Happens Every Time

It was all going so well...

Mikayla completed her Lifetime Wish:  6 tombs in each country.

Once her daughter, Amelia, got old enough to join her, she'd tag along on some of her mother's expeditions.  Kids can't do too much in tombs, but they can run around scooping up loot while the grown-ups are busy clearing rubble and shoving statues around.

They're also immune to traps.  Lucky brats.

Much of the time, though, when Mikayla was off on go-fetch missions for visa points or canoodling with one of her foreign flirts, Amelia was left to her own devices - an unattended child in a foreign country.  Isn't Mikayla a great parent?

She developed a taste for booby-trapping the base camps for amusement.

And entertaining the locals with ghost stories.  Amelia just loves telling ghost stories.

I noticed the first warning signs, though, when Mikayla started getting calls for tomb quests she'd already completed.

No matter.  Lifetime Wish done, I didn't need to travel anymore, so I returned home.

Amelia enjoyed a relatively normal childhood. She made friends with the other kids in town..

And got creeped at by her Imaginary Friend.

Mikayla became the best Private Eye in the city.  But she's still not fooling anyone with those leafy pom-poms..

Amelia kept up her hobby of telling ghost stories to random crowds.  It's like instrument-playing in its friend-making utility, but with a higher Fun gain and available to children.  Love it.

She also kept up her taste for pranks and booby traps.

You've got nothing to blame but your own rotten parenting, Mikayla..

Oh, and if you notice something... strange about the edges of that picture there, that's because Mikayla really should've picked up a little Sim Fu while she was in China.

Eh... she's completed her Lifetime Wish, reached the top of her career, earned an awesome romantic reputation, and I've got aging on.  Nothing left for her to do but get old and die, so I decided to cut to the chase.

I gave her just enough time to see Amelia age up to Teen and have a few days to do stuff with her before she crumbles to dust.

One thing I failed to consider with Amelia's age-up:  a birthday party full of her child-stage friends and classmates..

 ... means she spends the rest of the party as a teenager surrounded by little kids.

Oh well.  She can still entertain the crowd with more ghost stories!

I like Amelia as a teen.  She's the first teen I've had (for more than 2 days) since Generations.  She's learning to drive in her mother's sweet muscle car, tormenting everyone with her mood swings, and has her prom coming up in a few days.

Managed to find herself a really cute date for said prom, too.  My second-generation townies are a good-looking bunch.

And then...

The town exploded in a BFBVFS.

I dunno.  I can't go a sim-day, or even a few sim-hours, without an abrupt crash to desktop.  I tried resetting the town.  Other towns play just fine.  But this one is broken.

You know, I don't think I'll ever be able to play one town long enough to see grandchildren happen in it.  They all get hopelessly corrupted by the time the first batch of kids grows up.

@*#&!

Brightens My Day

Just a little random misfortune...

Mikayla is one tomb away from her Lifetime Wish of completing 6 in each location.

Dart traps suck.

You know what else sucks?  Travelling during a midlife crisis immediately cancels it with 0 wishes completed.  I was a bit disappointed because I'd been letting her go crazy doing whatever youth-reclaiming stunts she wanted.

She has a daughter now, Amelia.  A tomboyish little thing that I like just enough to try my luck with making it more than 2 generations before my town implodes.  I don't think it'll work.

She makes the cutest little squeals when she's on fire.

A Momentary Distraction

So I got roped into trying out Sims Social. This also got me roped into finally getting a Facebook account, but that's beside the point.

It was a lot of fun for the first couple days. I've always preferred filling my towns with my friends' sims - they make much more interesting friends, mates, and torture-toys than anonymously-created townies. And the whole point of Sims Social is to make neighbors out of your friends, and then go visit them and then squeal about what you and they did together. In that respect, it captures one of my very favorite parts of the game.

However:

The item selection for sims and their homes is very limited. Without any colorization options, I quickly found myself smacking my head against the keyboard trying to find a look for my sim and my house that both matches itself and feels individual.

You live alone. You cannot invite your friends over. You can only go visit them one at a time. When your friends visit you, you don't get to see it in action. There are also no community lots. No parties. No moving in together. No breeding. You're either home alone or visiting a solitary friend.

The energy limit is stifling for long term play. With the cap and refresh rate being what they are, you get maybe ten minutes of play before you have to rest for over an hour.

There are four skills, and no careers. You make money by grinding one of these four skills or mowing your lawn. Grinding skills and mowing lawn takes up energy. There's also no death, no infidelity, no hilarious mishaps, and no moodlets.

Oh, and it's buggy, too.

Basically, once the "oo, shiny new!" luster faded, it's starting to get boring fast. The quests are pretty good at giving you something to do, but... meh.

I already have my friends' sims in my Sims 3 towns, and I'm enough of a nosy shutterbug that anyone who cares to know gets kept up to date on what's going on.

And if I want to watch Kali diddle around with Gabriel?  (And I'll confess:  I do)

Well, that also looks a lot nicer in the main game.

I really need to pick up their story again.  It was fun.  And it's still sitting on my desktop.  Taunting me.

Anyway, enough griping.  Have some more random:

Time travelling in her undies. M'yep.  But then, keeping Kali dressed in a game where woohoo is autonomous is generally a losing battle.

Word to the wise:  Don't skinnydip with kleptos.  Unless you want your clothes stolen.

Of course, with the look on Kali's face, she's probably saying "well, if you want me naked that much, dear, go right ahead..."

Did I mention story?  Because I totally mentioned story.

In the same story in which Kali and Gabriel are main characters, this girl has a prominent supporting role.  I was tweaking her the other day, and I am liking the results.

Hauntings Not Included

Better!

Now…

It's never too early for Halloween. In fact, if displays in grocery stores are to be believed, we should've started preparing for Halloween weeks ago.

I see people lament about Store-content-heavy builds, including in my own direction, and it makes sense - not everyone can or wants to shell out the 30 or so bucks a month it takes to keep up with all the new sets. And of course not everyone has every single expansion and stuff pack ever made, either, and it put the idea in my head to make something completely basegame - something I haven't done since basegame was all we had.

So I made this Gothy little thing. It's old, weathered, and spooky. Dark, but just enough - going overboard on black and purple makes taking pictures hard, after all.

Here's what we've got:

- Sits on a 20 x 20 lot - easily placeable in almost any world.
- 2 bedrooms, furnished for a couple and one child
- 2 full baths
- 2 fireplaces, both upgraded to Fireproof
- A large and presently-unfurnished attic.
- Parking for 1 car
- Basegame! No CC, No expansion/stuff pack, and only a couple FREE store items (Like 3 decor objects, completely nonessential).
- Pricetag: About $45k after playtesting

It's been playtested at full capacity, and all is well. It's a petite house, though, and while you *could* fill the attic with extra beds for litters of children, I wouldn't particularly recommend this one for a large family.

Exchange Download
(Includes list of Store objects used, which in this case are all free downloads)

Mediafire Download

Pictures:

Gripe Gripe Gripe

I said I had a new house to post, and I do, except for one thing:

I tried to make this one 100% basegame, with only a couple items of free store content.  Except when I uploaded it, the Exchange told me there were Generations objects on the lot.  I combed through every room on every floor and even kicked the ghost in the garden into the stylist station, and for the life of me can't sort out where the Generations content is.

Running the game without custom content hasn't helped.  And even if Custard lets you filter out Expansion stuff, I'm on a Mac, and the last time I tried to use mono I just got a pile of code-vomit that nobody could troubleshoot.

Blast it.

Once I'm done kicking the lot around until the Generations content dislodges itself, this is what it'll look like:

A Little Random With My Coffee

Man. It's one of those mornings where it almost didn't seem worth it to chew through the leather straps...

Have some random pictures from my simming life.  They're pretty much all about children this time around (R, cover your eyes!)

Put down Mikayla a bit because I missed Kali and Gabriel.  I can't stray from them for too long - they've got to be one of my favorite couples ever.  Did I mention I made that last house for them and their brood? Because I did.

The children don't quite seem to get the concept of "zen garden":

They really need to clean the pool more often.

The Princess is not amused.

They do love that costume chest...

I built the family their new place because they went and surprised me with a kid.  No really.  Back when I started their last town, I wanted them to breed, so I made TFB autonomous.  Except my autonomous woohoo mod was broken, so they didn't do any doing autonomously.  I made them spawn anyway, and in time completely forgot about my settings.  Until an update came around, and I'll give you three guesses what the very first thing they did was when I loaded up my game with a working version of the mod.

Yep.

Kid's got a good arm!

That's it for the moment.  I have a house for y'all today, too, but that'll happen probably around lunchtime.