Delve Into Lunacy

I had briefly played The Sims and The Sims 2 when they each first came out and never really got hooked on either. After hurting my eye a couple weeks ago I decided to buy another copy of The Sims 2 and give it another go since it was slower paced and I could actually focus on it with my one remaining eye. I’m not sure if the difference this time is that someone else I work with is playing it also or what but I’m officially addicted this go around.

So far I’m focusing on two families. The first are the Lotharios. It began as just a one person family with a guy named Carl. I tried to base him off of Carl from Aqua Teen Hunger Force but I could only get it so close with the objects that come with the game. Still a real winner though: stained wife-beater, beer gut, comb-over, etc. I set him for the romance aspiration and I have to say it was rather funny watching these hot NPC women go nutty over him.

After he became an elder I decided he should get married and try squirting out a kid. So I had him marry the first girl that would accept that hadn’t caught him cheating on them yet which was Dina Caliente. If you don’t play the game Dina is actually one of the hottest NPC females in the game so they really make quite a pair. They immediately get pregnant and produce what I must say is one of the ugliest babies I’ve ever seen. It’s a girl named Iio and she looks like a Down’s baby that got smacked in the face with a frying pan shortly after birth. I love her anyway though and wish her the best.

I’ve created family albums for each of the families that I play and here’s what I’ve got so far for the Lotharios.

The next family I created was the Reaper family. Again it was just one guy, named Grim of course, and I was going to just have him kill everyone in the neighborhood. Just after moving him into his house though I realized that if I killed everyone then no one would be left for my other families to interact with so I deleted him. Might give him a go in another neighborhood later on down the line.

So at this point I created the Swiper family with initially just one guy named Scooter. This was actually a tribute to someone I work with that I call Scooter. Didn’t think about it until after he was created that it sounds like he steals Vespas, but since he was a criminal anyway I guess it fits. As far as looks I went with the slightly rebellious but still hip theme and his aspiration was fortune since he was going to do the criminal career track.

So Scooter was rapidly getting promoted and got married to Brandi LeTourneau fairly early on since they accidentally fell in love one day while just chatting. I find it was rather funny that they added a NPC with the last name of LeTourneau with an expansion pack that focused on schooling. Anyway, Brandi’s lifetime aspiration was Chief of Staff and despite her already being halfway through the culinary career I had her quit her job and switch to the medical profession. After playing these two for a while I’ve come to realize that I really prefer the money and skill related tracks over the romance one. It’s just more fun to actually accomplish something and build the character versus doing the same thing over and over again with different NPCs.

Anyway, both Scooter and Brandi hit the top of their career tracks and since Scooter had just turned to an elder when he hit his I had him retire so he could raise a kid. They got pregnant and, despite both of them being fairly attractive, they created an incredibly androgynous girl that I named Dora. Actually, until she became a child I was thinking the game had screwed up and told me she was female when it had me name her but had then created a boy. She still dresses and looks like a boy and the only way I know for sure she’s female is her current aspiration level is “Wonder Girl”.

At this point, Scooter has passed on, Brandi has just become an elder and Dora just became a child. I added Don Lothario back to a house and gave him a phone (originally I removed him on accident after creating Carl Lothario since I thought it had thrown him into a random house). Brandi is ultra-shy and sucks at making friends and Don Lothario and some other lady were the only two acquaintances that she had above zero. So Don and Brandi are now in love and once I get their relationship level a little higher I’ll try to get them married and see if the game will allow an elderly woman to get pregnant.

Here is the family album for the Swipers. Since I only came up with the idea of making these in between the time that I had stopped playing the Lotharios and started playing the Swipers I have a lot more screenshots of the Swipers. Regarding the paintings that I have screenshots of, Scooter was maxed on the creativity skills and the only aspiration that kept popping up that he could do was to sell a masterpiece. A few of the times when it asked what I wanted him to paint, Brandi was doing something interesting so those ones I kept instead of selling and started the “Shrine of Brandi” on the wall of the entertainment room of the house.

WARNING: I’ve removed the censor blur in the game and replaced the default “doll” skin textures with ones that are a little more realistic. Personally, I think seeing nipples and body hair is a lot less creepy than everyone in the game looking like a naked Barbie doll. So for that reason some of these images are more graphic than they would have been with the default game setup.

As I play the game more and update the family albums and such I’ll post updated pictures. I’ve also started working on lot objects and created what I think is a rather swanky house, but I’ll include that stuff in another post.

Well, I finally decided to start working on getting a replacement for the piece of crap that is currently the FallenBlossom site. The first thing I started with was the logo.

I had three ideas going into it: the silhouette of an iris with the blossom on the ground, the silhouette of a cherry blossom tree with the petals blowing off of it, and just a stylized “Fb”. I nixed the cherry blossom one right off since I figured in smaller images the petals wouldn’t show up. The “Fb” I fiddled with but couldn’t come up with anything that I really liked. So I started working on the iris one but was getting nowhere fast with my lackluster graphics skills.

While playing around trying to make the blossom part of the image I decided to go with an ultra simplified look versus something more life-like since that’s really what I was wanting to shoot for with the entire site anyway. Here’s what I came up with. The purple will be what I use for the background color on the site and I like the way the greens and dark gray fit with it so they’ll be heavily used throughout the site as well. I’m kind of leaning toward #4 but haven’t completely settled on the final one yet. What do you think?

I’m tired so I won’t write much, but I figured I should put something out here so it didn’t just show that “Sorry, no posts matched your criteria. ” message anymore. Maybe I’ll write something more substantial tomorrow.