THE BORE
General => Video Game Bored => Topic started by: border on June 07, 2009, 03:27:01 PM
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These games always seem to enthrall me for 15-20 hours, then I immediately put them down and give up any desire to even touch them again. Would this game be different? The hype was that they were taking away the micromanaging, taking away the ever pressing Social/Hygiene/Hunger/Fun bars that were always in need of refilling.....and replacing all that with an interesting system of aspirations and rewards.
Well, no. The "Needs" bars are still present, they are just buried in your menus. You still pretty much have to eat twice a day, sleep 8 hours a night, bathe once a day, etc. You still can't really leave your Sim to her own devices. My Sim's Lifetime Aspiration was to be a Forensic Specialist for the Police Department, and you might think this would motivate her to up her Logic/Art skills. But nope, if I stopped dictating her every move and let her do what she wanted she would pretty much play computer games all day everyday (kind of a sad mirror into our own lives at least :lol).
The Aspiration/Reward system is a pretty thoughtful addition to the game. Your Sim has a single Lifetime Aspiration (usually a career or skill-oriented goal) and multiple recurring random aspirations that pop up randomly throughout the game (stuff like "Read this Book," "Get Art to Level 5," "Buy a $1000 computer", "Become Jane's Best Friend"). Fulfilling aspirations gives you reward points that can be used to buff your character with any varied number of rewards -- attributes like learning faster, being able to skip work and get paid, not having to shower/eat/shit very often. Fulfilling a Lifetime Aspiration gives you mega reward points and allows you to buy some really high-end abilities.
Character death. Apparently this was introduced in The Sims 2, but I never got far enough into it to see. My character fulfilled her Lifetime Aspiration and I was just beginning to enjoy some of the huge rewards/buffs you get from having done so. Then all of a sudden I sent her to check the mailbox and the Grim Reaper showed up and struck her down, leaving in her place a tombstone on the suburban sidewalk. It felt capricious and stupid. The whole rewards system seems pretty useless if you're going to die almost as soon as you begin to reap its biggest benefits. The game told me I was going to have to create another character, and I at least hoped I would be allowed to let the new character move in to my old house, or retain some percentage of the rewards points I'd earned. Nope. Nada. The new character would start over from scratch completely, and all the work I'd put into my first character was gone.
So yeah.....I'm completely done with this game. See you again in another 5 years EA/Maxis!
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never liked them
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can you make them have gay sex
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I liked it, although it's not much a step up from the previous games. I do like that you can visit the whole town without having to go through a bunch of load screens, though.
can you make them have gay sex
Yes.
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Will DL tonight
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I could theoretically have sex with you
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And this is why I don't play Sims 3.
:maf
Career: Lumberjack
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You can also create fat characters now demi :drool
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Wow awesome
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I LOVE this franchise, and 3 is the best one yet...where in 2 you are a SLAVE to those needs bars, keeping a sim happy in sims 3 is comparatively very easy. Character traits you choose actually affect gameplay, and offer you different ways to meet needs. For instance, a brave sim will not panic at a fire, and will handle a burglar without calling the police. An athletic sim gets many different ways to work out that can prevent them from losing hygeine or energy as quickly. Bookish sims write better and gain skill points quicker, as well as having more fun reading.
This game rocks. Thank you.
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Can they have aspirations that involve murder and betrayal, like "lure my neighbor to my basement and dismember him"
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Actually, it'd be pretty awesome if you could make a murderer sim and see how long he/she could get away with it
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Not technically, but you can be EVIL, which causes you to steal from babies and take delight in the suffering of other sims. Any sim you witness suffering gives you a giant mood boost and you cackle randomly.
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Not technically, but you can be EVIL, which causes you to steal from babies and take delight in the suffering of other sims. Any sim you witness suffering gives you a giant mood boost and you cackle randomly.
I'm going to have to try that one out next. :lol
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lol it also gives mildly amusing but (as far as I can tell) useless options for mundane things like bathing. "Take Evil Bath" "Take Evil Shower"
"Sleep Nefariously"
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:lol
I never played the Sims 2, since it seemed so much built around families and generations and other bullshit. I could never do much griefing of other sims in the first game because you had to spend too much time in the bathroom or sleeping.
Since there's now a full area to play in it might be fun to go grief other sims.
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I've been playing Sims 3 for a little while, and it's definitely a fun installment in the series. Sure, it's essentially the same game as the previous two games, but the traits system is a lot of fun to mess around with and the load-free village is another nice little touch. Some of the DLC items are overpriced, but I probably won't care enough to buy anything. I just await whatever future expansions come, that's always where the enjoyment really starts to ramp up in Sims games.
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The genius of the Sims franchise is that the core fanbase is too dumb/scared to pirate it.
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The assignable character traits in the game are all pretty interesting. Arrested Development fans should note that one of the selectable traits is "Never Nude". I'm not quite sure what it does :lol
I LOVE this franchise, and 3 is the best one yet...where in 2 you are a SLAVE to those needs bars, keeping a sim happy in sims 3 is comparatively very easy.
I still felt like I was pretty much a slave to the needs bars.....especially in the mornings when you barely have time to shower/crap/eat before your ride shows up. It's nice though that your character now has the good sense to eat something at work, something I don't remember happening before.
I bought the Rewards that make bathroom/food less necessary (Iron Bladder/Rarely Hungry). That's really how the game should be on default. It was much more fun that way.....of course by the time I could afford them I was about 2 in-game weeks away from my demise.
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Border, had your character become a senior citizen yet or was he/she still just an adult? That could be one reason why your character died, they have preset time periods where they go between life stages [baby to child, child to adult, ect.] and the last step after senior citizen is death. However, you can increase this from about 20-30 days from adult to senior citizen to about 200 days in the options.
Of course, it could have just been a random event, I haven't played it enough to know for sure and I can't find anything online that talks about it.
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I'm really digging The Sims 3, though the character editor isn't as in-depth as I would like. I want to make some fucked up looking families but everyone just turns out looking like Home-style kewpie dolls.
And you can turn aging completely off if you want but it still doesn't stop them from some stupid deaths. I had one guy drown during a contest to see who could hold their breath the longest, and I didn't even enter him in the damn thing. Just don't get the unlucky perk unless you want them to get killed or want to micromanage the hell out of your Sim(s).
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Why did I think of Buffy when I saw the title to this thread?
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Isn't this like the gayest game series around?
It's basically playing doll houses.
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It's the best selling game franchise of all time, I believe.
ps in the sims 2, at least, you could purchase a reward object called the elixir of life that would reset your character's age, effectively keeping them from dying. Haven't got that far in the sims 3 yet, I've been busy.
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It's the best selling game franchise of all time, I believe.
It's the best selling PC franchise of all time; still got a way to go before it passes Mario, Pokemon, and Tetris.
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I dunno -- if you count all the Sims games and expansion packs......and only count "proper" Mario platformers and "proper" Pokemon RPGs, I imagine The Sims has gotta be pretty close with those.
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I had no idea that there was a Sims 3.
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Some guy at QT3 made his sims homeless. He had the dad buy a bunch of lobsters and then revamped their lot into a park where they sleep on benches :lol
http://aliceandkev.wordpress.com/
I need to get this game I think.
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Some guy at QT3 made his sims homeless. He had the dad buy a bunch of lobsters and then revamped their lot into a park where they sleep on benches :lol
http://aliceandkev.wordpress.com/
I need to get this game I think.
That's hilarious and depressing at the same time. :lol :-\
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I had no idea that there was a Sims 3.
same here
I saw a thread on gaf about how this is the best selling PC game ever or something and I didn't even know it existed
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yeah it hasn't outside the last two WoW expansions. but it's sold very fast.
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I always enjoyed the franchise to build houses. Never really "played" the game. :lol
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Game is pretty meh, until...
ctr+shift+c
"motherlode"
I'm also only building houses. The character development part = :hurr
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i messed around with this for an hour. i made a house with 4 dudes in it who are all crazy or insane or slobs or something. they ended up sitting on the couch for a day watching tv. i must be missing something
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I thought the Zero Punctuation review was a pretty good summation of my experience:
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation/800-The-Sims-3
For whatever reason I can't seem to break out of playing these games the "right" way, so I always get stuck in the sleep/work cycle.
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I lol'd at the chocolate hand drill with the tongue on it.