lmaoooo yeah I forgot they have the same head and I lost it when Chad's doppelganger jumped out of the cake. I think Tiffany hired a look-alike on purpose.


I think most of my ideas come from things other people made. I'll find a piece of CC or just look at an item or a skin in the game and think "what sim would wear/use that?" Like the Traylors are carnies because I was looking at all the clowns and circus memorabilia in the game and I was like "what kind of sim would actually want all this stuff on their walls?" and voila.

I also think it's fun to decide on a particular JOB for a sim, rather than just a CAREER. I don't think every sim needs to grind and climb the career track all the way, and not every sim would want to! (Specially the lazy ones...) So Chris Roomies is the Fashion career, but she's specifically a photographer, not a model or a designer. I decorated her room with cameras and equipment and photos that maybe she took. The sim career tracks have a lot of fun things in them (animal acting coach? human cannonball???) that it's easy to just skip over on your race to the top, but really leaning into one can be fun.

That university campus is a VERY cool idea! I know there are school and apartment mods but I've never tried to use them, seems like it would be a fun challenge! I am gonna look at some school-at-home mods and see if I can steal adapt your idea. And I think the Denvers have the perfect house, since they're a "mile-high." Maybe John should look into becoming a pilot or a mountain climber?

Thanks a lot for reading me!!!!

@simsample, with that face and body Sim Sample was clearly made for modelling!! Unfortunately Maxis did really slack off on that one, since it only has two objects: the photoshoot kit and the catwalk, which you already unlock by the middle of the Fame career track. At least the catwalk is one of the more difficult fame objects!!! He could also compliment that with the Fashion studio kits (and money-making objects), thay have both at Sim Freaks and at Around the Sims, you know, as a side hustle.

On the subject of the Denvers, yeah, they definitely need more sims in town, and to have more relationships. There's only two more families and, I believe, one community lot. This actually has motivated me to build up the nhood, I got really dry on ideas on this one (guess I was starting it right before I started studying music...).

And thanks for complimenting my little university lot!!! @EphemeralToast, I find your ideas very entertaining, and I definitely will, ahem, "inspire" myself. There's some really quirky objects that pique my interest on the game -like the moosehead. Maybe a bohemian couple like the one @YoNonna did??? I also like assigning jobs to the sims, since careers get really grindy and, once they have some sure bill and food payment, you're really free to explore everything you can do with the game. I thought of John as a police officer, but the X-Treme career is one that turns up a lot on his newspaper... in any case, he has some of that "washed-out" worker vibe to me. Living on a, as you said, a "mile-high" house gives me the idea of they thinking they're very cool themselves, or being obligated by living on a swamp. Two very intereseting ideas nonetheless. Maybe he, just as Tiffany did, should look into the Bunny/ Chad Suprise Cake model...

Ah, the university!!! I didn't came around to it, but I planned to make a house with sims acting as teachers and for student sims to skill ─using Simlogical's visitor controller. It may be very intereseting seeing how they interact with each other, which is, in the end, the interesting thing about sims university. I actually have somewhere written down the careers, which were based on the game and expansions career tracks ─with an Arts& Crafts option for those sims that become workers-at-home. Maybe they would have paid tuition to the teachers household, I don't know which setup would have worked. I also have a completely built dorm house, which I will show here. Suddenly I'm very interested again on this nhood!!!

Not in my game today, but a video I was watching with Will Wright. I don't know if anyone else has seen this one, but he talks about fansites at one point, how many do you recognise?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c91IWh4agzU

What an entertaining watch it has been!!! Thanks for sharing, @simsample!! As I imagined, Will is a very clever and interesting person ─and also funny, I saw the entire presentation. I find it fascinating how he wanted the game to cross some boundaries ─and surprised himself at how far TS went, even farther than he imagined!!

Such a pity most of those sites don't exist anymore, but it's very interesting indeed all the themes, as he says, they indulged in. I remember how the simming community used to be this very creative and quirky ─maybe we grew up? Maybe nowadays we, as a society, don't have as much time to devote to hobbies? Or maybe it's the actual landscape of Internet, fast-moving and very based on simple and short messages, what made this community less and less involved? It's true that nowadays TS4 doesn't give much to imagination (in the sense of the abstaraction TS1 brought: as Will says, you can imagine whatever you want with your game, as it's so porpusefully simple; TS4 has a lot of systems and big backdrops that don't lend itselves to imagination that much), so it may be just that the game has evolved in another direction.

He seems to be a really inventive designer, as he himself admits, and you can see the ways in which he influenced TS2 and TS Online (and the ways in he didn't). It makes you wonder what would have happened if, for some reason, he had stayed on the franchise ─though he's not really one to stay too much time with a project. I really wonder what he's doing now.

Of course, the main draw of the video was the nostalgia of those PPT presentations tee hee. Since you've been more than me around here, do you think Will entered and saw ModTheSims, @simsample? I believe he would be as equally fascinated that a site so much devoted to the quality of its content popped up ─and with so many game-changing mods and personalities, too.

I'm sure he knew about this site, as there were two or three Maxoids on here in the early days (that was the name for the EA developers and staff, for those who are young! ) I particularly remember MaxoidTom as he used to give us technical advice, which was used in developing SimPE by Quaxi and Inge and Peter Jones. Also he would answer technical questions, and sometimes our modders would give him information to use in developing the game, too!

Edit: I don't recall any Maxoid activity here later in Sims 2 or during Sims 3, but there was some Dev interaction during Sims 4 that didn't go well. I'm thinking of SimGuruGraham who I think got told not to come here any more when he couldn't take the Sims 4 negativity!

Bob & Betty & Brad & Tiffany



Next time: Bob & the Bachelors & the Bachelors' Couch

Wow, the drama! Poor Johnny, playing in traffic!