If you agree or disagree with me, feel free to comment.

DISCLAIMER: These are just my personal opinions. As I’m a storytelling player more than a gamer or modder, that’s the perspective from which I’ll approach my choices. Also, I completely ignored the mods that fixed many of the problems I mention. EA/Maxis didn’t provide those; the community did.

On with the awards…

“Most Annoying NPC” goes to….

Rod Humble from FreeTime

Every one of TS2’s EPs added NPCs to the game. Rod Humble was the worst. Sim Rod Humble, upon installing FreeTime, would appear on every lot and bring you a shiny new computer loaded with Lies and Propaganda for…The Sims 3, of all things! Way to break immersion. Sim Humble would also give families free computers, effectively free money; and he was annoying. What more can I say.

Honorable mentions go to: strays from Pets, the professors from Uni, and the apartment townies from Apartment Life.

“Least Value For Money” goes to…

Pets

The Sims: Unleashed added a slew of great features besides pets: Old Town, gardening, the sweet sax player, all that carnival stuff… What did The Sims 2: Pets add? Pets, strays, werewolves, some superfluous build/buy stuff…and you could breed pets. Not that much new gameplay for the price. Nevertheless, Pets was EA/Maxis’ highest-selling EP. Go figure…

They definitely knew that pets were the #1 most demanded feature, and proceeded to charge full price for pets and pets alone. And they got away with it. I’ll never understand the appeal of having virtual pets to go with your virtual humans. They take too long to train anyway. Boring.

“Worst Supernatural Creature” goes to…

Bigfoot from Bon Voyage

Bigfoot is completely illogical. He is a master of every skill, gets free gifts from co-workers EVERY DAY, and is sterile (where’s the fun?) Plus his name is ‘Bigfoot Bigfoot’. And you couldn’t ‘create’ a Bigfoot or ‘become’ one; you had to go out and drag him home by sucking up to him. WTF?

“Most Detrimental to Storytelling” goes to…

University

Sure, Uni was fun the first few times… but it takes so freaking long to complete if you don’t cheat. If you play a hood ‘by the book’ you end up going through Uni for every Sim. It’s hard to avoid because the game intrinsically awards and punishes Sims based on university. So monotonous and there was only so much I could take of it.

“Worst Supporting Stuff Pack” goes to…

H&M Fashion Stuff

H&MFS signalled EAxis’ first foray into the realm of licensed, non-free product placement. Whether the content was fashionable or not is a question I’ll leave to others. No, this SP was the worst because of its blatant in-game advertising. They gave players building tools and decorations to design their very own H&M fashion store to place in their hoods. So what do impressionable players do? Write H&M stores into their stories like it’s second nature! There’s a name for that: guerrilla marketing. (I think.) Thanks, EAxis, for outright marketing expensive clothing to kids through a video game so subliminally – and making the kids pay for the privilege.

H&M only edges out IKEA Stuff by being 1) the first in time and 2) advertising a brand not even available in the countries it was released in! At least we have an IKEA here.

”Worst Expansion Pack” goes to…

Bon Voyage

Rehash of old EP? Check. Crippling, game-breaking bugs on release? Check. Boring after the first time? Check (for me). Badly integrated with other EPs? Check. No spring break from college. No pets on vacation. No running a hotel as a business.

Here’s ten fresh controversies for the nutters with microphones. (Keep in mind some of my suggestions are actually saner than others. I needed ten things, OK?)

1. Promiscuity. Well, it is a goal of gameplay in TS2 to have sex with 20 different people. Though you have to play the game to know that, unlike certain critics wailing about penises and labia.
2. Same-sex marriage, acceptance, tolerance, etc. All that stuff the Bible supposedly doesn’t let you do.
3. Insensitive portrayal of persons with mental health issues. EA: insane kleptomaniacs = funny.
4. Exploiting kids with pay stuff. “Dad! I get $10 for free if I sign up!” Dad cracks out the credit card. Next thing you know, the kid’s spent $1000 on Sims stuff and you have one very angry parent appearing on Fox 8 News.
5. Child abuse. AKA leaving babies on cold concrete floors for several hours.
6. Paid organ donation. Well, it’s a pet peeve of mine. Exploitation of people in developing countries, EA?
7. Biking without helmets. DANGER!
8. Godless heathens.
9. Bullying. Or the possibility to do it through repeated poking.
10. Vegetarians. I dunno, something has to be offensive about the way it’s implemented … Oh wait, VEGANS!

Disclaimer: not necessarily a reflection of my own personal opinions.

Damn you EA! Always putting neat new objects into expansion packs I have no intention of buying!

What should dictate style? I’ve started thinking about these things, TS3-wise:

• Traits - obvious things, like an evil Sim will wear black, or an outdoorsy sim will wear shorts and skimpy clothes to soak up that sun. Slobs won’t really care what they look like, etc.
• Interests - rather more abstract. I actually looked at Interests for inspiration in TS2 quite often.
• Fashionable friends - Sims will copy the style of their best friends if they are popular. (Here’s my hoping that Sims 3 socialising will be more clique-y like real life, so we can have real social groups. It was always a bit more detached in TS2)

One thing I started to randomize in TS2 was baldness and glasses. A nice touch of realism. Basically at each male Sim’s age transition (or when I get around to playing them) I would roll for baldness. The older they are, the more likely they are to go bald. Same for glasses.

The fun part is deciding how they will cope with their baldness. Some might shave their heads. Others may wear hats. Some might choose the combover! Again, this is based on their pre-existing fashion tendencies and what I think would suit them. Similarly for glasses, choosing the type of glasses they wear is based on their personality and fashion ‘set’.

But on the topic of gradual aging, I’m going to use my soapbox here and spell out exactly why gradual aging (GA) sucks.

First reason – gradual aging is more realistic, but realism is overrated. Give us fun gameplay, I say.

The second reason – technological limitations. GA would almost certainly mean a variable height system. Granted, I would love to see a variable height system, but I understand that the graphics engine is limited – Sims of all sizes need to interact with objects. Currently the game manages by having one animation per life stage – if you’ve got short and tall Sim meshes, for every increment of age, how will the engine cope with animation?

Speaking of growth spurting – no convincing way of handling puberty. When can Sims become sexually active? you’re just begging for controversy here. The game needs a way to ‘unlock’ items and interactions to these growing Sims, and the only If they’re ‘locked out’ of sex until 18 (or 14? 16? 21? depending on your part of the world) is that necessarily good or bad?

And as for the life stages, I like the distinctiveness of each generation. I just hope that Elders aren’t as boring to play in TS3, living on for ages and ages. I was so thankful when I discovered the no age discrimination hack (lets Elders keep adult jobs).

I like to world-build from a Sim perspective. Sims only perceive life in days and weeks (due to weekdays/weekends). So, the easiest calendar is one that counts what are known as ‘Sim Days’ from day 1 onwards. I don’t find this terribly immersive, although it works.

In TS2 I decided that 20 days would equal a ‘year’ (a tropical year I guess) due to the 5 day seasons. Complicated. It obviously messed up the days of the week with respect to seasons, especially because I played 3 day periods Prosperity-style). I ended up having to chart out the seven year cycle with a spreadsheet.

Complicated 5-day season calendar system

THEN I realised that I had to synchronise the weather all the lots. (Whenever you move onto a new lot the season resets to ’1 day left in summer’.)

But then, I saw some other Sims websites (like Lakeside Heights), that use the ’1 day = 1year’ system. It produces nice ages with real-looking years. The other benefit of using ‘year-like’ days is that genealogy looks more realistic for use in family trees.

Now that TS3 will have no seasons, for my Hood Project I plan on a simple date system, days only.Time will be measured Sim Days and Weeks. And the first day can even be SD 1900, as a tribute to SimCity 2000.

It will be interesting to see how face generation works in TS3. Hopefully the engine is a little more chaotic and each facial feature will be randomized, rather than getting the same couple of dozen faces. I’m not big on obsessing with genetics (that’s a topic for another whole post) but I like seeing variations.

As for TS3, from what we’ve seen of the screenshots, Sim faces are overall smoother. Although they’re all premades… I wonder if we’ll be seeing the return of the ‘uglyface townie’ phenomenon. Personally I prefer plasticky soulless-eyed wax dolls over the angular faces, ridiculous noses, and red mohawks/mismatched outfits of TS2′s townie generating. Well, the last may still return.

So presuming you don’t like college, but like the instruments (for sake of example), you keep Uni installed and put up with the annoyances.

EVERY TS2 EP did this, mainly through those persistent wants to go on a date/buy a pet/hire so-and-so/go on vacation etc.

I’ve been thinking about how this relates to telling a neighbourhood storyline.

The added features seem to create the need to ‘write them into’ the story somehow. I really resent how TS2 compels you to add a college, or if you want to go all-out build one from scratch. Each EP added superfluous features which I personally didn’t enjoy (can’t speak for you of course) and over time build up to create a sense of ‘gameplay bloat’. Maybe they were fun the first time, but not the fiftieth.

“I’ll buy a pet for this family. Oooh, they should go on a honeymoon vacation! Let’s join the secret society. She wants to start a business – let’s run it out of her living room”.

Yes, it’s optional, and you can reduce the annoyances with mods, but I ended up taking the drastic approach. The last time I installed TS2 I stuck to the EPs I liked the most – University (for instruments!), Nightlife, OFB, Seasons and Freetime. I didn’t add any sub neighborhoods. I was mostly happy.

I want to play a computer game and be creative, not put up with bloated gameplay.

TS3 will, no doubt, come with close to a dozen expansion packs in the next few years. I’m going to be happy playing a streamlined, EP-free base game for a while.