Honestly, I never liked giving punny or silly names to my Sims (one of the reasons I banished the standard Townies from my game is that I didn't want a Sim named "Goopy" running around my hoods, and yes, I know it's a nickname, no need for his fans to point that out to me) the most I sometimes do/did was giving Sims alliterative names or names that are similar to their parents.

But I agree Sims 2 with its rigid memory system and everything makes my actions in the game feel more "serious" and "permanent". I usually don't delete whole hoods because of things like that, I'm more likely to abandon individual families.

For me banishing the Maxis townie's was done because I don't want all that Maxis bloat in my game. I like goofy goopy and all, but having him in every town is just annoying, not to mention doesn't make sense.

As for seriousness, I can do both. When I have plans to share something it's more on the serious side, but if I don't have plans to share something then I've been known to name a Sim "Watermelon Seed". I've never went and abandon entire 'hoods because I didn't like the Sims, but like Orphalesion I do abandon individual families. In fact I actually abandon most families after a few generations because I get writers block and want to see something new. I think the Goths, Landgraabs and my own legacy family, the Babybats, are the only families I haven't abandoned.


Yep. I'm at the phase in my town where I've got all the Sims created, now I'm play testing it all and seeing how it unfolds. I like to use the events that happen in my short play sessions as inspiration as to where the story can go next.

I tend to miss the damn townies. And the damn bin sims. While I have 2 hoods without them, I also have Binville - where the bin sims reside, the townies are present, all the sims from Bluewater Village have moved to the main hood and I added the Kat and Kim families. (And it is quite fun to take a break from the others and return to these familiar faces at times).

Besides, I have always had a soft spot for Goopy and for Benjamin Long - after all, in my very first hood in my very first game, my very first sim family's eldest daughter married him

That's really cool, thanks.

On townies, I like the Maxis versions, but I only like to have one version of them at a time. So if I have the Pleasantview townies in Pleasantview, I don't also want them to be in all my custom hoods.

I agree. I want the Pleasantview townies in Pleasantview, and my own townies in my own 'hoods. And that, by and large, is what I've got. When I create a new 'hood, I make sure the Pleasantview template is removed from the Program Files, so the game can't import the townies from it. I either make my townies in CAS, or let the game generate them with the Townie Tree. (Mine is a Tree -- not a Gun!)

I've been listening to songs from TS1, TS2 BG, Urbz and Bustin' Out a lot and noticed that the Simlish is more pronounced and fluent sounding in the older songs. The licensed music isn't settling well for me anymore so I've been turning off the licensed soundtrack in the options.

I'm honestly glad that there's now a version of Pleasantview that's without the standard townies, prior to that I had a home-made version where I had removed them myself with Simpe, and probably had a lot of corruption because of that. And before that I just ignored them as best as I could for years.
I just prefer to make my own Townies, especially so I can avoid double names, the very cartoony faces and overall give them a more coordinated appearance (as in better hair and clothing that doesn't clash and things like that) The only one among the Pleasantview Townies I like is Kaylynne Langerak, due to how tied she is to the storyline of Pleasantview.
Similarly the only Bin Sim I like is Tara Kat, since again she seems to be somewhat tied to Pleasantview if she's a descendant of Gina Kat from Sims 1. Though I also sometimes use the Ottomases but only after genetically alter g their faces to be less cartoony (or sometimes I just make my own version of them, for the same reason) I know a lot of people like the cartoony faces and that's good for them, but I don't and it's my game I play

I have never played Pleasantview - and never will, after being in that hood just long enough to leave Don in a pool without a ladder So my feeling is that - if that were to be the default game - I would have been denied a lot of things, such as the charm of Goopy, the fun Benjamin can be, the fights that are caused by Kennedy Cox and the loveliness of Meadow Futa - so there's that

I kinda wish I had a sim like this that I just used for everything. I did have one, a teen boy named Kim, who I used to make a terribly embarrassing video telling an irl guy I had a crush on him in high school (the sim was talking). I then again used him for various sims music videos, which sadly nowadays aren't on youtube anymore because unlike the good ol youtube days you can't just chuck a whole irl song in there anymore this all in addition to playing him normally in his normal sim life, where he ran a furniture store with his grandma.
But many many years ago he, along with all my other sims, neighborhoods, stories and clusterf**k of cc off the exchange - did not survive the transfer from dinosaur PC to schmancy laptop because I thought that starting afresh was the best idea.
I'm really quite awful at saving/keeping things. I do actually enjoy starting fresh from time to time, and whenever I do I just straight up delete everything, thereby banishing all my simmies into the void, with no trace of their existence other than my own memory.

Meadow Futa... now I wanna know what Alvin Futa and Meadow Thayer's kids would look like...

Oh, they are quite good-looking, and they met when I sent them both to Uni in order to fill up one of my 6-room dorms And young Ivy Copur has become Ivy Centowski, married to Orlando

I just married those two in my game as well. They are a cute couple.

Or you could have had a completely different set of characters to discover, which might have turned out as good or maybe even better. I just wish Sims 2 would have had an easy way to change and remove townies. That's one of the things I envy about Sims 4.

Unpopular opinion, but I just can't bring myself to like randomly generated characters as pre-made ones. Maybe it's the fact that there was some thought put into pre-made ones, I don't know, but I never liked playing with randomly generated townies for some reason. They just seemed more boring to me than like, the ones from the maxis hoods.

This also works in other games too, for some reason. For example, there's this social sim game I found recently where the whole point is that you interact with a set of randomly generated characters and watch as they make friends and enemies alongside you. And even in that game, I only talked to the like 6 pre-made characters, put into it to test rarer character traits. Literally no idea why. I just can't get attached to randos I guess.

I must admit that after playing a 'vanilla' Pleasantview, I really don't like it or the other 2 hoods-why? Because after all these years, the canon storylines are so well known and played through, the characters are limited and boring to me.

It's not that I haven't played them-I've played a Megahood, and I know all of them..but they're so boring now. That's why I need to play my own created neighborhoods because I don't know how things will turn out. The pixels do surprise me from time to time, and even challenge. me.

Don, Dina, Nina and all the rest are just the same characters time after time, and their story-lines are pretty predictable, as are their reactions to things.Plus, they're rather dated for their personalities-Don's the womanizer, Dina's the wannabe golddigger, etc.

It's just too rote for me.

Aww, shame- it's sometimes fun to look back on the sims you used to play with!
Although, once I built a neighbourhood for my daughter, and I put Sim Sample in there as a townie- she was not happy! And she spent a long time trying to kill him off. Eventually she moved him in with someone and had a satellite fall on him!

I have other townies in my other hoods.
However, having played the vanilla game for a longer time than most - not having access to proper working internet back in the day, since I was living in the mountains in South Africa - I got attached to the PV townies. I played my first custom hood for many years before it did the vanish into space thing one day - and by that time, most of the townies were not townies anymore. The game, of course, generated new ones, so I kind of got that too

That honestly reminded me of something my Dad used to do. He'd load all of mine and my sister's neighbourhoods, as well as the premade ones if he knew we were playing them, and make a family called the "BillyBob Family." This family would always consist of an elderly man and seven adult daughters. It wound me up one time, because he'd ruined one of my storylines by having his elder get engaged to one of my sims without asking. My sister also loaded Pleasantview to find Nina missing; guess where she was She was not amused

But I'm not talking about the Pre-Mades. I love the Pre-Made families of Pleasantview and Strangetown.

I'm talking about the Townies, and the Townies almost are (or maybe even are) randomly generated characters that just happened to be saved in a way that puts them into every hood, to the point that I've wondered several times on here how they were created (as in whether Maxis created them by hand, had them randomly generated by the game or had them randomly generated and then edited them a bit). Their names, faces, hair and clothing are very miss-matched or even repeat (like the two Ivy Copurs) and are selected from the game's random name list (which is absolutely abysmal in its Vanilla form, bot in quantity and quality) which doesn't make them look like there was much, or any, thought put into them.



I understand you feel about the Townies like I feel about the actual Pre-made families of Pleasantview and Strangetown, and that's cool, please don't get the impression that I'm trying to change your opinion or don't respect it.
But see...I've also played the game on and off since it came out and there were no ways to avoid the Pleasantview Townies or the Bin Sims for most of that time until empty templates were invented. And since deleting Sims was quickly found out to be a no-no I was stuck with those PV Townies and those Bin Sims in every hood. You could choose not to play Pleasantview, I couldn't choose for a very long time to have those characters in every single custom hood, that's why I started disliking them.

I'm actually under the impression that the townies were created specifically for Pleasantview but having them in every 'hood was an oversight by Maxis when they introduced the ability to have custom 'hoods.

I very much like the Pleasantview townies in their proper place -- they're mostly competent at their roles, sometimes surprisingly so, and even those who aren't are amusing. Parading around an attempt at a legacy hood...nope. I can tolerate Goopy, Dorian, and Russ, but even they look wrong out of the story I'm used to them in. However, I'd probably try to get them back in any megahood that included Pleasantview, if it wasn't Pleasantview-based already.

I didn't realize quite how possessive I was of my idea of the premades until someone made yet another remake of a premade neighborhood and made what I presume was a joking remark about making certain Sims a couple "as the Watcher intended". I don't regard those particular Sims as an attempt to evade the censors in what was by that point the late 2000s (as opposed to the Curious-Smiths -- I took an embarrassingly long time to get what Strange Tomato was alluding to, and then when I did it seemed so obvious...) and I found myself thinking "whose Watcher?" Then I see that premades have their ugly-cute squished faces elongated so they can breed conventionally attractive offspring, and realize the problem is on my side. Some people are disturbed by Sim-kids with eyes a long way apart, and by twins named Beatrice and Benedick (which, yes, would get them teased at school if their classmates have any intelligence -- but which I saw as an allusion to the folklore about lovers who die together being reincarnated as twins, a disturbing echo of the multi-generational trauma infusing Veronaville). I'm disturbed by the idea that Alexandra Teatherthon's discarding the O'Mackey name was an error (I'll be changing it back should I ever use the otherwise lovely new clean template for RH), and by how Chloe Curious and Johnny Smith really can't get away with the hairstyles they start out with and which suit them very well anymore (I'm almost ready to default replace those now that I've realized Chloe's is a proto-Karen and Johnny's is a proto-Proud-Boys style -- both of which would horrify them, for obvious reasons!). I do very much like the new version of Veronaville on MTS though, as it's so different from the original that it just seems like a reboot rather than a retcon -- think Star Trek versus Star Wars.

I know I also understand that a player may not want them in every hood - it just never was a problem for me, because I never played the premade hoods and for many years, I only played my custom hood. When I started with the Base game, I made my own sims. As the expansion packs were released, I moved in the bin sims as they came along - when my hood finally went kaboom, I had 244 families, apart from those in Bluewater Village and Uni - and on starting a new hood, it was really the first time I noticed that all the bin sims actually are in the bin And, as I said, I actually have 2 hoods without any premades - but after all these years, i am just fond of them I did later play Strangetown (I quite like those sims) and still may venture into Desiderata Valley these days - but I just like to control what happens in my game without scripts.

Good grief, I don't even know when the last time was I was on here, three or four weeks at least.

Well, Origin is downloading, new old computer is sorta-kinda stable (crashed a lot the first three days--which didn't help any with getting all the Windows updates on it), so we'll see how it goes.

What features do you all use the most in the game? I rarely use Uni features, but I find myself using AL, FT, and Seasons features the most.

hmmm

-Chemistry System really drives my romantic choices (NL)
-I use all the business functions in about 10 businesses and counting (OFB)
-I remodeled all my vacation hoods and heavily utilize them (BV)
-Walking to Lots is a staple of sim transport (FT)
-Love making and having sims live the apartment life (AL)
-All my sims go to Uni in some way (UNI)
-I have pets and have a bird sanctuary business I love to play (Pets)
-Gardening and Fishing (Seasons)

I guess the question is what features do I use the least?
Secret Societies (UNI)
Supernaturals (ALL)
Pet Trainers (Pets)
Child Adoption Agency (Base)