Soooo! I am in a Sims 2 mood lately. Going to get as much play as I can in before tomorrow, because tomorrow is going to stress me out. Sigh. -_-

But before that, I've been messing with SimPE, the Sims 2 Package Editor. Basically, I need to hack the neighborhood a bit :D I do that mostly when trying to ease creating positive relationships between Sims. Unless you're in a University lot, it's hard to get two Sims to meet if you created them in different households. Usually it's the calling game... Sim calls another Sim who calls another... and so on until a link is found between the two Sims that I want to meet, and THEN I can arrange them to both be invited at the same household and introduced. When your game has 700+ characters (admittedly, right now that includes the townies, but MY chars alone account for 400+ of those) it can be difficult... though my Popularity characters tend to be the best ones to "route" through.

God, how dorky... I'm thinking of coming up with a program to extract the shortest "path" of Sims between one Sim and the other! It's a classic programming problem, after all, as soon as you get into algorithms and data structures. Knowing me, though, I'd never actually code something like that, just think of how cool it MIGHT be. :D Kinda like how I wanted to make that program to determine the most efficient way to arrange monsters for a Rune Knight or set of Rune Knights in Brigandine. Basically, the Rune Knights have a "Rune Power" attribute, and the monsters have "Rune Cost", so that the the monsters' total Rune Cost cannot exceed the Knights' Rune Power. It would've been a fun exercise if I were so inclined... I probably wouldn't have made it a GUI though, because I'm lazy with that. Unless I made it a web app, maybe, because I'm obviously more used to dealing with the web.

Woo, tangent! </King of All Cosmos>

The other thing I generally do with SimPE besides messing with relationships is editing the Sims' zodiac signs and personality traits. Nightlife introduced the whole Chemistry concept, so now certain zodiac signs are more attracted to each other than others. However, they're not the TRADITIONAL Western zodiac attractions, such as you might look up on an astrology website. They actually depend a lot more on how the traits interact. Basically, the distribution of traits you choose determines the zodiac sign, at least initially, with some small margin of variation. I actually have a text file on hand that shows the trait distributions for each Sim zodiac sign, and the signs that are most attracted/repelled by each other. (Once again my dorkiness rears its head! ^^;;;) So if I want to get a particular couple of Sims together, and their Chemistry is low, I go into SimPE and mess with their traits a bit.

Hey, Sims 2 is all about playing god! I just happen to be a goddess with a few more tricks under her sleeve. Imagine if there were actually a god in reality that had a convenient little program to hack stuff the way he or she wanted it to go, though. o.O Then again, that could be pretty close to the truth, assuming such a god actually exists -- normally, he'd let the "program" of existence run its course, but when problems crop up or situations he wants to veer another way, he fires up the good ol' editor and makes it so.

Lately I've been messing with the University lot I have (Tower University, the only custom lot I ever made ^^ It took MONTHS to do, too!) which has been somewhat of a pain. University is my least favorite of the expansions, due to college taking WAY TOO LONG to get through. x.x Seriously, it takes as long as it does to get one Sim through adulthood! Yet I refuse to uninstall it because I like the concept of sending Sims to college, so every time I put a new handful of Sims through it they get stuck in Young Adult status for quite some time. ^^ What happens usually is that I ignore University for a while, then I decide "Hmm better graduate a few of them" and play it a couple days until I move out more Sims back to my default neighborhood (Tower Island). I DO think the college perks are worth it, though; once the Sims get out they get extra careers, get to start working higher up on the career track, and have 6 rather than 4 Wants (2 of which can be locked at once).

But speaking of expansions... I've had Sims 2 Pets for quite a while now, and not had the opportunity to ramble about it yet! :O I LOVE Pets. The cat and dog customizations are phenomenal. The game actually simulates most if not all well-known cat and dog breeds, and with dogs in particular those can vary quite a lot! You can also make your own breeds or alter your pet's coat. The coats are built as multiple layers with varying color, pattern and opacity, all of which you can control -- AND you can layer indefinitely. You can create most any type of coat you might want, and what you can't create, the custom content modders will eventually do it for you. :D That's one thing that's going to take up lots of bandwidth (not to mention swiftly dwindling HD space) when we get our cable connection next week -- downloading custom Sims 2 stuff! :O

Believe me, Pets customization is an A+... the Sims delivers when it comes to customizing your playable mobs, and I can only DREAM I'd see that level of options in any other game, whether it's for humanoid characters or animals. The only game that I can think of that will come close is Hero's Journey -- from what I've seen of their character creation screenshots, they've actually taken some cues from Sims 2 in terms of customizing features. I'm really, really excited for this game JUST for the character creation process, and there's LOTS more to get excited about when you get beyond that!

But this post is about Sims 2, not Hero's Journey. (That will come later... HJ doesn't come out till late 2007 anyway!) So what can I say about Sims 2 Pets gameplay? It's very, very fun. Cute, and fun. Did I say cute? :O The cat and dog animations are absolutely adorable. If you Create-A-Pet or buy one from a pet store, you can determine the five pet personality traits: Doofus..Genius, Hyper..Lazy, Independent..Friendly, Aggressive..Cowardly, Pigpen..Finicky. (The .. indicates that there's a scale between them. For Pets, the scale is not 10 points but 3, so that Pet personalities are not quite as complicated as Sim ones.) So if you leave the pet alone, they do different things depending on their traits. A Hyper animal might run around crazily, an Aggressive one bark at or chase people, a Lazy one lie around on the couch a lot, and so on. Genius means the animal learns Tricks and Behaviors faster, Friendly means they become faster friends with Pets and Sims alike, and Finicky means they get dissatisfied if they're not clean... for example, a finicky cat will not want to eat out of a dirty bowl even if there's food in it.

I mentioned Tricks and Behaviors just now... well, these are two things that the Pets can learn over time, the way that Sims have Skills and Talents (the latter was introduced in Open For Business). Behaviors are things like Chewing/Scratching Furniture, Peeing Outside/In Litterbox, Hostility Towards Others, and so on. How you train (or discourage) such traits is by observing the Pet, and when he or she does a behavior you want them to keep doing, you Praise them. (This is done by controlling the Sim that owns the Pet, then clicking on the Pet not long after the behavior was made.) So if your kitty goes and scratches on the scratch post rather than your Sims' favorite couch, you click on the cat and choose Praise... Not Scratching the Furniture. You'll see the little meter go up above his or her head. Eventually, a Pet can permanently learn a Behavior, so long as they are not then Scolded for it afterward (or Praised for the opposite effect).

Keep in mind that whenever you can, it's better to use positive reinforcement than negative. You'll have little choice but to Scold if your dog pees inside the house, for example, but once the dog starts going outside, make sure to praise them for doing the right thing. Scolding should be kept to a minimum unless you actually want your Pet to be abused or run away. ;.; Which would be sad! Pet runaways haven't happened in my game, but if they do, you can put in a request through the phone to find them again. You're more or less out of luck if you never bought the Pet a collar, though. Treating Pets badly might also lead them to be taken away for adoption, instead. Or, you can give up Pets for adoption yourself, particularly if you have a cat or dog that just had a litter and can't afford to keep them all. The neat thing about the Pet Adoption service is that it's neighborhood-wide, so if you have a household give up a litter of kittens, other households will be able to adopt the same kittens. ^_^

There's many ways to obtain Pets in the game. As I mentioned earlier, there's the Create-A-Pet mode, which functions pretty identically to the Create-A-Sim (and is in fact reached with the very same button). You don't have to create a Pet from scratch with owners in the household, but you can't move Pets by themselves into an empty lot -- they have to be moved into an existing household so they have people there to take care of them. Again as mentioned earlier, your Sims can also adopt a Pet over the phone, or buy them at a pet store. You can even have Sims buy Pets from each other directly, assuming the Pet is present with his or her owner. The last way to get a Pet is to befriend one of the prolific strays that now wander around the lots. There's quite a few of them, it seems. o.o They'll just hang around at the lot for a while until you chase them off or welcome them in, and if you befriend them enough they'll stay. Some strays are a pain to have around, though, because they'll start rolling around in your garden and ruining your flowers and stuff. o.o

There's also a special stray: the Werewolf. This one only comes out at night and can be differentiated by its glowing eyes. If you bother this particular doggy enough, he'll bite you and you'll become a werewolf, too! I haven't actually tried it YET, but I do have a char I want to be a werewolf. Actually, Jon and I came up with the concept for this couple a while back: Irianna Mnemosyne Lynch, one of my seldom-used avatar type chars, is a vampire (introduced in Nightlife), and husband Oberon Lynch is a werewolf (now introduced in Pets)! The only thing keeping me from actually making those two Sims a vampire / werewolf pair is that they probably wouldn't ever see each other again, since Oberon would be human during the day while Irianna is sleeping in her coffin. ^^; I do still want to try it, though, since I believe both "afflictions" are curable in Sim world.

Pets can also have jobs. This is another Pets feature that I've not yet tried, since I've been too busy making Pets and giving them to my Sims and just having fun playing with them and training them. ^^;; There are three Pet career paths: Service (which includes seeing eye dogs and other such functions benefitting Sims' lives), Security (guard dogs/cats, also, being employed in the police force!) and Showbiz (for your attractive, intelligent cat or dog to be featured in commercials, pageants and movies!) It'll probably take a while for any of my Pets to get to the top of a Pet career track, since besides actually getting the Pet the job, they also need to be trained with specific Tricks that will help them in the jobs. Probably certain Behaviors are expected too (certainly wouldn't want the dog food commercial Pet to pee all over the set!)

I've not really tried out Pets breeding, either, because it requires building up a strong relationship between the two pets to be bred and their owner. But they actuallly DO breed, and do so genetically, just like Sims do! I'm excited to see how this turns out -- it will be fun to mix breeds in game, see what the coat combinations produce. It would take more commitment to playing a single household to see how it pans out, though, and I tend to jump around playing different lots due to my low attention span at times. ^^;; I'm sure I'll eventually do it, though. :D I already have one house set up with an exotic male and female cat (one is a Burmese, the other an Ocicat, I think) to have them breed and sell them to other Sims. In fact, you could probably breed pets AND create a business to sell them, assuming you have the Open for Business expansion active as well. I love when the expansions can interact like that. ^_^

All in all, Sims 2 Pets has been tons of fun!! It and Nightlife are warring as my favorite expansions right now. Open for Business is great fun, too, but more of a strain on system resources, and takes more commitment than I've been putting to really enjoy. I have a handful of Sims with businesses, but haven't gotten very far in ranks with any of them, particularly the ones that are community lot businesses rather than home businesses. Also, training Talents tends to take time, too... and some you can't train at home. The craft ones you can, as well as cosmetology, but you need to actually train while the business is open for Cashier, Restocking and Sales.

So there... I've done my video game ramble for the evening! I have such a backlog of games to play. ^^;; I'll be busy for quite a few months with those, between all the roleplaying I've been doing! And I still want to buy Phantasy Star Universe, too... looks like my sister and Clark are enjoying it, and now Lumi and her boyfriend want to play too. So hopefully I will not be lacking people to play with... though I'm still expecting that I'll be playing just with Jon, most days. That's ok! I already thought of what our characters will be like. So far I've thought up an Oira-like CAST ranger that I wanted to RP (assuming I'll get a chance to RP) as a diplomat between CASTs and other races, and a Mimi-like (as in Mimi from Reborn Again) newman magic-user type chronicling the history and lore of the planets. No doubt I'll need to make some sort of meleeist too, but I'll start on that later!

NOW I will start up my Sims 2 game... it's my last chance of relaxation before what may prove to be a long weekend of stress. ;.; I hope not... but at least I know that I'm getting a break the beginning of next week, when we have to be offline anyway for cable to be set up.