TS4: Disturbing Children Books (Part 3)

No screenshots today; EA released a patch yesterday, which made my game really choppy. I already lowered the graphical settings, but this is bizarre considering I have some pretty high-end and recently-built gaming rigs.

The Sims 4: Disturbing Children Books

The Sabrukas' stories marches on as things get more and more strange in their lives. In terms of renovations, I expanded upon the second floor again by adding a nice, luxurious bathroom, complete with high-end shower and bath. I also started adding decorations around, which I've never really bothered with before.

I built Myllenium her own private office, much smaller than Nosco's. See, on the second floor, the space allocated for the bathroom and a nice reading room I wanted to build was 5 spaces by 12 spaces. The bathroom took 5x3 spaces, as any bigger made the room feel immense, so that leaves 5x9 spaces for a reading room. After experimenting with room sizes, I can't seem to design a nice looking study any larger than 5x6 spaces, leaving a 5x3 space room available. I didn't know what I could do with that space; it is too small for any really functional room since just placing a couch there would take up a good percentage of the space, and the only thing I really think could fit there would be a bathroom, which I already have on the second floor.

Ever since I took away Millenium's alcohol, she seemed a little depressed, choosing to spend her free time staring at walls and doing sit-ups at random hours of the night. I decided she needed a hobby, something to keep her mind active during her free time, so I had her pick up writing. She seems surprisingly good at it, and started reading a lot more as a result. She also finished writing her first book:

Pat the Badger

Pat the Badger is struggling with alcoholism while coming to terms with the untimely passing of his wife.

Yikes Myllenium, what happened to you??

She seemed much happier with this hobby, but it presented us with a problem. See, in order for Nosco to proceed with his career as a start-up entrepreneur, he needs to make some royalties on mobile apps. The problem is that he can only create mobile apps at home ('cause apparently all he does at work is dick around) on the computer, while Myllenium can only write books on a computer (because apparently sims don't know how to write by hand). With a single computer, this was a problem.

The Passage of Time

This is poetry / But this is not a haiku / See? Told you so

Myllenium's new masterpiece, a book of poetry she is currently writing. Anyways, I decided that if Myllenium wanted to write, she should have a room dedicated to her craft. Thus, I squeezed a desk, chair, bookshelf and computer into the 3x5 room, converted it into a study, and voilà! This seemed to satisfy both Myllenium and Nosco's needs.

I always assumed that when I was making changes to the house, the game would treat it as if the sims themselves were doing the renovations and whatnot, but I am not so sure anymore. I think that my changing his environment quasi-daily is making Nosco slowly go insane. After completing the bathroom, he started talking to himself, but only while he was in said bathroom. I thought that was funny, but once I completed the second study, he started talking to himself constantly, and only when he was alone. This is really quite eerie, as sometimes he only seems to be whispering to himself, staring at nothing.

"Sul sul boobasnot ravasheen!" Sure Nosco, sure...

Ĭ͍͉̲̩͎̮̈́͋̏͠ ̷̴̣͈̩̠͔̜̰̪̞̅ͬ̓̂̓ͥ̀s̴͖͚͇̟͕̱͍̟̰͊ͪ͗̊͌̈́̚e̷̯̭̫̳͓͊̍ͬ̾̂̑̀ȩ͎͚̦͚̬͕̖̐͟͜ͅ ̵̼̰͚̲̦̃̒y̧̥̪̌ͮ̈̈́o͈̖̻̺̪̤ͤͦͫ͐u̢̳͈̙̻̻͗̃͢͡ͅ

Cheers,
Snowman

TS4: Home Improvements, and a Budding Drinking Problem (Part 2)

Note: I've added some sims from my friends and family into the game, but I won't be following them closely. The game does a good job of automating their lives without my influence, so I will only report on them when they are relevant to the current plot.

The Sims 4: Home Improvements, and a Budding Drinking Problem

Nosco struggles, Myllenium soars.

So I played a little more last night, and each of the sims' personalities was fleshed out a little more, and in a surprising direction. As a couple, Nosco and Myllenium are going very well, despite their weird and disconnected schedules. Whenever they have any free time, they spend it eating together, working out or doing "woo-hoo", which doesn't surprise me much.

On his own, Nosco has stagnated a bit career-wise, having become an entrepreneur with his own start-up. He's making quite a bit of money, and is pouring that money into home improvements, starting with a better office.

Notice the wallpaper and lighting.

He also does, on his free time, some freelance work for some extra cash, having apparently abandoned his desire for hacking.

Nosco sometimes plays with things he shouldn't. The face he made upon seeing his
bluescreen made me giggle.

Things, as were expected, kept breaking around the house, which Nosco diligently fixed.

Seriously, Nosco has fixed this toilet about 10 times now. Someone in this house
is taking some seriously oversized sh*ts.

Myllenium, on the other hand, can't stop working out, and has developed a very strange habit, completely out of tune with her real-life counterpart.

Yes, you saw that right, Myllenium is making herself a drink. This has been going on for days, with her drinking at least two glasses a day, like in the above example where I'm strongly suspecting she's drunk. On her days off, she literally starts jogging to the bar, coming back hammered.

I'll have to watch out for that. To avoid her rampant alcoholism, I decided to remove the mixer bar from their kitchen, and also took the opportunity to revamp their kitchen. Finally, after a few more renovations, I finished the office on the second floor and moved their bedroom upstairs for more room and better lighting (in my opinion).

I think the new kitchen is much better. Not sure what I'll do with the freed room
downstairs though.

The new bedroom, along with the finalized office space. Notice the similarities with
one of the "default" studies; I liked the style and made it mine.

That's it for now, I'll keep you posted when I play some more.

Cheers,

Snowman

TS4: Say hi to the Sabrukas (Part 1)

If you want to skip the review bit, just jump until you see the big TS4 title.

This weekend I decided to splurge and spend my video game budget for last month (I'm a little behind) on The Sims 4, a game which has not gotten the best reviews. Still, I'm a sucker for what I guess you can call "life simulation games" (Animal Crossing, the aforementioned The Sims, recently Tomodachi Life, etc.) and I have to say that the bad points were actually what sold me to the game. Yes, The Sims 4 (I'll just call it TS4 if you don't mind) seems to have less features than its previous instalment The Sims 3, but I don't think that's a bad thing. For starters, I missed the simplicity of the original game, and TS3 never really did it for me. I felt like it was too much detail and I felt myself forced to obey the sleep-pee-shower-eat-work-sleep routine (which I also call the SPSEWS, or "spews" routine... you'll see that coming up) if I wanted to see anything interesting.

TS4, on the other hand, seems to have simplified some things to the point where I actually feel like moving out of my all-important house and visit some things. I don't want this "review" to go too much in detail, so in short I feel like TS4 is a solid return to the franchise's roots while providing still some new improvements, the best of which I gotta say is the "emotions" system they put in. Seeing my sim get embarrassed because they admitted to being attracted to their maid, then proceed to miss work because they hid under their bed covers for 3 hours was hilarious.

With that being said, on to the journal.

The Sims 4: Say hi to the Sabrukas

After getting the game, I thought to myself: "You know, Jonathan the Almighty and Gorgeous, maybe I could do a Let's Play of TS4." And, as you can see, I sorta did. The plan is to continue this until either a) I get extremely bored of this (which I'll tell you, I won't just leave you hanging) or b) my lineage, i.e. the children and grandchildren of my original sims, dies out.

So I started creating sims for myself and my spouse. I decided to make my simile, which I called Nosco Sabruka, a complete geek; he loves video games, computers, etc. The only problem is that when creating my body type, I forgot to remove the goatee that came with the "default randomized" model, making me look like a douche. A small paunch and spazzy haircut later, I was done.

I am a little crazy looking.

I spent a little more time making my girlfriend because, well, she deserves better. After about thirty minutes of fine-tuning eyes, nose, and mouth - she deserves the extra time spent - Myllenium Sabruka was born. For her traits and personality, I decided to give her a sporty mind; athletic, healthy, and active. I'm sure this will go well with my own, less-physically-inclined clone.

Myllenium was sleeping when I took this one.

Once they moved in to their cheap. barely-standing new home, I looked for a job. Nosco easily found a job being a tech guru, but Myllenium had a bit more trouble as none of the jobs seemed to fit for a, um, fit person. I thought of giving her the secret agent, painter or astronaut careers, but I think I'll leave that for later if she gets bored of being a cook. I thought that would fit well because Myllenium's real-life counterpart is an amazing cook, but I digress. Now, and similarly to real-life, Nosco and Myllenium's work schedules are completely incompatible, with the former being a standard Monday-to-Friday 9-to-5 gig and the latter being, well, the night shift.

This is what we typically look like.

About a month goes by with my sims spewing (for those who didn't read the review, this comes from "SPSEWS", or sleep-pee-shower-eat-work-sleep) and working up in their respective companies. Nosco is an ace engineer now and Myllenium is head cook or something, but that's not interesting. Let me just tell a few stories that happened during that month:

• Nosco and Myllenium had "woo-hoo" almost every night they could;
• On his free time, Nosco hacked some sort of trust fund and got a whopping 0$ out of it;
• Myllenium dragged Nosco to the gym, where she had a successful workout and he only succeeded in wetting himself and passing out;
• With a steady stream of money coming in, I decided to improve my sims' life by expanding their house, and discovered that I can't build a nice-looking roof for the life of me;
• The toilet broke about 10 times, the sink about 7 and the shower about 9 times;
• Nosco set the house on fire while cooking some mac-and-cheese and didn't do anything to help while Myllenium put it out;
• Myllenium went jogging an average of 2 times a day, and boxed with a punching bag about once a day;
• Nosco is boring as hell, as all he does in his free time is play video games and hack trust funds;

That's pretty much it for the first part. I'll keep this updated whenever wacky or weird things happen, which will probably begin as soon as we have a bit more MONEY (as our house is butt-ugly and almost empty right now).

Cheers,

Snowman

UPDATE:
I got a few screenshots, so I'm posting them here:

Our house, in the middle of our street.

The small gym I built for Myllenium.

My office, quite sad looking. I need to renovate that ASAP.

The first floor of our humble abode.

I think Nosco was playing a game or something. Notice the crazy eyes again.

On Sandcastles

Topics: Video Games, Storytelling

Sandcastle: noun a model of a castle built out of sand, typically by children.

Today, let's talk about one of my favourite topics ever; storytelling and video games (which, if you've been paying attention, are also the two topics for today). With all those talks about video games (y'know what? I'll just call them games) being a new art form, I feel it important to address the question of how games can be used to convey a story, or an idea.

Now, I wouldn't be surprising anyone by saying that there are many, many video games out there with amazing stories to tell avid players; Bioshock Infinite, Grand Theft Auto V, and Pokémon are just three examples that popped into my mind when I thought of extensive and immersive stories. Originally, games did not have too much story put into them; Doom (1993) had an extremely simple plot of "demons here shoot them ok thanks", while Pac-Man (1980) had an even simpler plot of a dot-gobbling (what a beautiful word) yellow circle being chased by ghosts (reminds me of high school).

It wasn't long however before developers realized the storytelling potential in video games. Many people remember playing Super Mario Bros. (1985, NES) with its simple "kill the turtle-dragon, rescue the princess, save the kingdom" story, but when talking about stories in games I personally like to mention Final Fantasy (1987, NES). Now, THAT was a game ahead of its time. With a complex plot (well, not that complex), sprawling world and fleshed-out characters (mostly villains, and again not that fleshed-out), Final Fantasy started out with a bang and would grow to become one of the most well-known RPG series in the world.

Nowadays, you would be hard-pressed to find a game without even the simplest of plots.

But what happens when the plots aren't complete? What happens when the game leaves too much holes for the player to fill in? What goes through the minds of players as they conquer a city whilst playing Civilization V? Do they simply consider this a colourless victory, or do they imagine themselves as a conqueror gaining territory? Or a liberator of the oppressed, for that matter?

In my experience (read: no sources for what I'm about to say), I find that nowadays players tend to "fill the blanks", so to speak, in a game's plot as they play. Most Let's Play series focus on stories and plots, and even those without tend to make do with what they can. For example, many Minecraft Let's Players find a simple goal to accomplish and build a plot around it. They personify some of the personality-handicapped enemies or creatures and interact with them in humorous ways to entertain their audience.

Here's another example with the game Animal Crossing: Wild World. Now, I've always been a fan of the Animal Crossing series, and of life simulation games in general. Animal Crossing features a simple plot of a young boy or girl moving in to a town populated mostly by animal-people hybrids. There isn't much to do other than fish, relax, get money, expand your house, get more money, etc. It's quite hard to explain, but I hope those comics will have given you an idea of what the game can be like.

Now, let me present you with The Terrible Secret of Animal Crossing, most likely the most popular Animal Crossing Let's Play out there. Go ahead, read a chapter, I'll wait...

...ok, that's enough. As you can see, players tend to fill in blanks in a story however which way they can, sometimes in a, um, disturbing manner.

I think video games, both as an art form and as a way to convey stories, are here to stay whether we like it or not. The fact that players create their own stories, in a way, while playing is reminiscent of another popular form of consumer-driven media; fan-fictions. In fact, video game fan-fictions also exist and are quite popular. It seems as though video games in general seem to involve their audiences in a much more active role than, say, television or movies. What does that mean about games' long-term viability as an entertainment media? Are video games, in fact, a "better" art form than non-active media, such as television? and what about books? Where do they fit on the active/inactive scale of media?

Those, my friends, are questions for next another time.

Stay frosty,

Snowman


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Out With The Old...

Topics: Programming, Life

Lesson: noun something to be learned or studied: the lessons of the past.

Today I have learned that the very basic things you learn in school never cease to be relevant. For example, I had a missing import statement. I remember telling some of my students to always check for those things. Yet I spent 15 minutes trying to figure out exactly that; a missing import.

Never be too quick to discard lessons you learned years ago.

That's all for now.

Stay frosty,
Snowman