Share the odd ways you used to play the sims...


I'll go first. I only had Life Stories because I lost my CDs. I hated it and till this day I don't have good memories of it because I was stuck with it. I was 13ish and had a very odd way of playing. I played multiple families, they all lived in perfect fancy modern mansions from the 2000s (Stylist Sims was my go-to CC website). The adults were dressed like teenagers, the men always had a Justin Bieber haircut (the beatle ones and the 2012-2013 one) and colorful outfits with bulky sneakers. Their teenage kids looked the same. I got sick of "kid" clothes so I made kids wear those emo "grown up" clothes. Did I mention that they had the exact same first face template? They had either blonde or brown hair and green or blue eyes. They all looked related to each other. Just ew, thank God body sliders didn't exist, females would probably look like Pam Anderson and males like Giga Chad.

I couldn't wait the kids to age so I would age them up with cheats. Same with pregnant sims by speeding up the pregnancy. So by the time the teens became adults their parents barely passed half of their adult stage. I would then kill the parents to leave space for the "new" adults. Who needs elders anyway? They're old and ugly. I would cheat into them having high level jobs when realistically they were barely level 3. I would then create a sim when there were none left to marry and the family tree quickly became big with probably four generations.

After I found money cheats I also build always huge mansions for my sim. They were quite romantic thoug and full of antique furniture. I also gave them exotic (usually English) first names and weird last names without no meaning. I was disapointed that they were not rich or succesful at the beginning of the game like I was wrote in their backstories in my mind. (And the poorness until I found motherlode)

The most odd thing: In the first year I played Sims I used my familys common computer and shared the user account with my sister. That means that we shared the whole Sims. Our sims used to live as neighbours. We did not touch each others families but from present point of view while I have all neighbourhoods for myself this is odd, like sharing the whole save file in other game. That is why we did not touch to pre made families either. There were not copies for both.

I like starting characters from teen or earlier, as opposed to starting on day one of adulthood. I know this is the TS2 section, but in TS3 I would create the parents as ghosts and then have them return to the netherworld when I started playing. My first TS2 world had the characters I wanted to focus on start as children, with the parents as afterthoughts. My reboot of the cast started with creating the characters as adults and aging them down to teen with cheats.

I create a family's dream lot, then I move the family into an empty lot, then give them a ridiculous amount of money with motherlode, evict them out of the lot, and place them into their dream home. Afterwards I give them the correct amount of money with familyfunds.
Not that odd, I just like having an ideal home for my Sims.

I did the same very early in the game. I was a child myself and I did it until I was a tween (little before my phase I described earlier). I would make gorgeous cookie cutter teenage girls with my friend or a single one when I was playing alone and give them common domestic names like Ana and common surnames. If the sim is single with no family members their name and surname would be the same cause she didn't need it cause she had no family . The teen girls would have gorgeous medium sized houses with a garden. My friend watched MTV Cribs and had some ideas. We would murder their parent usually by setting up a small fire hazard and making them burn toaster pastry. My neighborhood would be full of teenage girls who wouldn't date other boys cause the pre-made ones were taken and the townies couldn't grow up (not in that version of the game), so we made them lesbians so they could at least experience love in aome ither way. When I was a little older I did the same except having always that one teenage sim with 10 lovers cause I love the thrill.

I have a few stories about early sim playing.

When we first got the original game I was 12, my sister was 10, and my brother was 8, plus we had three cousins aged 8, 6, and 4 who visited a lot. We made a family of the six of us, plus I think our Dad and their Mum as that was the limit. We couldn't afford a big enough house, and tried to build an upper floor for the beds but forgot about stairs, so no-one could get up there. The sim kids also tended to do things when their human got hold of the mouse, which meant that my 4 year old cousin's sim fell asleep on the lawn and missed the school bus, and then was sent to military school.

After that I think my aunt and uncle banned my cousins from joining in with sims, so it was just my siblings and I. We thought that every house needed 2 storeys, so we'd build these tiny little 6x6 cube houses with tiny rooms. It was only after rather a lot of playing that my sister and I realised it was best to start with a single sim living in one large room with an attached bathroom.

By the time TS2 came out I was 16, and knew what I was doing more, so I don't think I have any particularly odd stories about my playstyle, though it has definitely changed over the years. I do have stories about both my siblings.

My sister didn't like the idea that her sims would age and turn into elders, so she turned off ageing from the beginning. Her sims had a baby, and the mother was pregnant again 3 days later and she didn't understand why the baby wasn't growing up. I turned ageing back on for her and she was horrified when 6pm arrived and the parents had one day less of the adult stage, and the baby still didn't grow up. In the end she had to accept ageing, and pretended that the first baby was a twin with his sister.

My brother, on the other hand, was clearly bored of the whole "happy families" idea and made one household with four single adult women, and a neighbouring house with one single Romance sim man. He then proceeded to make the man woohoo all the women, and then any other townie women he happened to come across.

I don't think either of my siblings play sims nowadays.

I used to repeatedly murder my self-Sim.

Once, I made every single sim from the cover of the game box, and I moved them into a house together and just blindly followed their wants. It was very chaotic and a lot of fun.

In the sims 1, every time I got chance to play it (usually at someone else's house!) I would make myself and the friend whose house I was playing at, then I'd make child sims who looked like Harry, Ron and Hermione from Harry Potter and I would create a little annex to the side of the house all decorated in stone and castle theme and pretend it was Hogwarts XD

Also, we had a map of the school in our school planners, so naturally, I created it (in Sims 2). It was ridiculously huge and this was with making all the rooms much smaller than their real life components. I then made a family with me, my sister and three of my friends as teens, plus my favourite teacher and for some reason the head teacher, who we didn't like. Then I moved them all in to the school and let them loose with free will on like some kind of asylum challenge.

It was utter chaos XD The school was not at all laid out well to serve as a house to walk around, all need-fulfilling items were miles away from each other, nobody could keep a job because it took them more than an hour to walk to the carpool, and my overriding memory is that the headteacher took a bath in the science lab, and somehow got that bath stuck in its dirty state so that even when directed, nobody ever managed to clean it ever again.

If there wasn't enough space in the house for whatever I wanted to add like the piano or the sports machine, I'd just dump them outside next to the house and maybe build a fence round it (sometimes). Career wise, I'd make all my sims either go in to crime, scinece, or sports other career tracks were simply unacceptable. Also had a phase where I'd build on the first floor but the ground floor is just an entry way with either a lift or a stair case leading up stairs (so like a house on stilts but structurally unsound because i'd delete the pillars which i felt were ruining my aesthetic).

I and probably every longtime simmer had a phase when we built super expensive "aristocratic" houses, usually very early. Pianos were mandatory. For me it almost always ended up looking very tacky. I had this resurgence in high school when I found a gorgeous European town mansion on MTS (I wish zi could find it now) and I decorated it with Vita Sims furniture to look as old money and Victorian as possible than I moved the Landgraab household there. I'm still proud of that build because it was so different from my usual builds but extremely hard to combine.

Houses took forever to build because "big = good." There would be, like, 25 countertops in the kitchen and only one stove. The living room would be the room next door, but across the lot because the Big Square Building that covered 70 % of the lot only had three rooms on the ground floor - bathroom, kitchen and living room. The remaining 30 % would go to the backyard pool being bigger than two olympic pools combined.

As I aged, the more I preferred very narrow living spaces and would often feel the need to complain because "what do you mean you can't squeeze through? Try harder!!" because the furniture was too close together.

I used to make almost every available or unattached sim gay (possible foreshadowing for older me? Hmmm) including Darren Dreamer, Brandi Broke, and eventually even Daniel Pleasant and Herb Oldie. I'd eventually make them partners in CAS and give them a nice, domestic life with their "true love" according to me and my 13 year old self.

I also had a habit of recreating original characters from Sims Machinimas or stories and incorporating them into my premade hoods, I still remember one where Brandi fell in love with a sexy OC gardener character who turned out to be the head of an international criminal organization (but I don't think it ever got updated after that plot line came out?), or forcing Mary Sue and Daniel to have another set of twin girls named Mary Jane and Betty Sue from Dizzy's Playhouse Sims Stories. Back when I had the normal Maxis lifespan I also used to give sims complete makeovers (hair, clothes, etc) every few days or season changes just to give them something to do, especially with teens since they seem to stay teens forever with Maxis aging.

More recently I did my own version of SophieThePuffin's Myshuno Games with randomly generated sims, built my own sets and game areas and everything. It was a blast and if it weren't for the massive lagging I'd definitely do it again, maybe as a test to see who gets to be incorporated into my next premade hood as a little easter egg.

That's how we all built as kids. My friend was slightly more creative cause she watched MTV cribs. We basically had no idea how the interior of rich houses was so we made oversized necessary rooms. I remember still having space but no idea what to build so we made a 'flower room' that was filled with plants. That room could've been a library, but we were making a house for ridiculously rich sims, not for nerds and intellectuals.

I didn't think I had anything particularly odd I used to do as a kid but now that I'm revisiting Arbor Falls I remembered how I once converted the Thedorff house into a nightclub, don't ask me why I thought that would be a good idea. I don't know exactly where I put it afterwards but the main bedroom became the dancefloor. I even remember putting a lot of those neon lights on the main entrance.

As an aside, poor Bridget Thedorff had overall a miserable life with me in charge. This was in the mid to late 00s, peak High School Musical era, so her oldest son was called zachary. Yes, zachary with a lowercase z. I guess I didn't notice the typo before it was too late. Maybe my sister was right in only allowing me to play with the Thedorff household, else I would ruin the entire neighbourhood. I once tried to be sneaky and play with the Whitt household in Garden Heights without her knowing, already well past the end of the story, Alice was married and had kids, the house now with 3 floors. I managed to get either the dogs or the kids to run away, maybe both, I don't quite remember, and for Alice to end up dead. Yeah, probably for the best that I only played with Bridget Thedorff...

Reality TV show competitions had a choke-hold on me as a kid, notably America's Next Top Model. I used to try and replicate it in the game by sticking 8 models in a mansion to "compete" in contests. I usually lost interest and returned to watching the real thing on TV.