Nightlife: Censor Blur won't die!!!

[Renatus]

nectare, I did have a few Barbies with painted on underwear - one must have been bought in '89, the other in '91, and a male doll way back in '83. I've also seen much older dolls that looked like they had painted on undies and bras, but the paint had long since flaked off.  It never ceased to weird me out, even when I was a little kid. And they do make underclothes for them every so often, although not so often I wasn't equally weirded out by the lack of them.

[/tanget!]

[nectere]

hmm..I only had a couple of barbies as a kid and was always reprimanded if I undressed them by my father. They didnt have painted underclothes and nether did any of the ones I bought my daughter, I guess I just assumed they had always been that way.
We have such odd notions about nudity, at least in the US, I hear other countries, except Arab/middle Eastern countries, dont have quite the issues with nudity that we seem to.

[Kristalrose]

But Jamie happened to look at my laptop as two sims jumped under the covers, and he asked what they were doing. Now, he has Asperger's, and is extremely literal. If I would have told him what they were doing, he would walk around school talking about sex and going "honk! honk!". And I'd get yet another note from the teacher. 

ROTF Brynne!!  Been there, done that, bought the t-shirt.    When Allen was in 2nd grade, he drew a big stick figure, put two round circles on about where her shoulders should have been, and wrote "bobies."  His teacher was horrified.  I proudly put it in his babybook.  "Ahhh, look, Al's 1st porn, and his 1st dirty word." 

Apologies for hijacking this thread.  Carry on.   

[Zeljka]

nectare, I did have a few Barbies with painted on underwear - one must have been bought in '89, the other in '91, and a male doll way back in '83. I've also seen much older dolls that looked like they had painted on undies and bras, but the paint had long since flaked off. It never ceased to weird me out, even when I was a little kid. And they do make underclothes for them every so often, although not so often I wasn't equally weirded out by the lack of them.[/tanget!]

That's funny, my mom wouldn't let me have Barbies, so my grandpa gave me one that some of his buddies had given him as a joke decades before.
Don't know how old it is, but old enough to have real hair. It had some rather detailed 'adult parts' ... though I always realized this was probably part of the joke when they gave it to him and surely not 'factory installed' I've never seen a Barbie with underwear.

[Renatus]

Zeljka, it could have been a German doll that the Barbie was supposedly based off of that was apparently a kind of adult joke gift as the doll was supposed to be a whore. Apparently the Barbie design was very similar to these dolls.

(I have no idea why my brain soaks up so much random stupid trivia, really.)

[Ancient Sim]

I, too, find it insulting that we apparently have to be shielded from barbie doll (or *gasp!* anatomically correct) nudity. Especially on the babies. What sicko thought we needed that?

Glad I'm not the only one who feels like that.  When I first saw the censor blur on the babies, or toddlers in the bath, it just looked unnatural to me.  It's as if it's saying "This is dirty, filthy, obscene, how can you possibly want to look at this, you unnatural excuse for a human being" and I find that offensive.  Was I supposed to cover the private parts of my 5 kids when I bathed them and changed their nappies then?  Well, would you believe nobody ever told me I had to do that.  If they must leave the censor blur on the adults fair enough, but they really should remove it from the babies and toddlers.  It's incredibly insulting to the vast majority of people.

And I still hold by what I said before that I doubt there are any paedophiles or whatever getting their kicks from a game like this.  Even without the censor blur, the word "tame" is too ... well, tame.

[Baddmark]

My beef with the censor blur was that it made taking screenshots a pain - the blasted thing showed through walls and floors.

[RainbowTigress]

I don't hate Maxis/EA. I don't even hate Wal*Mart. But I do vehemently HATE that censor blur!

All discussions of Jack Thompson aside, you should try seeing that blur through the eyes of someone with...shall we say, certain "perceptual limitations" (I'm using that euphemism because some people don't believe attention deficit disorder exists, especially in adults). It's like a giant insect on the screen, twitching and vibrating its wings and drawing your already challenged attention to it and holding it like a glue-trap.

Since I simply CANNOT play the game with the censor blur activated, I will not be buying Nightlife until there is a way to deactivate it. And since I can't see helping a company profit that will not help me, I've shut down the Sims2 areas of my website until there's a way to deactivate the blur, so I can buy and play Nightlife.

~Hairfish
Mermaid Cove
www.mercosims2.com

I agree with your description of the blur, Hairfish.  I played Sims 1 again the other day, and I was surprised that the censor blur really wasn't as bothersome as it is in Sims 2.  For one thing, the sims aren't as big, they were only 2-dimensional, and they aren't as detailed.  The blur wasn't "in your face" so much.  For someone with ADD tendencies, it is extremely distracting.  And it irritates the heck out of me when people say that ADD doesn't really exist or that you aren't trying hard enough or you're just lazy.  How can I try any harder???

[Zeljka]

Lazy?

You'd have to be blind to miss that blaring flickering blur. If anything, it actually drew my attention to the area.

It's so big it actually ruined many of the cutest baby/toddler animations in the game.

[RainbowTigress]

I agree, Zeljka.  Some of the cutest animations are with the babies and toddlers, especially on the potty.  When the toddler pats the potty, it's so cute my heart melts.  Also with the sim parent poofing powder on the baby's bottom.  Someone went to the trouble of programming those animations, and with the blur on, we wouldn't even be able to see them.  There is nothing sexual about it.  If someone is sick enough to get some kind of sexual gratification from that, I don't think they would be looking for it playing The Sims, they would be looking elsewhere.

[Zeljka]

Exactly, because there are so few things that toddlers can actually do, it seems a shame to miss any of it, and the same tenfold of babies.
The toddler patting the potty gets me every time too, as does the happy gurgling baby in the sink.

Now if you had to hold them down kicking and screaming to change their clothes and they started pulling socks off the second you put them down, it would add realism to the game. I don't expect this or particularly want to see it. I'm just saying that anyone who's had or seen a toddler knows they'd prefer to be naked at any given time. We're not asking to see them naked... just lose the flickering box that covers over 3/4 of them.

As for adult skins, why not? EA/Maxis can hardly be held responsible for what people put into their games. They've done what they felt was right. Probably crazy, but aren't my teen/adult/elder female Sims the only ones without nipples? This only draws my attention to the fact that they aren't there, if they had been, I'd barely have noticed it.

It's just weird, I don't think any of this would have been an issue anywhere but North America... home of the repressed and depraved

[Meek_Monkey]

The censor blur seems silly as my 15 year old son pointed this out to me, He said that without the blur it they only look like naked barbie dolls if u have the maxis skins. So should we all kick up a stink towards the naked barbie dolls.

[Inge]

But it's only the player-entered cheat that's been taken out, isn't it?   It's not as if EA have done anything to stop hackers showing the Sims without their blur.   In fact the blur is applied specifically in the hacker-accessible code.  For instance, my doors that make Sims get naked as they went through them never applied the blur in the first place, so it didn't need removing by any cheat.   Those hackers who called the global undress function to undress their Sims will have had the blur applied, whereas those who called the primitive change-outfit directly would not.   It would be a free choice open to those doing the modding.

I have a feeling a lot of people are not understanding this issue fully.

[Renatus]

The way I understand the issue is this: The blur removal code was taken out in Nightlife. This makes it harder for players like me, who are non-modders, to remove it when we wish. We now have to wait for some third party to come up with a solution that may or may not be satisfactory to our wants. Why we wish to remove the blur is a secondary issue, but for many of us it is because it causes very real gameplay problems. Making it so we cannot remove the blur on our own effectively hampers our gameplay experience.

[gali]

I can't understand why so many players want the un-blur hack. I too wanted to see "what is it", and pasted it on my game.

Well, I was dissapointed: all I could see were naked DOLLS jumping here and there.... There are not sex-organs to show - so what is the big deal? After half an hour I got bored and deleted the un-blur hack. I like my sims with the blur, it's more interesting and imaginative....

[Hook]

If the censor blur can't be removed with a simple cheat code, then it will be removed by a modification to the EXE file.  This will be done by thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of players.  And everyone with a modified EXE file will have to change the file back before installing a patch.  If they don't go back to the original EXE file the upgrade will fail.  Anyone wanna guess at the number of people who won't remember to do this, or won't know that they have to?

Smooth move, ExLax.

Hook

[Renatus]

Read, gali: It causes a massive slowdown problem for a lot of us, it causes a massive distraction problem for a lot of us because it is very big and obvious, and it shows through walls and floors, ruining picture taking attempts. This is aside from any irritation on the morality involved. The blur causes very real gameplay problems.

[Ancient Sim]

Well I know for sure it will drive me crazy, it always did.  I will try Nightlife out and play for a while, but then I will probably remove it until there is a new patch.  Apart from anything else, as our laws here are nowhere near as strict as American ones, the game should reflect this, but I know it won't.  And to the person who said all you can see is Barbie dolls - NOT in my game!  I see men with willies of various shapes, sizes and ... er ... stiffness, and women with varying top-half sizes (as in real-life).  I don't get turned-on by them (I would worry seriously about myself if I did), but I do find that they add realism to the game.  I have nudists walking about all over the place due to crammyboy's mod and I'm so used to this now it will seem very strange to see all my Sims in clothes.  That, however, will be infinitely preferable to seeing naked ones covered in silly little squares.  Oh, PLEASE someone sort that out ASAP. 

[Motoki]

Inge: Tom said over at MTS2 that Nightlife also uses 2 of the globals that were used by the current non-cheat mode blur patches, which I believe would still work but you'd lose some of the new Nightlife features. AFAIK it's possible to create a new one that doesn't conflict with Nightlife, but I much prefer the cheat code way because it's much cleaner than modifying the exe.

Remember when the first patch came out and tons of people couldn't patch because the patcher program refused to patch the modified exe? I suppose the best thing to do is keep a backup of the original exe, and I always do if I use some patch that modifies it, but I'd still prefer the cheat code way and am rathered irked that some attention grabbing fool who had no idea what he was talking about caused it to get yanked.

[Ancient Sim]

I've just noticed something.  I got my Nightlife a few minutes ago and noticed that it said 12+ on the box.  I checked my Uni box, the same.  Yet the base game is 7+.  Now, is that because the expansions are 'naughtier', or because we've suddenly been subjected to US censorship laws over here?

[maxon]

Well I ain't buying it if it has that stupid blur thing on it.  I find it particularly offensive on babies.  The fact that they want to 'blur' a baby's nappy bothers me - bothers me a lot, actually.  There is something very unnatural about that.  And if it is that Jack Thompson pervertson, then hopefully it won't affect our game here because it's 7+ rating and our censorship laws are much less strict. 

You know Ancient Sim, I felt uneasy about the blur on the baby when I first saw it last year and then started using the patch so wasn't bothered by it again.  You made a similar comment to this recently on another thread (possibly on - whisper it - another board) and I thought about it for the first time in ages and I think you are exaclty right.  There is something definitely unhealthy and unpleasant about blurring a baby having it's nappy changed (not to mention the silly reaction you get from passing sims but that's perhaps another issue).  It's saying something like, 'there is something corrupt about your gaze on this pixellated representation of a baby.'  Ugh.  It makes my skin crawl.  A baby is just a baby and for that matter bodies are just bodies - to pretend there's something wrong with looking at them is not good.  I can understand that people don't want to look at adult bodies in the game and they should have the blur for that if they want it but blurring the babies is bordering on pathological.

[Motoki]

I've just noticed something.  I got my Nightlife a few minutes ago and noticed that it said 12+ on the box.  I checked my Uni box, the same.  Yet the base game is 7+.  Now, is that because the expansions are 'naughtier', or because we've suddenly been subjected to US censorship laws over here?

Probably the latter  Having played it for a bit, I fail to see how anything in it is any worse than anything in the original game or university.

[Brynne]

I am curious Brynne, what did you tell him?

I told him to clean his room.

[cwieberdink]

I am curious Brynne, what did you tell him?

I told him to clean his room.

You could have told him they were "wrestling"   

C

[Brynne]

Then he would think you could have a baby by "wrestling".