A Love Letter (or Simming, MTS, and How I Came to Embrace Freedom)
Date Posted: 23rd Mar 2024 at 3:32 AM
Views: 152
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I've never played with the pre-made hoods or sims except for one brief foray into the lives of the Pleasantview residents almost twenty years ago when I first got the base game. I remember opening up the hood for the first time and seeing the intros to these sims I'd never heard of before. I came to Sims 2 from Sims 1 on the playstation. I was 16 when I first rented the Sims 1 from the local video store for a weekend. I only played it for that one weekend, but I never forgot the experience of first interacting with my "little simmies." Thinking back, it occurs to me that if I had known then that I would be starting a lifelong love affair with simming (and a lifelong hate affair with EA), I probably would have rented the game every few days for the next four years until Sims 2 released.
But I didn't. Not that my parents would have let me anyway.
And so when Sims 2 released, I snapped it up eager to replicate the experience of playing through the stories of different sims in different hoods. When I opened up Pleasantview on my brand-new laptop, I didn't realize just how the different the experience of telling stories with these little people would be. Not that it deterred me from simming! No no no. But it did, for some reason, make me close Pleasantview and try to forget the Goths and their neighbors existed. I was so annoyed that they didn't have a preset story that I could just play through. Seems silly in retrospect, but I had never truly played a sandbox game and I was unprepared with having no direction from the game.
Lucky for me, I have a creative streak a mile wide. Even back then, I loved designing house plans on paper and created make-believe households in my school notebooks. So, my irrational annoyance at the pre-mades did not stop me from creating a blank neighborhood in which to endlessly design victorian homes with endless self-sims to fill them. I shelled out for each new expansion as soon as they were released. When the Mansion and Garden stuff pack released in 2008, I added it to my cd case full of sims 2 and expansion installation disks. I had burned all of the patches onto a disk just in case they were ever that hard to get. I was determined that I would always be able to play the game no matter what.
Sadly, all of those disks have been lost to time and circumstance. But in 2011, I still had them safe and sound. At the start of that year, I still didn't know what a mod was and I had never even heard of cc. But sometime in late 2011 or early 2012, I got a new computer and I was eager to give Sims 3 a try. Around the same time, I discovered CC. It was, to say the least, a revelation. I immediately knew that I had to learn how to make "stuff" of my own ("stuff" being custom paintings that I had decided were essential to my sim's lives) And that is how I discovered..... The Sims Resource.
I downloaded TSRW and took my first tentative steps into the world of making custom content for my very own use. Custom paintings? Easy! Emboldened, I waded deeper. And in those deep waters, I found MTS. Specifically, I found a tutorial on object creation that promised to teach me how to make my very own table. It was a rough go in the beginning. I learned to love Milkshape and meshing (in later years, this love would become an obsession with 3ds Max that, half the time, had nothing to do with Sims). I struggled through learning to texture, and I beat my head against the wall to "master" UV maps (my love of meshing is only equaled by my utter loathing of UV mapping).
It's been a long time since I first discovered MTS. It's my simming home more than anywhere else. I may not be very active here, but I love it nonetheless.
In short time, I came back to Sims 2. Though, I've never truly moved away from Sims 3. I venture back to it every few years. I've even tried that abomination they dare to call Sims 4. But, as has always been the case, Sims 2 is where my heart truly lies. It wasn't my first, but it will always be my favorite. I know its ins and outs and tricks and quirks. I can make entire worlds and direct their development with absolute freedom. I can put myself in the game and live out the perfect life or I can let free will reign and give chaos a free hand. I can do whatever I want, and if I can't, there's probably a mod somewhere that will say "yes, you can!" I can remake the game to be what I want it to be because, inevitably, some other simmer has looked at a game mechanic and thought "I wonder if there's a way to change that." The Sims 2 is utter freedom of creativity at every level in a way that I've never found in any other game. I love that and I love the community that has, for far longer than EA, kept this game fresh and new for someone who's been there since the beginning.
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