Omg. My childhood is back. The Sims was one of my favorite games of all time. I would spend so many nights playing this game until 4 or 5am, using the free money cheat to trick out my houses and to set my Sims up in horrific situations. I would then have to be up to leave for school at 7:30am and try to explain to my mom why I was so tired, not dare telling her the real reason, lest she remove my PC from my bedroom.
I even used to use my miniDV camera and the FireWire card on my computer to capture game footage to edit it with funny voice overs and edits, similar to the style later known as Machinima. But it was the year 2000 and I didn’t know anyone else doing anything like that.
The subsequent games have been varying degrees of great or meh — Sims 2 was a disappointment to me and while it took me a while to embrace it, Sims 4 is pretty dope (I had very few complaints about Sims 3). But the first game, I remember reading a preview of it in Next Generation magazine in August of 1999 and getting a preorder at my local video game store that week. Six months later, I left school early to get it early.
I can’t wait to play this when I get back home tomorrow.
Why was Sims 2 disappointing to you? I remember it being received well, and I loved that the Sims could finally age and die. I don't see many people who were disappointed in Sims 2 unlike 3 and 4.
They felt less and less sandboxed to me after a while. Like I don't remember Sims 2, but in The Sims 1 you could find a Genie lamp and become a millionaire instantly, and hire a robot butler to take care of the house tasks, simple stuff. Otherwise The Sims feels like a game that takes way more effort than life itself as you balance umpteenth things about your sims life. A lot of the fun was in making ridiculous homes.
Of course, other people play The Sims to live out saddistic gags like my cousins did, they would make "kill homes" as I call them, they would remove doors, windows, and food sources, and make them as miserable as inhumanely possible.
I used to do the murder houses! So much fun, especially in Sims 1, where a lot of that stuff was based on the hacks people found on the internet. My favorite was to invite a ton of people over to party and see how many of them I could kill in the pool (after removing the ladder) or by forcing them to use a cheap oven.
I would leave them in a room usually and remove all amenities. One crazy one was a friend who said his sim had a baby he didn't want to deal with, so he put walls around the baby, then when child services came to take the neglected baby, they kept walking around the walled structure.
Honestly, I might have confused Sims 2 and Sims 3 in my mind. One of them wouldn’t play well on my laptop at the time, and I thought it was Sims 2, but looking back, I think it was Sims 3. I will admit that some of the magic just wasn’t in the sequels for me, tho I did like that Sims could finally fuck in Sims 2 (it was Sims 2, right?) and I’ve definitely spent a lot of time with Sims 4 over the last six years.
Sims 3 ran terribly, that was one of the things that the community hated about it, so yeah, probably Sims 3. Also Sims 3 sims looked like potatoes and while Sims and Sims 2 still had some Maxis personality in them, Sims 3 was pretty stripped of that.
Sims could fuck in the Sims 1 (the heart bed debuted in the Sims 1 after all), but they didn't get pregnant or age.
I even used to use my miniDV camera and the FireWire card on my computer to capture game footage to edit it with funny voice overs and edits, similar to the style later known as Machinima. But it was the year 2000 and I didn’t know anyone else doing anything like that.
The subsequent games have been varying degrees of great or meh — Sims 2 was a disappointment to me and while it took me a while to embrace it, Sims 4 is pretty dope (I had very few complaints about Sims 3). But the first game, I remember reading a preview of it in Next Generation magazine in August of 1999 and getting a preorder at my local video game store that week. Six months later, I left school early to get it early.
I can’t wait to play this when I get back home tomorrow.