Cross-Forum Fervor! Let's Play The Sims 3!

[François]

Glorious! Good work, Electro... nic... Arts.

feelin' conflicted over here

[Mongrel]

I had no idea François was Amish.

If this wasn't summer I'd have suspenders on to complete the illusion.

Actually, now I'm curious: Do people who see you locally, in person, ever mistake you for some flavour of Mennonite?

[Grath]

I had no idea François was Amish.

If this wasn't summer I'd have suspenders on to complete the illusion.

Actually, now I'm curious: Do people who see you locally, in person, ever mistake you for some flavour of Mennonite?

As someone who used to live in an area with a lot of Amish: Needs a straw or felt hat, clothing is too fancy. Needs suspenders and/or a vest.
(Sidenote: One of the funnier images from then was two around teenage-ish Amish boys playing an arcade-ish hunting game in Walmart, presumably while family was shopping.)

[François]

Oh it happens fairly regularly yeah. In the warm seasons it's Amish, in the cold seasons it's Jewish. And people seem much nicer on the average to the Amish. It's "Oh neat, I didn't know we had Amish nearby" vs " FUCK YOOOOOOOOU". :(

I do have a felt hat but that's pretty much winter-only as well.

[Mongrel]

As someone who used to live in an area with a lot of Amish: Needs a straw or felt hat, clothing is too fancy. Needs suspenders and/or a vest.
(Sidenote: One of the funnier images from then was two around teenage-ish Amish boys playing an arcade-ish hunting game in Walmart, presumably while family was shopping.)

Right, Amish is a very particular subspecies of Mennonite, with varying restrictions on specific technology and a more severe interpretation of Mennonite austerity than say, mainstream Mennonites, Hutterites, Mennonite-Quakers, etc.

There are plenty of people in the broader Mennonite community with no such restrictions on one item or another and some who use computers or cell phones or whatever and even some Mennonites who live in regular communities and are barely distinguishable from other run-of-the-mill conservative christians (though the beard habit is hard to shake), it's just that they still have the same spiritual basis for their ideas, so living without frills and a minimum of indulgences, pacifism, useful hard work only, faith as your tent pole, etc.

There's a huge and widely varied interpretation of what a no-frills life entails, and it's up to individual congreations to decide. So really, Zed could easily be mistaken for one. Only the Mennonites were Swiss and German originally, so there would be very few, if any, in Quebec.

EDIT: It appears there's one small community, but they're getting chased out of the province because their local school does not teach the provincial curriculum and is therefore illegal (this is probably only a problem in Qubec, because this was a new community, whereas several other provinces have long-estabished communities and thus had exemptions granted to them or laws worded to allow it decades ago or more).\\

EDIT2: Oh, Zed posted.

[nosimpleway]

If this keeps up I'm switching one of everyone's traits to Technophobe.

[Silversong]

Name: Silver Song
Are you male or female? female
Pick five Traits. Artistic, Bookworm, Neat, Perfectionist, Charismatic
Choose a Lifetime Wish based on your Traits. Star News Anchor
Music: Symphonic Metal
Color: Blue
Food: pastries

I think y'all know how I dress.

[nosimpleway]

Looking at the traits has been interesting. Brontos are more likely to describe themselves as Bookworms and Geniuses (and a lot of you are struggling to get published). Tyrants would sooner call themselves Evil or Inappropriate, but with a Good Sense of Humor about things.

I'm going to go over the apps with the missus tonight when we're both home, so if you want in, now's the time.

[Brantly B.]

Wait did they start calling themselves Tyrants after we become gentle herbivores?

[Brantly B.]

When I saw the trailer for Tomodachi Life, I joked that I'd Let's Play it as soon as it was out. This is a joke mainly because I wouldn't be able to get the game, didn't own the system it's for, and don't have any way of recording anything but a screenshot LP off my PC.

I keep meaning to respond to this and getting distracted by a shiny object, but honestly, from what I've seen of Tomodachi Life, you're not missing anything. The game would translate horribly to a screenshot LP even if you had the special equipment needed to take screenshots from a 3DS in the first place. It's more or less a lot of vignettes starring interchangeable finger puppets than anything you can build a narrative off of.

This idea is way better, although it mystifies me that we can't all inhabit a neighborhood together. Isn't that a huge step back from the first damned game?

[Classic]

Like I tried to tell you before, everyone can however because the entire town is (nominally) simulated at the same time and basically the entirety of the lifetime rewards system is dumped whenever you change which family/lot is under player control, switching back and forth between different controlled lots means you'll very quickly end up with sims who are generally unfulfilled.

Like, in Sims 1 and 2, everything relevant to the game-y aspect of the sims was stored to the lot, which meant you could switch between playable groups without any mechanical compromises. You just had to suffer through Sims ridiculously long loading screens. Also, because one of the things that's saved to each family lot is the time, when you're not playing a family, their clocks are basically arrested, keeping some of their information static. They can't grow old and die while you're not looking, for example. Also, because of the way this works, in these iterations of the game you can go out to a lot and time one the "home lot" won't advance. Meaning that when your sims leave the goddamned house they have more life to live.

It doesn't help, like I mentioned, that the Sims 3's default narrator very happily lets neighborhoods slowly die as its sexless inhabitants don't have children, pursue careers, or do anything but mill around vacantly. Which is, I suppose a sacrifice I'd be willing to make if the alternative was them dying in a fire (when I wasn't watching).

So in Sims 3, while we can all be in the same neighborhood, with the default settings switching between groups would cripple the lifetime rewards competition, and it would mean that the number of recordable sim-days before "aging up" is divided amongst every lot.
...
Plus, reconfiguring full lots is a pain in the ass.

[zaratustra]

Here's an alt build if you need some variety, although it probably doesn't have the 'lots of lofty aspirations that end up getting in the way of each other' that truly characterises a zaratustra:

Traits: Artistic, Genius, Computer Whiz, Ambitious, Neurotic
Lifetime Wish: Renaissance Sim

[nosimpleway]

AFAIK they've always been Tyrants. I'm not sure where the term came from.

I messed around with multiple lots ("lot" being the game term for a piece of property, in this case the area where you can build a house) when a couple of Sims got married. As far as I can tell, the unpatched game only allows one "active" lot, being the with characters that it keeps track of. Everyone else is sort of ignored.

I think patched-up versions allow multiple lots to be had in the game, but as Classic said, the game dumps a lot of the character data and futzes with the flow of time in switching between them. Back when I had the 1.6 installed, I tried a game where I owned two lots, and the game crashed spectacularly almost immediately so I didn't have much time to experiment with it.

[Mothra]

The game will not allow such unholy union

[Classic]

So in short: We can only have 1 "active" lot, that gets played and directly mucked about with by R^2, but if you guys were horrible sadistic monsters, you could probably pressure him into making several lots of characters that could also exist in the neighborhood, but not be "in the running".

EDIT:
It's possible I'm completely misremembering the functionality of V1, but I'm pretty sure all of the features I've described are present.

[nosimpleway]

It took rather a lot of discussion about gameplay and narrative, but the missus and I finally decided who's gonna be competing for this LP:

Congrats to:
Zara Tustra
Brentai de la Hentai
Buge as Ada Bee
Beat Bandito'toole
and
Silver Song

Good applications all around, everybody.

I'll be PMing each of the players with some relevant details of gameplay mechanics and character ideas. The first update for the Let's Play should come by the end of the week.

[nosimpleway]

Furthermore, victory for either community in the Let's Play is now based on a two-out-of-three condition set. The conditions are:

The household that accrues the highest mean Lifetime Achievement Points, as before
The household with the higher Property Value (having the most and best stuff)
and the household that completes the most Skill Challenges

I haven't mentioned skill challenges yet, so here you go.

[nosimpleway]

I start chargen with Zara. You know, between the limited options and very limited reference material, that doesn't... well, that doesn't look like him at all.


So fuck it, if I can't even get close then everybody gets a random appearance. Did you know Brentai is secretly a black guy? It's true.


Buge's skin is also rather darker than I am led to believe it is IRL.


Beato Bandito in his slick leather jacket.


The exception to the entirely-randomized appearances is Silversong, for whom I go and look for the nicest clothes available. Sorry Silver, that's as frilly and lacey as they get!

I know everyone's disappointed.

[MarsDragon]

I misread every single one of those gender selection boxes.

I think I need to go to bed.

[nosimpleway]

I buy one of the bigger lots in the game, so there's plenty of room to eventually expand the house.


So funny story! It turns out the amount of starting money you get depends on the number of people in the household. And Mongrel et al were so excited to go be crazy NPCs somewhere. So I genned them -- equally random appearances, hence Mongrel's inexplicable cowboy hat -- just to kick them off the lot to find their own fortune elsewhere in the town of Sunset Valley.


Left to right: Brentai, Beat, Buge as Ada Bee, Silver, and Zara.


It takes several long moments before Mongrel, TA, and François leave the lot. The very first thing Zara does is freak the hell out.


Meanwhile, Beat sneaks up behind Silversong and yells "BOO" in a loud voice, just to startle her.


Things seem to calm down a little after the initial shenanigans, letting everyone chat for a bit.


Once the three new NPCs are off the lot, I can build a basic house. Two bathrooms, one tiny kitchen, a place to sit, and five beds. It's kind of shit, but it was cheap, and--

Oh.

Whoops.


Would you believe I actually didn't mean to do that?

Anyway. I made the house as small and cheap as possible to allow for input from the players on how they want it to grow; there's plenty of funds left to expand. Does everyone want a private bedroom, or will some of you room together? Given that three of you need to practice writing, and that's computer work, do you want a dedicated LAN room with a few shitty PCs or one desk with a better model? Bigger kitchen? Nicer bathroom? Back patio? A bicycle or a car? What are you guys looking for in a house?

("Nothing, I want to blow all my money on books and recipes and skill classes and concerts and groceries and stuff" is a valid answer too. Remember that the group's funds are pooled, though, so there's no individual fund to keep track of.)