More Awesome Than You!

MTS2's wiki is saying stop-starting telescope gazing is reported to increase the odds of abduction.  They don't go the whole way and say it's true as they obviously aren't awesome enough to know.  Is this lies & propaganda?
http://www.sims2wiki.info/wiki.php?title=Game_Help:Aliens#Alien_Abduction

Be nice to have some more stuff in the War Room about how things really work.  It was a bit sad to see there's been nothing new there for so long.

I vaguely recall seeing that myth debunked back on VS, when TJ released his higher abduction odds hack.  Or maybe it was just the way he hacked it?  I'm fairly sure that with his hack the more cycles they stargaze the more likely an abduction is - i.e. the longer they look through it in one session, the higher the odds.  I'm just not sure if that was vanilla behaviour and all he did was raise the odds, or if he tampered with that behaviour as well as raising the odds.

In my experience alien abductions are governed exclusively by Murphy's law. :-\

As far as I know, abduction odds stay the same in an unmodded game all the time a sim is looking through the telescope.  With TJs higher abduction odds mod, odds of abduction start low and increase through the period that the sim is stargazing with the telescope.  If the sim stops stargazing (i.e. for BUY reasons) and then resumes, odds reset to low and have to start increasing again.  The mod was the only way I have ever had an abduction since I think unmodded odds give you a probability of abduction slightly lower than the IRL probability of increasing your wealth by watching TV preachers.

Now, please place your hands on your BV disks and say with me: "Heeeeyull!"

I always thought that the abduction odds where a bit higher in an unmodded game when playing Strangetown. Is that a myth too?

I don't know fer sure, because I always play with TJ's mod in. Or did. And will again, as soon as my new shiney arrives. My neighborhoods are a bit out of the ordinary, and aliens are essential. That's why I also had a gender equality mod. Both, pixel men and pixel women got pregnant.

I hope that mod is also easy to re-find. I'm hoping it was TJ's. I better go check.


/me is trying to figure out what "heeeeyull" could mean. Hell or Heal? That is the question.

As far as I know the chance of abductions is the exact same in all the hoods, so for Strangetown it is a myth.

As for the mod, just want to make sure about this. Did you mean a mod which permit female to get alien pregnant too?  If so, that one was made by Squinge but there might be other modder that did it too.  ;)  There are 3 versions available at the sims2graveyard, if you are unsure of which you need, pm me and I can tell you what is the difference between the 3.

ETA:  Add a bleh moment and change permit abduction to permit alien pregnant

Not entirely a myth -- the Curious brothers are scripted to get abducted, at least in the initial scenario that comes with the base game.  So they have higher odds (at least for a while), but Strangetown as a whole isn't any different than the others.

Jolrei reckons it's more than that....

At this point perhaps "reckoned" is a better word.  I had been led to understand, if I recall correctly, that some Strangetown lots (esp. those related to the Curious family) might contain scripting/code that modified odds of abduction.  As noted in the quote, I thought someone else might have evidence and commented that the person's experience suggested support for the hypothesis, considering that people had reported oddities related to stealing lots from S-town for use in other 'hoods.  I'm perfectly happy to be wrong about this.

I never really played the Strangetown hood. I tried once, and it worked fine for a while. Then I played the Curious brothers. Pascal (it was Pascal, wasn't it?) gave birth. All was well. I left the lot and played the the Singles household for a while. Came back to the Curious' and Pascal was pregnant again, and the new baby was gone. Pouf.

Then Olive's graveyard ghosts started acting up. I don't exactly remember what happened (it's been a while), but that was enough for me to just leave the hood and never look back.

So far I had some screwy going ons in all EAxis hoods. That's why I never played them again. That's also why I believe they tried to be cute and, as usual, messed things up royally. In the newest hood, Riverblossomsomething, the plantSim suddenly started dropping kids when visiting as a non-controllable. While I didn't mind that too much in the beginning, it started to annoy me enough to stop playing that hood as well.

Are peasants not allowed to start topics in the War Room?  I have never sought to try it.   Well, I just checked, apparently I could not start a new topic there if I wanted to, but I could start a poll.  Very strange...


When the TJ's 'higher odds' hacks were hosted here, I am almost certain he stated in the description that abduction odds do not increase with time in a unmodified game, but that his mod made it so that they did.



The one I have been using for a long time is by Smonaff at MTS2.  It seems reasonably stable and apparently plays nicely with TJ's hack.

I usually just tombstone an alien pregnancy after a female is abducted, because I don't want same-sex pregnancy as a general rule. It's a pretty rare occurrence.

As for abduction odds, the same post I read way back when saying that start-stopping viewing was the key to abduction also said that it always happens in the first 15 minutes of stargazing. This is patently untrue, as both my recent abductions have been after at least two hours of uninterrupted searching.

I also read almost everywhere that abductions don't go on after 3 AM. I had people abducted as late as 5 AM. If they were teens, they had to race to the bus, and they usually were in pretty bad shape need-wise.

I've had early morning (2 am ish) abductions before, too.  I also had a rash of abductions of sims that were just young enough to still get preg (adult males 5 days from elder?--I think those were just coincidence, but it was weird).

Is there any truth to the rumor that having more than one sim stargaze at the same time will increase odds of abduction?

And (one last question) anyone have a male plant sim abducted and get impregnated?  I'm trying for an alien/plant hybrid and am trying to resist just using the tombstone of life and death to do it.

I don't like same sex pregnancy among sims either, but for me the alien pregnancy for males is different.  It is alien, after all, and hilarious.



I have had early morning abductions also, but the stargazing in those instances started well before 3 AM as I recall.



I'm glad I thought of that!  But almost embarrassed that I had not thought of it before.  Now I have something new to try.  Can plantsims even get pregnant by 'normal' methods?   

I like the same sex pregnancy option. It's the sims, after all. I also heartily dislike the social worker, and all the other assorted NPC's who have the tendency to become weird and/or glitchy. That includes the head-master.

I have my own system. I use Inge's cat to get my home made head-master over, do my thing, and just toggle the private/public school thingy with Merola's painting if my sim family qualifies. It's not easy for my simmie-kiddies to go to private school, but my home-made headmaster doesn't become an issue in my game. I have to use a lot of imagination, but that's not a problem for me.

They also have to pay a school fee, which I deduct with the help of Monique's computer. Via the 'donation' option. Fees vary according to my rules, so I don't use a set fee mod.

I don't know if plant sims can get pregnant the usual way. That's something to try out. The abduction scenario is also something I would like to find out. Plant-sim aliens. Great idea.

I think the only way to have an alien plantsim is to make an alien turn into a plantsim since I don't think plantsims can get pregnant.

ETA:  Well I'll be damn, indeed the option to try for baby is there.  I always thought since plantsims spore plant babies they could not actually get pregnant the normal way, I learned something today.

Yeah, that seems to be the case. Can plant-sims be abducted at all, do you know?

I don't think I've ever had that happen. But as far as pregnancy is concerned, the plant-sim in Riverbottomsomething did just sort of drop her offspring - everywhere.

By the way, thanks for your offer, Ms. D. I'm not looking forward to *not* finding the odd little mods back. You know, the ones that have been in your game for so long you forgotten that you had them.

Of course plant sims can become pregnant.  That's how most users learned that the one in Seasons is black.

I assumed they could.  I also assume the gestated (as oppossed to "spore"d) baby will have the genetics of the mother and father and NOT the genetics of the mysterious "plant sim"?

That's it.  I'm going to cheat my plant sim into an alien pregnancy (he'll like being abducted and I'll like the alien baby).

Plantsims can become pregnant and have a sprog, but it's a normal baby and not plantsim. I'd assume that if a plantsim got abducted the resulting alien baby would be a regular alien baby and not plantsim.

What!  No little leafy alien cuties?

How many times have you tested? Alien babies don't always get the alien skintone. I've had a couple born without the skintone and with the eyes, and a few born with the skintone and not the eyes (which, considering general alien spawn eye size, it freaky).

Regardless, you can turn an alien kid plantsim.

Grow up the baby, turn it into a plant sim, and generate all the part-alien plant toddlers you like.  Would that be close enough?

Servos, Zombies and Bigfoots are sterile.  Other freaks breed just fine.

I have no zombies. Their walk drives me nuts.

Bigfoot? I didn't even know he could become romantically involved. I didn't get to play all that much before I was forced off. I don't think I like the idea anyway. Unless it's just a guy disguised as Bigfoot, and he can take the big hairy suit off.

Wait! Where's Jolrei?


/me cracks up


ETA:


What do you mean? I'm confused. Do you mean the prototype is a #4 skin sim? I thought this was the prototype.

http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=230572

Could the skin colour be random in each hood?


LOL@Veilchen

Bigfoot is not supposed to become romantically involved, but unupdated hacks have weak-checking on this and can sometimes allow it as a loophole. Strangetown has nothing special about its alien abduction odds, other than the prescripted Vidcund abduction.

I have 25 (in Dark Side of the Moon, Queen's Cove has none). All the Seasons/BV bin sims, plus the garden club. They're virulent, too. I also have incredibly odd indigenous creatures. Ex:
(http://img48.imageshack.us/img48/4278/snapshot5458b015f45ccd0dq6.th.jpg) (http://img48.imageshack.us/my.php?image=snapshot5458b015f45ccd0dq6.jpg)
Wheebo, here, is actually the most normal-looking.

Oh, honestly!

* ROFL *

Zazazu, I just have to go and see if you have stories about that hood. Virulent? I thought zombies were just generally pissed off, slow as molasses, boring sims.

 :D to Jolrei

Depends if you have the zombie apocalypse hack Veilchen. My hood has an increasing zombie population, as the current zombies eat the brains of the non-zombies. Simwitch had her first zombie fight the other night, I was so glad she won because I had decided I would not alter any fight outcomes by making sims normal again and I so did not want to play myself as a zombie.

He/she can't.  No romance whatsoever; hence the inablilty to reproduce.

I disabled the apoclaypse in my one hood for exactly that reason.  I was just starting the population out, and nobody was fight trained, and all of a sudden the one zombie in the hood had quadrupled the population in one sim-afternoon.  I could see all my poor skill-less sims falling in less than a week.

Is there a way to have a zombie killer in game?  That way, the apocalypse could end when either all normal sims were turned to zombies, or all the zombies were dead (er, more than they are already, I mean).

There's some guns at Paladin's Place (http://www.simwardrobe.com). You can kill the zombies that way.

No, not the Ideal Plant Sim... what's her face, the playable plant sim lady that comes with Seasons in the new neighborhood.  Rose?  Players were having her "try for baby" with her white husband and got black babies.  There was some confusion (at the TSR forums, not here of course) until someone tried the obvious and learned that if you turn her back to normal she's got skin #4.

I put up a short one mid-afternoon. Only one zombie fight so far, but then they are pretty much confined to the house and I don't let them greet them. Luckily, all my zombies but two have absolutely no body points. Jaden can trounce them easily. His wife might not be able to, depending on which one attacks.

Thanks for the link, kutto. I'm going to want that eventually!

It's the implicit racism that assumes everyone is white until proven otherwise.

I used to see that way too often in the Sims 1.  I made furry sims and I would categorize them as whatever skin color was the best match for the hands, in case the head wasn't immediately put with the right outfit.  I quickly learned that if I got a complaint about the skin "not showing up in the game," my first response should be, "did you try creating a dark skinned sim?"   :P

I tend to find that, left to my own devices, my starter sims are always white. Lily, ghostly white like myself. That's why I added skintone to my RandomStuff. After the first couple generations, though, I've mixed in so many skintones and hair/eye colors that I get descendants with every imaginable combination.

I play with a combination of TJ's higher abduction odds hack and Smonaff's alien pregnancy for females (http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=184470) from MTS2. They seem to work just fine and that's with all EPs installed. I'm also using an older version of TJ's increased abduction odds hack where abductions are, while not guaranteed, much more likely to happen. He has modified the abduction odds downwards in the latest version and given knowledge aspiration a slightly greater chance of abduction (relative to the other aspirations). The chance of abduction with TJ's mod does slowly increase with the continuous viewing time so the best bet is to get start the sims stargazing as soon as it gets dark at 7pm.

If I'm going to cheat, I'll just use the cheat on the telescope - with Pescado's fix of course.

Re-reading the thread I see we have a new contender for myths and legends.... 


I can't imagine that it's going to increase the chances for the sim you're trying to get abducted.  Maybe whoever put that forward is just thinking that odds are additive... so if you have 200 sims stargazing at once one of them will probably get abducted?   I so hate stats.. 

I don't consider TJ's higher odds mod cheating, I consider it the correction of yet another EAxis flub. My neighborhood was very unusual in the "normal" sense. I had many mythical creatures, and a lot unusual CC skin-tones. I don't use the mod to fulfill my knowledge sims wants to earn asp. points, I use to get the alien DNA into my game.

Considering the relative ease in getting plant-sims, vampyre-sims, and zombie-sims, I am all for alien equal rights. I don't know about werewolfs, but it seems there are potions for that sort of thing everywhere, and I remember seeing it in the lot-debugger menu as well. Robots you can simply build with a high skilled sim. Plus, none of the aforementioned spread any DNA around. Zombies and androids can't breed, and the vamp babies are normal babies.

I'm not sure about the plant-sims, but I'm assuming that since you can cure a sim from that, DNA spreading is also out of the question.

I've read about the zombie apocalypse and it sounds very interesting. I might just build a separate hood, just to try it our. With the Paladin weapon, it could be a very entertaining game. Thanks for the link, Kutto. The odds will have to be a little more on the even side, I wouldn't want the zombies to be the odds-on favorites automatically. Can zombieism be cured in the game by any non-mod means, by the way?

I don't know about the higher odds/per more sims. Very few of mine were rich enough to afford the expensive telescope, let alone several expensive telescopes. With seasons, it is also now harder to continually star-gaze. In the summer they overheat, and in the winter they soon freeze their pixel-butts off, and have to stop gazing.

Fall seems to be knowledge season, so who knows, maybe the odds are higher for abduction in that season anyways. I have to try that out and see.

I've had plenty of green babies, and I don't use any kind of mod.  They have all been bad cases of Murphy's law.  One facehugger was spawned on a poor romance sim just home from college, living in a shack and earning peanuts as a drive-thru clerk.

Both of my abductions (I've only had two  :'() were romance sims. Mwa ha ha.

And eevilcat. Thank you thank you for the link to the equal alien pregnancy hack. I've been wanting that desperately!

The only way this works is that then you have more than one sim stargazing and they each have their own set of odds, so even if one doesn't trigger an abduction, one of the others has the same odds of doing so and might be "successful".  This would be more true if you have twojeff's hack in that increases the odds as stargazing continues.  However, more sims stargazing do not increase the odds for any individual sim, as far as I know.

As soon as a sim is abducted the others do that OMG witness abduction thing and so reset their own abduction odds (assuming you're using TJ's mod).

lol, I love that reaction.  When the sim is abducted, they stand around with the "worry" expression and sometimes they cry and just generally look stricken.  Then when the UFO comes back and dumps the abductee on the pavement, if they have any knowledge leanings at all, they run outside and do the "OMG this is so fucking cool!!!!11" thing, cheering and punching their fists in the air, while their friend, spouse, and/or father is crawling around trying to decide whether he still has all his teeth.  Now he's back, no cause for concern anymore.   :D

Next day, everyone wants to be abducted, or more on the sinister side, wants to have someone else abducted (I must confess that I too have wished for this - has not happened so far.  No TJ mod for real life.).

I hate the random fears that a family member will get abducted. Theodor Heuss's purpose in life is to be abducted. Yet a couple of his nieces and nephews took hits when he finally was. They don't even live in the same house.

Speaking of telescopes, what about the shoving and such. It seems to me that it's always the same sims that come over and push my simmie around. Is it predetermined by the game who is the slapper/shover? It's rather silly that a person would know that they are being watched from any kind of distance, but there you have it. EAxis says so, that makes it true.

I also heard that NPC's/non-controlled playables shove kids and teens around if they are the ones 'looking through' the telescopes in the daytime. Is that true? I've never seen that, but I have a hard time believing that adults would shove/slap a neighbors kid around. If anyone would that to my kids, they'd be oh so very sorry.


ETA
Theodor Heuss? I like your style, Zazazu.

That's his birth house. Does yours look similar?

(http://i33.photobucket.com/albums/d68/veilchen739/HeussHaus.jpg)

Kids can't be shoved and can telescope all they want, no one notices. Teens can be both shovers and shovees.

He's named after Theodor Heuss Bridge in Dusseldorf. Looks like it's the same person, though for a different reason (yes, I'm half German, but I know almost nothing about the country). The Ridge family direct descendants of founder/heir are all named after bridges of the world. Of course, this would have made more sense had I named them the Bridges instead of the Ridges, but there you are.  The house the sim was born in is a colonial. He's currently living in a small cabin in the woods with a dog and his niece Galata, expecting some alien spawn.

I thought the default shover was the "p/matriarch" of the hood.  The first created sim maybe?  That's why it's Mortimer Goth  in Pleasantview & Consort Capp in Veronaville, or so I thought.   In my TSR challenge hood it's Sonny Day who was the first sim I put in there.

If the matriarch/patriarch of the hood is the shover, then Loki and Circe Beaker(I could be wrong with the last name), the scientist couple who experiment on Nervous Subject, must be the leading citizens of Strangetown. Because that is the one hood where I actually played long enough to have my simmie look through the telescope and had Circe come over and practice hostility on my pixel person.

Yea, it's the 'oldest' playable sim in the hood based on their character file number.  In Pleasantview, after Mortimer Goth dies John Burb becomes the shover. And so on down the line.

Thanks Joe, that makes sense. I thought it would be one of the sims with the least nice points that was selected by the game.

Hmm, it makes me wonder how that works in a new hood then. If you still have the assorted families in the sim-bin and the houses. Do they already have character-files associated with them, or do they get one once you put them in game? The sim-bin sims must already have one, because they are used for walk-by sims. Or is it the first CAS sim that gets the honor?

Gah. I wish I could look. Where the hell is that computer? Come on Fed-Ex, get the lead out!

In my custom neighborhood it is the first sim I created there.  I wish that I had known about this effect way back then, because I later created a sort of 'neighborhood bully' character whom I wanted to be be the one.  But alas, no.  Even emptying out all 'nice' and 'playful' points was not enough to make it happen.

In a new hood, it's the first playable created (lowest character file #), even if they're still in the sim bin, or just plopped in a lot and never played again.

Or spawned as a townie and then moved in and made playable. For a while after my first playable died, it was Colby, who had married Daisy. Once Blaine married Meredith, she took over as shover even though Colby is still around.

I usually start a new neigbourhood with each new EP, and I always plan my telescope shover.  Ever since pets, I've used a crazy cat lady sim for the job:
(http://userpic.livejournal.com/56597453/2128731)

Here's something I always wanted to know (actually since Sims 1):

Does the zodiac sign have any influence on the personality or behaviour of a sim? Of course if I create a sim in CAS the sign will change with the distribution of the personality points, but if I change it with Insim for example, would it make any difference apart from that sim suddenly being more (or less) attractive to certain other sims?

Does it matter - for the behaviour of a sim - how I distribute the personality points? I could never free myself of the suspicion that there are only three categories - low, medium, high - and that the range from 1 - 10 is deluding the players, so that they believe they have more choice.

Lawdy, Gwill. That sim looks meaner than Crumplebottom. The perfect shover.

I don't know about the zodiac signs. Those seem to do a little (emphasis on little) something in the attraction arena. Other than that, I could never see a discernible difference in either interest points or personality points, save for the cut-offs. Like 4 ticks in interest stops the sim from doing the 'finger in the ear' or related stuff.

Sims with 4 ticks in nice, neat, and playful also show a visible difference, but active needs more than 4 to make the sim run. I haven't had the chance to see for myself yet, and it will be a while before I can.

Isn't there something in Peasantry that breaks down how attraction works and how much certain things influence attraction?

I remember someone was working on it the right before I took my hiatus. I can't remember if it ever got done...

Same here, Jelendra.

I haven't looked, but then again, I had no reason as of yet. I can't even play right now, I'm still trying to get everything installed.

I rarely ever let my sims find mates naturally. I always make couples. Then I get to match their signs and turn ons myself. Then it doesn't matter if they think Sports are boring because they have three bolts for each other.

I like having a couple now and again who are hot for each other but can't carry on a conversation. Or those who have neutral chemistry but whose interests are completely in line.

Zodiac sign alone has no effect on personality or behavior in any edition of the game, but personality defines the zodiac sign in CAS and if you use the debug-drag. Zodiac sign independently of other factors has an influence on attraction after NL's attraction system. Pre-NL, it is meaningless.

To some degree. Personality has an influence on the motive decays along a continuum: Active sims lose energy more slowly, Serious sims lose fun more slowly, Shysims lose Social more slowly, etc. Some objects are slightly more attractive to sims of certain personality classes, although this generally means the action goes from "Obsessive-compulsive" to "REALLY obsessive-compulsive". There are also, however, quantized points, where either you have it, or you don't. For instance, the ability to Always Run appears at Active > 500. Therefore, below 501, you have a lazy sim who takes forever to get anywhere, at 501+, you can GO GO GO, which makes a MASSIVE difference. In CAS, since you can only control at 100-point increments, this ability will appear at 6 bars. Other points include the 301 "Book Point" for Neat: At 301+, a sim will return a book to the shelf, at 300 and below, they will refuse to do so, and will obsessively and perversely attempt to dump it on a coffee or end table, even if it means a longer trip!

J.M.  - any chance you might be willing to make a thread in The War Room with the personality info?

Maybe. There's not all that much to it, though, I only keep track of a few nuisance points. The basic underlying point is that more personality isn't necessarily better, just more neurotic.

There's plenty of unanswered questions about aliens in this thread that need pulling together and de-bunking if you're interested in necromancy on Myths and Legends.  Nobody has said "yes" or "no" about whether stop-starting telescope gazing increases abduction chances. 

Totally off-topic, but someone asked me yesterday why the policeman always came and broke up parties because they were too noisy.  I know that's a feature of late parties, but does noise have anything to do with it at all?

I was under the impression that the cops would only come if you had music outside. I have to look into that once I can play again.

According to TJ's abduction rtfm - if I understood it right, the stopping action resets his mod to the beginning again. The odds get better, the longer a sim looks through, but re-start from the top once the sim stop-starts. I don't know if that applies to non-modded telescope behavior though. I have to re-read TJ's rtfm again, maybe he meant that this goes for all telescope usage.
 

Yup.  In my game, the cops show up if the stereo is on and is either outside or there is a speaker outside.  Considering that the speaker is borked and sends out animated notes signals even when the stereo is off, the cops come to all parties.  Gotta get rid of that damned speaker.  I used to just delete the police car, which allowed me the amusement of watching the police woman (who inexplicably had a mohawk hairdo) walk home.

As Veilchen says, with TJ's mod installed, if your sim wants to be abducted, there is no point in stopping and restarting stargazing 'cos odds reset to low.  Not sure what happens in an unmodded game.  For me, there would be no abductions at all, with my luck.

In my game the cops come if there is a stereo on anywhere in the lot. Inside or outside.

The bastards!

Sims are lucky not to get tazed!

Would you LIKE this to happen? I COULD make the cops show up and start tazing people.

Hey, I'm all for making the sims more realistic.  :P

HELL YES!

Would you? :D

Yes, yes I do.  The electrocution animation would work fine for a tazed sim.  Also could this be made as a random event like the burglar except with slightly more regularity.  Also can I request that the cops laugh whilst tazing?

I am so warm and fuzzy that my comment is causing such wonderful creative juice for the community.  ;)

Plus, any sim on lot who dislikes the sim being tazed should get a relationship gain to the cop. This'd be lovely.

That's just the tazing.

Seat me squarely in the pro-tazing camp. That would be a gleefully welcome addition to my game :)

Yeah, who puts stereos outside? You get the cops called on you if you party into the early morning with a stero going. Because stereos are loud.

We had speakers outside at the house I grew up in. It was on a pretty big plot, and our closest neighbors were always invited to our parties. Also, the only music my father tended to play really loud was Vivaldi.

Frat and sorority houses at MSU also regularly had stereos outside when I went there. They also regularly got the cops called on them, but they never learned. Tazering would have helped.

Floormates of mine my freshman year were blasting their stereo in the middle of the day and got the cops (the real ones, not campus security) called on them. Turned out they were smoking copious amounts of pot as well. Having daddy on the Board of Directors doesn't help much when the CPD gets you for possession on campus.

 ;D

Knowledge sims should probably like it and roll wants to be tazed.

And of course tazing should make the sim hate the cop in the short term, but in the long term the relationship will shift to positive as they realise it was for their own good.  Like the relationship with a burglar.

My sims end up with the stereo outside because I usually play with small houses and there's no room inside for dancing.

 MSU... never learned.. Uh.. isn't that  redundant?

Regarding that old twins food thing; does anyone know what the source of that rumor was?  I swear it was something that came from a  game developer which was why it was given so much credence by the community long after experimentation proved it untrue.  I only have the base game and Uni but I thought I read that some food thing has been or is being added to one of the EPs.  Perhaps the company goon was referring to something that wasn't in the game yet at the point the rumor started?  In any case that one always bugged me because of the non-awesome stupidity it unleashed on the various Sims 2 message boards.

No, "fraternities", "sororities" and "never learned" is redundant. Kind of like "UM" and "snotty brat with no real campus".

They'd like it once, or they would want to see it happen to someone else, like they do with electrocution.

There was an interview back in the olden days where it was outright stated that a pregnant sim could find that eating "certain" foods increased chances of having twins, after which everyone started swearing it was cookies. No, spaghetti. No, some other damn thing. Then the pre-publicity for OFB announced definitively (backed up by the Prima game guide, so it *had* to be true  ::)) that eating cheesecake during pregnancy would cause Twins. All well and good, only EAxis forgot to activate the cheesecakey code when OFB shipped, so that part had to be included in a later patch. But finally, yes Virginia, there is a twin-inducing food.

I think it was due to the normal convolution of conversation lines that happens during chats. Someone asked "Is there any way to increase the odds of twins?" and then someone said something about bribing Maxis to get some feature included, and a Maxoid said "I like chocolate-chip cookies." So immediately the sheeple decided that eating cookies guaranteed twins and proceeded to test it. To no avail, since it was false.

Of course, then people sent their pregnant simchicks off to eat cookies (or whatever the theory-food of the week happened to be) in droves during every pregnancy, so when one of them happened to produce twins, people started to cite the one time in 587 tries that it just happened to coincide as "No, really, it works! I have proof!"

I remember trying to explain how statistics works (very basically) to people on the BBS back then. They didn't get it.

Well, yeah... That goes without saying.

I would probably have fainted if they did get it. What a mess that stupid 'twin' thing was at times. Sheesh.

Thanks for the heads up with the borked stereo. I thought it was more EAxis crap. The game audio seems terribly wonky.

So true. Tazing really is fun! I've developed a hefty resistance to it as a result.

Thanks a bunch for the image that just flashed into my head, featuring Pes, Mrs. Pes, and a cattle prod :P.