Links in that post seem to be broken, but it's on the Graveyard. https://www.simsgraveyard.com/files...PriestMarry.rar



Some people who play medieval games use a hacked marriage arch that can marry anyone of any game to simulate things like that. That's another good thing about Sims 2. Maxis kept everything so generic that it's easy to mod your own preferences in.

This is why I love the game: it is not that difficult to make it be what you want it to be, despite some game details being explicitly American. I personally don't play historical but I have seen Youtubers have amazing results with their CC and default replacements. The game really does look medieval European or Victorian British or what-have-you.

My Sims actually live on another planet that is similar to ours but also very different. This is how I hand-wave away things like Plantsims and how all of toddlerhood is less than one season. This also explains (at least to me) the Sims' notable lack of the concept of personal space.

Simple for me - I make my games British! More specifically, almost all of my neighborhoods (unless it's a deliberately American themed game) are Welsh. All of my CC goes towards making my game seem Welsh, including creating some of my own like Welsh rugby shirts for my male sims when they go down the pub. I don't even play uni as intended because it's so American to me, I'm working on a faux university town right now where adults-elders can all 'enroll' (going to try to make a custom career).

It's an interesting question. Personally I have lived in several countries and are a naturalised citizen in my current country of residence.

But for the most part I think I have always played my Sims as sitcom Americans. When I was a young child they still regularly showed those corny American 1980s sitcoms during daytime TV and, with my home life being very sub-optimal I really latched on to the way they portrayed families as actually liking each other and talking about problems.

So when I started playing Sims I mostly played the characters in the way American culture from the 80s, 90s, and 2000s was portrayed in sitcoms, cartoons, tween shows, and teen dramas. By now I know of course that those shows had little to do with the reality of US American culture, but I still play my Sims largely like that. By now I actually prefer it that way. I do not see my Sims as "American" anymore, but I look on them as, basically, living in "Sitcom Land". A place that in many ways superficially resembled certain aspects of US culture, but is really its own thing.

It's of course possible that the place I was born in or the places I live/lived in have subconsciously influenced my playstyle, but due to it being subconscious, it would be difficult for me to realise it. I've never consciously tried to make my Sim neighbourhoods resemble any country I've live/lived in. Some features I don't engage with not because of any cultural influence or preference, but because I don't find them fun or interesting.
I don't often give my Sims cars, but that's because of how limited the placement of driveways is and how they sometimes bug out. I don't use fraternities/sororities...because I don't like playing uni in general. I don't often use apartments, because I feel the common area is too chaotic and distracting for me, I don't use Winter, because I never liked the cold in real life (also because in my lore "Sim City" with its suburbs of Pleasantview, Bluewater Village, and Strangetown is located in about the the place in "Sitcom Land" in which L.A. is located in real life America. And from what I know a snowy winter would be ill-fitting for that region)

When I was a child it was the 1980s lol.

Oh, something else that's definitely NOT from my part of the USA, the Car Pool! No one is going to drive all the way to your place and pick you up to take you to your job. Not unless you pay them. You'd have to live close to each other, work at the same place, and have the same shift. Never happens. Someone from work might pick you up or take you home if your car broke down, once or twice, but not as a daily thing, and you'd want to chip in some cash for gas and wear and tear, just to be a decent human being.

Closest things I can think of are the Idaho National Lab buses. You drive your car to the place the bus picks up. about forty minutes from our home, you park your car, and you get on the bus for the ninety minute drive out into the desert. (Yes, it's kind of a killer commute. I know folks who drive themselves the round trip because their work schedule doesn't align with the bus schedule.) Or high schoolers: you have two or three (or more if the driver's eighteen or older or some are siblings of the driver) who live fairly close, one of them drives the group to school and home again. A lot faster than taking a school bus.

I always looked at the universial carpool in Sims, just like the school bus that, apparently, has a stop at every single house, as something that falls under "acceptable breaks from reality". Owned cars weren't a feature in Sims 1 (I assume they didn't want to do all the animations of the car pulling out of a garage/parking space, hence why in Sims 1 all the cars stay on the road when you visit community lots) or Sims 2 (until late Night), so they had to come up with a solution to get your Sims to work/school.

I mean who are those weirdos your Sims carpool with anyway? They sure never seem to interact with each other.

I've always looked at the carpool as job-mates sharing a ride to/from work. It's somewhat common where I live, especially if there's limited parking around the workplace, if it's a long drive and several people are going the same way, if two or more people live roughly on the same stretch, or if there's inconvenient work times and buses don't go, etc. Plus, it's better for the environment to share a car VS everyone driving separate cars (especially for long commutes, or when bus schedules aren't convenient, like evenings/weekends/holidays), so there's that.

What I don't get is the weird uniform the driver is wearing. I'd almost wish they just wore regular hapazard street clothes* like normal townies, or appropriate work clothes*, so it actually looks like a commute and not like they've got a private chauffeur XD

*For a lot of jobs, you'd be changing into work clothes after getting to the work place, especially in health care, lab work, dealing with food (health and safety 101), but also space travel (who changes into a space suit at home?), and various other careers, so I'd be totally fine with street clothes...

Then again, the TS2 carpool shifts with work, so anything can be a pickup - beaten-up car, ambulance, helicopter... take your pick XD

The reliance on cars is odd to me because I'm in Germany, and in a major city that has really good public transport. So, I grew up and consider cars to be nowhere near as needed or focused on like in the Sims. Especially with Sims 3, with teenagers having this big Wish to get a driver's license... or children who are grounded being prevented from going to school, and then being in trouble for not going to school... because, apparently, what I'm supposed to do at that point is have the parents drive the grounded children to school. (Despite no car, nor a driveway being on the lot)

That sounds like a bug. School buses don't not show up if a kid is grounded lol. And school is an exception to grounding.

Yeah, what is that all about?


Car pool and bus drivers are like:
https://modthesims.info/showthread....549#post6002549



I agree, if they looked like ordinary townies it would be believable that a colleaue was picking your sim up.


Here in England, we have crappy and expensive public transport, so we use our cars and have a couple of crappy and expensive hours each day trying to drive five miles to work in a traffic jam (caused by all our towns having the same road layout they did when the Romans founded them). But we don't car pool; oh no! We all hate each other and never share anything, so we sit alone in the gridlocked streets, in the sublime isolation of our five seat cars, and glower at each other and occasionally shout 'wanker!' and gesticulate wildly while rolling our eyes. And we like it!


I seem to remember that the grounded sim wouldn't be allowed to leave the lot to get onto the bus... but I haven's played three in a long time!

This explains why every other car on the road is an asshole or a wanker to Dad lol.

Same in the US.

I would not mind having the crappy and expensive transport of the UK or the US in my country

Car Pool in the sims has never bothered me - I still find it fun when the vehicles get upgraded with the promotions and have never cared about anything being realistic in the game anyway.

I have to admit, I've never even thought of the carpool being a bit weird! It gets weirder the more I think of it now . It's been my Sims way of getting to work in varying degrees of style since I started playing Sims 1 back in the Upper Paleolithic, so I always just saw it a a Sims thing - much like what Justpetro says. Carpooling isn't exactly common here in Sweden either - either we live in a town and have expensive but decent public transport, or we live in a sparsely populated part of the country with bad public transport and drive to work alone, so we don't have to be too close to other people.

'It's a sims thing' is how I like to look at it too; I see them as being in a different Universe from us entirely, so anything can happen! I did love the Sims 1 vehicles, (the cars got stuck behind Fluffly the cat washing on the road for two hours whilst your sim starved ) especially the old town trolley bus.

They didn't exactly remove that in the Sims 2 lol.



I couldn't remember that, so I looked it up and found this.

https://www.reddit.com/r/thesims/co...in_one_picture/

It's been really interesting reading everyone's post in here. I never really thought too much about how my RL influences my sims life. I definitely like to go realistic as far as making them pay taxes, college fess, using mods like inteen etc. (I just found that my sims were getting too rich after a few generations and it wasn't as challenging.) But I also allow aliens so there's still themes of fantasy here and there.

As far as my culture/upbringing, I definitely play a more of a "Utopian USA" type of hood. (erm. maybe not with me having them pay for college lol) I grew up in the states but "culturally" I'm Hispanic and I can't think of anything that's super specific that I implement in-game so now I'm going to keep an eye when I play during my next rotation.

And then I realised that I didn't play TS1 enough.
I don't remember this kind of stuff but I do remember magic and superstars.

That's the way it should be! Cats are more important than cars.

By the way, what happened to the Sim in the car?

He's been beamed safely to his destination (but it takes a long time for the game to decide to do that, and if the sims are low motive they can easily get in danger by being trapped by road obstacles!)

Me, by the 50th horn blow: Yeah, because it will work this time after it failed to work the last 49 times. DX

Sims 1 seems to let you go further out into the corner of the road than Sims 2 does.

Less a 'cultural' background, but more the unrealistic factor that Sims can get a job so easily.
No applying and hoping to get picked, you just apply and, boom, you got the job.

Not sure if it's cultural, but I also am someone that isn't a fan of making multi-level store houses for Sims to live in. Maybe because I've mainly lived in apartments up to now, so having multiple levels is unnecessary for me. Plus, I like being able to see everything at one glance, so one-story homes are usually what I build and play.

Damn, I want that ability! I'll even take the 'can be fired on a chance card'.