The Saga of the Two brothers

How better for me to play Generations than to create families of the sims of two of my favorite characters?

First up, Brandon and Pat.




And poor little Melissa in the cutest creepiest PJs ever.


Her parents are so cute it's gross. They're going to be embarrassing when she's older.

As in another incarnation of him, Brandon is a firefighter.


But this here is one of my favorite pictures of him. He got home after work and Pat and Melissa were gone. So what's he do? Start playing with Melissa's toys of course. Childish sims are so cute!


See? How cute! I should share video of him doing this. He starts making noises and everything while he plays.



Another gratuitous shot (as they all are). Brandon had just woken up and stepped into the living room and Pat went up to compliment him on his appearance. He's wearing boxer shorts here, so I guess she likes that. I love his thought bubble like he's thinking how lucky he is to be married to her. Awww!



The whole family out for a stroll. I love the stroller though they take it out at stupid times sometimes. Like I sent someone to teach their baby to walk on the front yard and after they stepped down the porch brought out the stroller to walk a few feet. Still it's so cute when I send the entire family shopping.




And of course we're dealing with both brothers. For some reason, I thought it'd be fun to give Jimmy glasses. Perhaps that's just a personal bias?



And if I'm dealing with Jimmy, then I'm dealing with Mary too.

But in this alternate reality, they already have kids. Remember the last one? Unfortunately, she went invisible, most likely due to some sort of corruption.



So let me introduce teen Kaya (v. 2.0) and Allison.

Kaya is not Mary's, she's only Jimmy's daughter. This is actually cannon. She's mentioned here (for those who read Ruin). Jimmy was a young dad. It wasn't his choice if you can believe it, he was jumped by the girl and Kaya was the result. He was only about 15, and I imagine that Kaya is now 15 here.

In the sims story in my head, she's just come to live with Jimmy and Mary. Right now she isn't sure how she feels about Mary or her little sister, as cute as her little sister is.

Here she sets up a prank just for Mary. Jimmy, with some crazy innate father second sense, came downstairs to scold her, but when he got to the bathroom...


Mary shooed him out and sealed her doom. He went off to go clean.


Oops. Sadly, she went back and washed it all out. It would've been awesome if she'd left her hair pink like that!

Kaya is actually a pretty good teen most of the time. She asked to go to a friend's house and they did homework together.


Kaya also has the very large master bedroom/study, which I think her father gave her partially out of guilt. It's her own space, plus because the other two rooms are on the other side of the house, Jimmy and Mary can be near the baby.

Kaya's room/the study:



I'm not great at decorating. I just wanted to have some fun, and Kaya strikes me as a girl with some personality who likes bright bold colors.

I left my sims alone while setting things up, and wouldn't you know it, both brothers knocked up their wives!


Mary and Pat ran into each other at the bookstore. Gah, I LOVE pregnant sims! Plus it's nice that in Sims 3, both women recognize each other as sisters in law. They're family, basically.

Mary announced her pregnancy to Pat.


And Pat looked appropriately excited for her. I just thought it was cute. Did she think Mary was just getting fat?


Then she threw this face. Like she's saying, "Those boys."


Next time on "As the Sims sim":



Brandon has a minor heart attack. Facing fires is nothing compared to his wife having a baby. (Also, he was asleep and it was three in the morning, why did he feel a need to hop out of bed and change into his work clothes to face this crisis? Training?)



Bonus-- bath time shots!



What? You thought I meant of the babies? ;) I'm just showing off the chest hair.

Pose Boxes

It's been a while since I've posted here! But I haven't really been playing the game. It's a lot of work to get a story chapter out every week with pictures. Which is a shame because one of the fun parts of TS3 happens to be getting the pictures, and I've been breezing through that part to just be sure I have something up every week.

So I have started testing out the pose player. I've got the updated version now, and it's pretty awesome. You can add poses to a list to be used again and again. And instead of looking for a specific box like in TS2, you just have the one box and you type in the name of the pose you need. Sometimes this can be really handy or really not handy. Many poses do not have any sort of description, so it's hard to know what pose it is until you use it.

Many artists include the picture of a pose with the name beside it, so I've been keeping the pictures that come with the pose files. I've also got a notepad file where I'm putting in the names of poses. If I can, I put in the description too just to help me out.


The other day, I saw this pose pack and I had to use it. (I knew exactly who for too.)





I've been wishing to pose them forever on the floor of the meadow. In my head, they used to meet on the meadow and then just lay side by side. The closet I could imagine were the TS2 animations of sky watching (and later on cuddling under the clouds/stars). Nothing like that at ALL in TS3. Why would they take that detail out among the ones they did take out? Maybe Generations will put it back in?

Anyway, this is what I came up with.

Using the earlier link floor pack from Club Crimsyn. It's not bad, but here's the thing- the artist can mold the faces. And since there is no over lay yet, the face that goes with the pose is just the face with the pose. This isn't really Brandon's face. So that's the main issue I've got with the poses on pose boxes. Even if the pose looks great and natural because of the care an artist took (and these poses were pretty neat), they will still look stiff and unnatural because of the faces.

And I really deal with faces.

So I decided to give is another shot with a different pose pack from My Blue Book. Pose Set 003- Couple Poses. She says she worked hard on them, and it really shows. I think she did a great job with it considering how difficult it must be to pose one sim, let alone two and get them to line up!


My favorite picture:



It's adorable, but still those faces frozen like that.

But then I suppose my own attempts at couple posing like this have been the same for the most part. It's why I end up having weird camera angles to hide strange eyes or the fact that two sims may be going through one another. Like the first couple of pictures in this chapter.


But still, my favorite pictures of Pat and Brandon happen to be the standard EA animations. Catch them between animations, move them around a little and you have unique poses with unique faces and they will generally turn their heads to face each other. The Pose Player will also play those standard animations, so I still need to do even more experimenting.

I guess I just don't see myself becoming a major poses downloading whore. Though I do note the good ones I like and see possibility for future reference.

My sims have become alcoholics

Okay, Late Night is pretty fun. I get the feeling sometimes that the developers are actually paying attention to the community and listening to what they want in the game and then trying to implement them but in a way that's different from what came before. I don't really have anything too specific, but I just get that feeling.

Anyway, onto Bridgeport!


Confession here, Mom just upgraded her graphic card in her computer and gave me her old one that was like SUPER powered. (I didn't even know she really knew she could do that.) Man, it's a huge difference between this one and the 8800GT! So Gayl, if you read this, I'll be sending your card back soon.

First up, of course I had to play around with the sliders. I was bemoaning the fact that the men all had the same torso no matter the muscle mass, so I was glad to see the change! (It works on the women as well, but women already have so many custom sliders that their body variety is huge compared to the poor men.)

So first up, regular Brandon with my default skin. I've always liked this skin for the face and the way the abs on the body are just shadowed. Never have been a fan of painted on abs, but these work for me for the most part.



Here is Brandon with the new slider maxed out.


I wanted to see if the default skin really gets in the way. I'd say no, but this skin doesn't look great on larger sims, so I think I do need to edit this one or something to get rid of those abs.

Also, Ick. I'm not a fan of large muscly men like this.


What I settled on. Something in between. Brandon is supposed to have more mass than his brother and be shorter. Jimmy will probably have a bit more muscle since he uses his body much more often than Brandon .




So for this EP, I decided to use Brandon and Kyrene. Who better to explore downtown Bridgeport?

New things I love- one fancy drinks actually do something. I actually like that sims will gain the party animal trait or the insane trait after drinking. I sent Kyrene out, and we almost had a bar brawl.

I also love that sims can form groups again. They can go to bars and order drinks for the group or a round for the bar. The bartender/mixologist will put the drinks on the bar counter, then the sim can actually deliver drinks to people personally.


Here's Kyrene picking up a tray of drinks for her and the guy she's with.



Sims can now stand around while drinking and talk! They'd sort of do it before, but now I can direct them to. I can have them flirt and do other things as they drink.


Also, they can eat at the bar. This is also just a gratuitous shot of Brandon who met up with Kyrene after his work was over.

Brandon has managed to become a minor celeb. See, he was working as a fireman, and he met another minor celebrity there. He managed to impress her, and so he gained a star. So far it got him a slight discount on one drink, he got into one club without having to bribe the bouncer, and he managed to get recognized which gave him a little moodlet.

But Kyrene is the one in the movie start career! I really need to get her on that.


My one complain is the proliferation of stupid elevators. I guess it makes sense. I mean, if you live on the 18th floor, you're not going to run up that many stairs. Still, it seemed silly when there was a house fire in a high rise for Brandon to do this:


Especially considering how difficult it can be to get out of an elevator.



Smooth. Good thing he's cute.


The other funny thing is that both Brandon and Kyrene can think of nothing other than drinking. "Have a drink" is a persistent want that keeps rolling up for Brandon. Sometimes even having a drink at two different places. But then anyone reading Ruin probably won't be surprised to hear that about Brandon or Kyrene, lol. Next up will be some creative woohoo.



So my hacks page has been updated. And if anyone uses the invisible furniture I whipped up using Buzzler's script, I did fix them for Late Night. They're over here.

Of creepy gnomes and other things

I really want to play Late Night, but that's going to take some work. Most of the hacks I use are updated, but not the Chaos Mod painting yet. I'd like to take a few pictures before I update with the latest patch and make the Mod Painting completely (or possibly only mostly) unusable.

So I decided to play some more Ambitions. (Starring Mitchell and Paula which I last showed way back here.) It started out with a fire.



Yes, that's the maid deciding she doesn't get paid enough for this and walking away. She's a horrible maid anyway. I've watched her snacking on food and brushing her teeth.


Finally found a gnome! Kinda. Mitchel actually made him. I've been watching where he appears each day.




Mitchell managed to create a time machine finally. And we had a little adventure in the past.




He came back with a little surprise.

For something completely different- TS3 on the DS

I need to talk about this, but I have no where to talk about it.


The Sims on consoles have been overwhelmingly disappointing. The first round, they gave it a good try with TS2 on the PS2, but it was lacking something. The play was very goal oriented because for some reason anything that comes out to the consoles absolutely must fit into some neat little box. You can't have an actually open sandbox type game without putting missions or goals as part of the game.

Playing on consoles is boring anyway. Unless you're new to the Sims or you don't have a working PC, there's no point in playing on the console.

(I will add here that the only fun version of Sims on the console I have ever played is Castaway on the Wii. Goal oriented, yes, but it was also really fun and well done and I actually liked it better than Castaway for the PC.)


So I really can't see a reason for playing Sims on a console. Until TS3 on the DS which promised to be closer to the real thing. I wouldn't have bothered personally because I had my doubts, but Mom got it as her free game at a Best Buy sale and handed it over to me.

I have to say that I'm impressed! They have managed to keep all the best elements of TS3 and give me pretty much what I've always wanted.


Being on the DS, the graphics are just so-so of course. But game play does manage to capture the best elements of the DS as well. Like you can use the touch screen to customize your sim.



This is Chris, my shy klepto with a want to be a master thief. I know, not much to look at, but you don't really have to see their faces all that often. The experiment with her was to see how open the game really was. Could I create a sim that didn't live at home?

Yes, it turns out you can. I've hardly had her stopping off at her lot at all. She only has the basic necessities at home- a bed, toilet, fridge. Nothing else.

It's actually an open neighborhood. She can take showers at the gym and eat hot dogs on the grill at the park and then nap on park benches.


Here she is taking a jog through town. She's much too stylish for sleep on park benches though. So she has a number of boyfriends around town. Once you've got a boyfriend, you get free use of their house any time, even when they aren't home apparently.

Since she's a klepto, I had hoped originally we could steal items for her home, but it doesn't work that way. She can only rifle through drawers and steal money. That's kinda lame. I'm hoping making her a master thief will give her some extra ability and she can steal properly.


The building tools are also awesome. It's a touch screen, so they give you the ability to draw walls and add onto houses. You are limited though to one floor and by the number of objects you can put in a house.


A different house with a married couple. (Interestingly to note that thanks to the open neighborhood they were married by the town light house on the look out point.) This house is close to the object limit. I guess 'cause there's a lot of deco objects throughout the house?

My favorite room in the house is the study.



The painting is Olivia's. I'm having her be a stay at home sim working on alternate ways to earn money. (I'm having way too much fun with their story.) Apparently, you can take paintings and then use them to decorate walls. I haven't given it a try yet, but she has the option to sell or take the paintings and there's a family inventory, so I'm assuming she can then hang them up.


Down sides: No woohoo (so all they get for being the klepto's boyfriend is some lost money and an occupied bathtub), no way to switch characters in the same save file, the save files are also not connected so my shy klepto will never meet my over worked prince and his stay at home wife, and no way to switch homes that I can see.

Oh, and you know, no same sex flirtations. I won't even go there, but that's really annoying and limiting.


Also, loading screens. But the upside is that you can spin the plumbbob. That's kinda fun!



I don't know if sims can die. I starved one guy once and he was zapped over to the hospital. Also, I don't know if I can kick sims out or not. I'm working on the drama, and I'll see. That would be a way to keep things fresh in a save file. Let a relationship deteriorate, and then kick out the old sim and play with the new one.


Anyway, I'm impressed. I wouldn't really sit and play this at home, but I do get a lot of playing done at work.

TS3 lighting

So I thought that I was already using a lighting mod in my game, but apparently I was not. Laura reminded me about it, and then Tamo brought it up again in her blog post.

So I thought I would update my mod and found I didn't have one. Oops! Let me tell ya, the mods actually make all the difference.

Take for instance the chapter from the week before last. Night time and fire, what could go wrong? But it seemed too bright to me.


This is the original shot.

Here is what it would've looked like if I'd had the lighting mod in.


Makes me want to retake those pictures!

I'm using the darker version of the mod. I want my nights pitch black. In the Wildlands, even though there are buildings, there really aren't many lights except for fires from pits, bonfires and oil lamps. Probably a few other ingenious inventions floating around.



This doesn't affect the indoor lights too much. But the windows do appear darker which makes a big difference. Before I was desperately trying to hide that the rabbit holes I was using for decoration actually have lights. Now it's really not noticeable except for the marquee on the movie theater.

Also, this mod affects the light at sunset, the fog, over cast and stormy. This will either be really awesome or a pain to work with. Generally, it' nice to have consistency from picture to picture. If it starts out sunny, I'd like it to stay sunny. I'm pretty sure the Relativity mod will prevent things from changing at all when I don't want them to though.


Also, I added a new default hi-res moon which is gorgeous. It probably won't be seen very often, but still, I like knowing it's there looming over us.