quite challenging to make your lot look like more than some random furniture scattered around, but the key to success I have found is to make room-groupings and go a little crazy with the old landscaping tools, that is, the colour of the grass and the elevation of the terrain. Flowers and shrubs are a pain because they spawn weeds for some reason, so I generally don't bother with them; the trees are prettier anyway. I only have a few familes who line in trees however, as there is so much fun to be had with the bulild tools, especially now you can have five stories. The tools for building are quite flexible, the main issue I have with them is that there are too many straight lines: walls either go upwards in straight vertical lines, or accross in straight horizontal lines, with a small concession for the diagonal. So you can't, for instance, make houses inspired by this guy http://www1.kunsthauswien.com/english/hundertwasser.htm (who I really like at the moment). Kristalrose - my gameplay isn't that radically different from how the game was designed to be played. I don't think I push the limits of the game, I just don't use it as a medium to recreate what I see around me; I like making my own worlds instead. Obviously these worlds are limited by the rules imposed by the game, but it's still fun. As you said, the game is quite 'Californian,' so it doesn't heave so much with restrictive moral values as it could quite easily. This is true mainly in the context of Sims' sexual relations, which are brilliantly liberated given the cultural context of the game.
Way cool suggestion Zooty. I can see how it would be hard to accomplish the designs from that website. But beautiful designs they surely are. I have been building tree houses since your post and it is going well. You were right about the toilets. Everything else can be put outside. The only thing is that on the second level, the trees get in the way of seeing certain actions but I believe more thinking about the placement of such trees instead of random look-at-my-beautiful-forest placement wll help it out. It's strange to live without walls though - I have started to develop little glades of activity and used other things to simulate walls (like hedges). Just one question...if you have an artist, where do you hang there pictures?
