I've just bought and loaded up "The Sims 2 Double Deluxe" (Sims 2 + Nightlife + Celebration Stuff). I've successfully completed all the tutorials and watched the tutorial videos on the bonus disc. However when I looked at each of the three possible starting territories they each have between six and three families already in place which certainly you CAN control. After slightly panicking at so many Sims that suddenly appeared to be all relying on me to look after their needs (are they ?) I eventually ended up selecting Romeo Cap from scenario 3. Working out his career goals I used the phone to make a date with Juliet Monty, chose the public lot as a date bearing in mind the family history, and then struggled to find it when the taxi arrived. Once we got there I used Romeo's goals to romance Juliet - actually very successfully to the extent of asking her home. Once at home I set about trying to hook up Romeo's brother with the only free woman in the game - Juliet's sister. Unfortunately I must have pressed a wrong button and ended up with ROMEO asking Juliet's sister out half way through the date with her - with quite spectacularly bad results. The story is mainly there for the amusement factor - I can manage reload. But these are my problems... 1) How much responsibility do you have to take for the controllable families in each scenario ? Does the computer look after them ? How does it know which you are playing and which it should be playing ? If I built my own family with my own house would the rest of the neighbourhood collapse because I'm not telling every controllable character when to go to the toilet and to eat ? Are the characters you can control the ONLY characters in the game - are there no NPCs ? What I am looking for is just a basic guide to where I should start. Do I need to start my own family and build my own house ? In which case there is a vertiginous learning curve at the start of the game. I'd have been quite happy just being allowed for my first game to carry on playing with the first two trainer Sims for a bit to see how that went. So, noob, no real idea what's going on and what they should be doing is looking for pointers on where to start. Thank you. S.x.
You might try searching for the sims 2 wiki page as there is a lot of information over there concerning the game.
Basically, each family is doing nothing while you play another family. So you can play them in turn to do the scenerio. I personally never did scenerios. I prefer to make my own families and play them. I haven't played it in quite a while, but when I was playing it I had about 6-8 families that I played in succession for many generations. (By the time I'd finished, they were all cousins. I had to really juggle it so that I could get them to be married. I kept a spread sheet to keep them all straight and make sure that they got the "education" that each one needed.)
Thank you. I finally sussed it and started one family which is rapdly hitting the skids in Pleasantville (the house got so bad even the maid wouldn't clean it) and a far more successfull family in Verona - a rather mousy female Cap seducing completely the very dishy Oberon on her first date. So now I have careers, increasing abilities, and bigger paychecks. Can I move house ? This SHOULD be in the game but it appears very difficult to find. My problem is that the teeny house that was all I could first afford is now too small for all the great items that I want to buy. S.x.
You can move your family into a bigger house. Unfortunately, I don't remember how to do that in TS2. (I've been playing TS3 and TSM for quite a while instead.)
