More Awesome Than You!

No, look, really, i can't play with TS3, it's ....
it's ....

so, i was wondering if anyone still planing with TS2

p.s.
don't blame me for my English take it as it is :P

The Pudding has that effect on many people, it seems. It just isn't quite mature as a game yet, unlike TS2. Maybe this expansion or one to come will give it that thing it needs.

I think to TS3... I feel ... betrayed :(

There's a fucking shift key on your keyboard for a reason jerkass!  Fucking use it!

But for the topic at hand, I have never, ever, ever, played Sims 3.  Never bought it, or arred it.  Don't want to, and never will.  The expansion packs are shit.  Everything about the game is shit.  It's just a gigantic, steaming pile of shit.

You can't say it's shit when you haven't even tried it. I tried it and did find it to be shit, but at least I gave it a go.

Sod off, JerseygirlZERO.  IIRC, Max carries the ESL trait, and is one of our only esteemed undead members.  You, on the other hand, have not passed the DO WE KNOW YOU?; DO WE LIKE YOU? bar, as yet (longtime lurker or not).  It is not your place to ramble on about shift keys.  In this context, your personal opinion of the pudding is irrelevant and uninteresting.  It is also not the topic at hand.  The topic at hand is "are we playing (spelling correction there, Max) with TS2?"

I would agree with Pescado that the pudding is not mature.  I still enjoy my TS2 game, primarily because there are a wide range of things sims can do in that game that are not available in TS3.  I was always fond of the supernaturals in TS2.  Additionally, I had not finished exploring all the possibilities that TS2 offered before TS3 came out, so there are things that my sims have not tried yet.  I am going to keep both TS2 and pudding loaded for some time to come.

I wonder what do you want from my shift key ? :P

.. said that, I wish to share this news, i'm working on a new land ^_^

(http://sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-snc3/hs639.snc3/32054_423815546467_783961467_5664068_7234307_n.jpg)

actually we have a graveyard on the left side, with a "creepy castle" on the top of the hill, while on
the right side , small and hidden by the tree, there is the hermit house (http://img352.imageshack.us/img352/984/dinamiteblaefiuto9um.jpg)...



yes, the title was a sort of that, a cryptic title to try to resurrect all ts2 player  ;)
maybe "someone still plays with TS2?" is correct ?

I have to say that I, too, have been drawn back into TS2. I think part of it is the lack of the attraction system in TS3. TS2 has more to do. Collecting is good in moderation, but it seems TS3 is heavily biased in that direction. The puddings are another turn off. They just look weird, especially after all the advances in skins and clothing in TS2.

I still play TS3 a bit, but I enjoy my TS2 game more.

Yep, still playing it several hours a day.  Haven't seen anything yet in the Puddings that is of any interest.  Ugly Sims, stupid chase around minigames, disappearing neighbors, and that's just what I can think of in my pre-caffinated state.

Sims 2 didn't take a fucking year to "mature".  I don't recall seeing "has anyone else dumped Sims 2" threads on every board I'm on after it came out, which I do for Sims 3.  Personally I suspect that Sims 3 was designed by juveniles who think that's the whole appeal of the game and it won't ever mature.

The leap from TS1 to TS2 was a lot greater than the leap from TS2 to TS3, which might explain some of the disappointment. TS2 brought completely new and revolutionary things like genetics and aging, which was a huge deal to a lot of people. Open world doesn't quite match that.

Funnily enough, TS3 made the genetics more crappy instead of better. That was a major drawback for me.

I'm still torn between the two games. One the one hand in TS2, as others have noted, you get genetics, but on the other in TS3 there's the whole neighbourhood ageing. I like realism in games and TS2 started to feel like work, when I had to go and play each lot in rotation to keep everyone the same age. Then again, some of the TS3 stuff irritates the crap out of me, especially the endless collecting. For building and designing I adore TS3, that design tool is the shizz. I keep looking for it when I'm building in TS2. Ideally I'd like a game that combined the best of both worlds.

@MaximilianPS: That's a lovely looking layout, a little cove in the hills with the river running through it. Just one comment though, the tall buildings at the top of the hill look a bit overwhelming and intimidating, not to mention unnatural. In real cities the densest building is generally in the middle. It might look odd to have a kind of seaside village with skyscrapers  looming over it. BTW your English is quite understandable - much better that my (German?) would be. (Not sure where you hail from, just guessing).

I like rotating the households; keeps each one exciting if you limit yourself to 1 - 2 seasons of time on each. I actually wish TS2 had some of the features from TS1. The butter churn, bee colony and spinning wheel were great fun! The collecting in TS3 bored me greatly after about a day. And, IMO, the design tool is overrated. It made creating a house incredibly tediously slow, although it is fun if you're in a particularly creative mood.

Nearly everything in TS3 is cheerful to the point of causing nausea, cowardly, insulting, tedious—except for the jogging—starting (with the aid of World Adventures) in Al Simhara at the mountain landing just above the Temple of Queen Hatshepsut, all the way down to the gorgeous water past the Ruins of Karnak…just delete the Fatigue Moodlet until your Sims become more accomplished and you're all set.
Yep. That's about the only thing that TS3 and WA are good for…jogging in a desert. Hmm…

Although I was rather disgusted with TS2's glitches a while back; I am a much more tolerant person now, so yes, I still play it.
I am also still playing TS1, which I have never been able to uninstall. There's just something about it. Probably the music that came with Makin' Magic, along with the mist-filled village and the glorious, moon-swept fields…and the strange noises that can be heard at night…the butter churn…the autumn foliage… I better quit there.

I like that the "French" music station in TS3 is the music from "Makin' Magic".

I think that they only used two or three from Makin' Magic, though.  They did include three new tracks...which I confess to finding not as additive or moving.

That's what is wrong with TS3: Lack of Effort.

Yes! The atmosphere in Makin' Magic was so eerie and actually felt a bit magical. TS2 and TS3 failed epically on that.

I concur.
If there was ever a time when I truly longed to fall through my computer screen, it had to be when I was playing Makin' Magic.
WA had such potential. But what does EA create? Three huge, redundant, memory-sucking neighborhoods that have no cultural appeal or lasting satisfaction. Yet a little town in Makin' Magic practically oozed sensation and character.
Quality, where are you now?

I still can't get past the doughy, boneless look of the TS3 Sims.  I don't have it and can't run it on my computer, but I have not experienced overwhelming sadness about not having it.

The thing I miss most from TS1 is the gnome-making bench (and the gargoyle-making bench, I suppose).  One of my favorite things to do was to make them make gnomes until they were in multiple motive failure, then let them eat, pee, and nap, then back out to more gnomes until they were in multiple motive failure, and after a couple of days, when you let them sleep, they'd have nightmares about making gnomes, and wake up with little "gnome" thought bubbles.

One of the few reasons I'd consider going back to Sims 1 is the Makin' Magic stuff.

But, yeah, lack of genetics is another big reason for avoiding the S3.  I like it when somebody's red hair pops up 3 generations down the line in an otherwise black-haired family.  That and the no personalities thing.  Quirks do not equate to personality.  All they seem to be is Stupid Sim trick generators.

Well, Mr. Jolrei beat me to the...well, beatings, but I did want to say that I am installing ALL of TS2 right NOW. I have never had all of them before. I have not played in 18+ months. This is like Christmas but without Uncle Fritz passing out in a ditch somewhere.

I completely forgot how bummed I was that there was no gnome-making bench in the Sims 2. I looked through every category in buy mode the first day I had the game.

My computer can't run 3 and I still play 2 as much as I ever did. I even have two uninstalled expansion packs around here somewhere.

Sims 2 sims didn't have "personalities" either. They had slider bars, but these bars basically had zero effect unless you were hitting a "breakpoint". For instance, absolutely nothing distinguishes, say, Outgoing 6 from Outgoing 7, as this has not hit a breakpoint. Switching to a trait based system is pretty much what I already did in Awesomeland: Added defineable behavioral quirks that would otherwise have occurred at specific breakpoints, or not at all. Like Miss Mean's drinking habits are not the result of any personality slider, they're a result of the Lush trait. The resulting behavior is distinctive and unlike that of other sims. You can't get this out of a "personality" slider bar that has maybe 3 distinct breakpoint zones.

Ok but this is 'cause the computer works on this way, you can set variables with numbers, so Sims have variables that define the traits, the only things that are different from TS2 to TS3, i suppose, it's the number of hidden variables, but EAxis FAILS on the game's logic (IMHO)

At the end i like TS2 because it's "faster", in the meaning that the sims react faster (also because the animations are faster), when things happen Sims react faster, and situations and reactions are more fun than TS3... if you get what i mean.

I think that there are alot of brains outhere, and the community can build some hacks to made TS2's sims more brilliant than TS3 once ;D

... without forgetting the sims2's simpahty respect to TS3 barbie 'n cicciobello (http://www.giocattoleria.it/wp-content/uploads/cicciobello-pappa-si-pappa-no.jpg) style

I tried TS3 for a bit, and I don't actually find it to be more fun or interesting than TS2.  Sure, realism and neighborhood-unification stuff in TS2 takes a lot of work, but I am used to micromanaging that by now, and it's not all the difficult.  I've gotten used to imposing my will on TS2 to get it to do what I want, and I've got all the tools (i.e. hacks) to do it, whereas TS3 still isn't what I want out of the box (though in a slightly different way) and there seem to be significantly fewer ways to modify it, particularly since there can only be one core mod and story-progression mod, rather than a lot of interchangeable parts as in TS2.  Maybe at some point there will be enough content and enough mods that do what I want and aren't being updated daily for me to want to switch, but that hasn't happened yet.

Also, my TS3 is so far behind on patches at this point that I don't even know how I'm ever going to get it up to date.

I'm waiting for TS4.

You're a glass half-full sort of a guy then?

I was lucky enough to have a friend which borrowed loaned me TS3 and it was a good thing because after a week playing it, I got tired of it.  I could not get attach to any of those Sims and felt more like I was watching a show then being part of it which is what I like about TS2.

I still play TS2 almost daily and even created new hoods recently.  There are still many things I have not tried yet so the fun factor is still there for me and I have all the hacks I need to make it a great and fun experience.

I doubt I will ever reinstall TS3 unless it would be the base game with only one EP addition that would make it totally different, which is doubtful.  Even with mods, it seems to be a pain to manage and hard to keep a hood for a long time without it exploding into pieces.  And the process to install mods is way more complicated then in TS2.

I like my game simple to handle and not scratching my head all the time so it works properly

ETA:  Corrected to avoid causing more tooth ache

Look, I'm not part of the grammar gestapo, but that makes my teeth ache.  A friend cannot borrow you anything, they can only loan you stuff.  Remember this or you may be hurt by an hysterical old lady with aching teeth and, trust me it won't be any fun.

Odd, I read that as "a friend which who borrowed TS3 for me", in which case "borrowed me TS3" would actually be correct - but since the post was edited, that obviously wasn't what was meant.

My tolerance level must be really high today.  So I'm going to make a confession.  I DID try TS3.  Once, a few months ago.  I arred it, used a no-CD crack (I didn't feel like using the so-called "Awesome Mod"), but it just turned out to be a complete waste of disk space.  I didn't like the plastic skin, the fact that I couldn't see in the "rabbitholes," and just didn't like the overall look.  So I uninstalled and deleted the whole file.  World Adventures and High-End Loft Stuff do not interest me at all.  And neither does Ambitions.  I just really don't understand the appeal.  I'm not a big PC gamer to begin with, so maybe it's just that.

I am playing TS3 these days, but for some reason I just can't get into building as much as I did with TS2. There's no logical reason for it that I can see. There aren't any missing tools that I want, I can't actually put my finger on anything from TS2 that would improve TS3's building, it just doesn't inspire me.

I suppose there's also the fact that TS3 houses don't really need much of anything. Beds, bathrooms, a kitchen. Done. Sims go off lot to skill and gain fun, and they could sleep, shower and eat off lot too. If uncontrolled households didn't need bed and kitchen facilities I likely wouldn't bother at all.

Since WA, I've taken to dumping sims in pre-made houses, slipping a basement under there whenever they needed more room, often with the stairs leading in from outside. Not exactly ideal construction.


As for TS1 vs TS2, there were definitely people who didn't immediately make the switch, we just didn't whinge about it on forums. I didn't get TS2 until NL was out, but I know I picked up TS1 before Livin' Large was released, those 10 little non-aging houses occupied me for hours. I thought it was amazing that Livin' Large added a whole nine other neighbourhoods of identical size and layout, one of them even partially occupied!

I play both of the games. I mostly play TS2 when I want to clown car, as TS2 handles it better. I really find myself missing certain aspects from TS3 while playing, though, like the open hood and the toddler books and the traits.

It seems that most of what people complain about with TS3 is how it's turned from a sandbox type game to a goal-oriented or quest game. Of course, you're not really forced to do any of those things, especially if you've already done it all once. I tend to have characters only complete the things that are fitting with their personalities. Like, I'm not gonna have a couch potato sim go be all athletic running all over the desert going through tombs. And the tee-totaling granny in my hood certainly won't be making or buying nectar during her trip to France!

I think that TS3 is better for story making, if you're into that sort of thing. I'd really love to combine the two games. I'd also like TS2 to not take 30 minutes to load when I want to play it. :P

ONE OF US, ONE OF US

Still love TS2. I had to reinstall after a crash and took extraordinary measures to save my old neighborhoods. There's stuff in TS2 I still haven't done. Like, I'm only now just getting into plantsims and werewolves.

As for TS3, I hadn't played for months until I installed Ambitions. I'm trying to get into it, but I can tell I'll be bored of it soon enough.

What's more, I can't bring myself to care about my sims. I've reinstalled TS3 often and nuke neighborhoods all the time, without shedding a single tear. In TS2, I have an elaborate family tree going on strong since 2006 or so.

It's a brain washing thing.  I spent several years at a University that was bound and determined to make me into a High School English teacher despite my repeatedly explaining that my High School experiences had engendered a positive hatred for teenagers.  I escaped with a degree in pre-unemployment, but the training still kicks in every so often. 

I'm in therapy for it.

I have stayed with 2 for a bunch of reasons mostly boiling down to: I've invested all the money I can afford to and all the time I care to in the game I have: I like what I have: I'm still exploring what I have: and what I hear of the gameplay in 3 just doesn't sound like what I want to do.

But honestly -- I don't mind the Sims in Sims 3.  I wish they didn't all look so similar -- and do they have to?  It seems to me that a lot of people make the same Sims 2 Sims over and over also, but not as much -- but the way they look seems sort of attractive enough to me.  I'd like to have all those sliders.  I'd see what kind of Sims I could make. I'd like to give them some angles and a bonier look, but I like that the Sims 3 Sims have wider faces.  I might actually be able to make a Sim 3 Sim that looks anything like me.

The sims don't have to all look the same, no. I've had a variety in my game, some deliberately odd, because I missed the aliens at first. I have pictures of a few up over on photobucket: http://s131.photobucket.com/albums/p282/Lady_Faizah/TS3 (should be public) - I particularly like the triplets I had once in one game, as an example of diverse facial features, if nothing else. (Okay, the evil one amused me, but any evil-trait sim would amuse me.)

I still do miss my deliberately odd-looking TS2 sims, though. I know I can make freaky TS3 sims, but it's just not the same. I miss the noses the most, which is a weird thing to miss, but there it is.

Come to think of it, I don't even know why I play TS3. Things no longer failing to match (for the most part) is good? The traits, I like those. The age length slider was nice for a while, but I've been playing on default for ages. Tombs in WA are interesting the first time around? Okay, no, I can't come up with a good reason.

I suppose I'm half waiting for the next OFB: The expansion that seems utterly dull, but then turns out to be just what I never knew I wanted. WA had the first one down (another Vacations - I never liked the first two) but it did not deliver on the rest. In the meantime, at least everything matches. And sims can be evil.

I'm still playing Sims 2.  There's more to do and I had plans for all those Sims...  I'd say I know them all personnally if it wasn't so sad!  I'm working my way round the hood trying to get them all to the end of winter and making plans about what to do next.  I haven't got Sims 1 on this PC, but I've been thinking about installing it.  I've also bought more old games which shows I'm bored! (Guild 1, Emperor; rise of the middle Kingdom, Heroes of M&MV complete)

I am also playing Sims 3 - it's boring and frustrating, but not so bad with WA and Riverview added.  I was blown away by the look of WA even though the thought of tomb raiding Sims made me cringe.  There's a long list of things I don't like about it, but it's boring because I really don't care about any of the sims that came with the game or that I've created.  I guess it's the look of the sims and the houses and the fact their wants seem to flow in very narrow channels.  Do they ever through autonomous romance wants?  I like the fact you can move seamlessly around the 'hood, but hate the storymode idea.  I also hate the way the lack of elixir and permaplat status forces you to keep jumping through the same hoops.  Maybe it's the way I play. I'm looking around for other hoods to play and found a couple here which I'll install when I find a crack for the latest WA patch 2.7.7.  My usual place doesn't have one yet. 

Elixir exists, it's called Ambrosia and is a product of the fishing and gardening skills, although it's also an exportable product. There's no "permaplat" in TS3 because TS3 doesn't operate based on aspiration levels and sims aren't constantly having wild mood swings because mood is no longer directly tied to micro-motive state.

Don't need a crack for TS3, that just adds unnecessary complication. Various NoCD packages already exist.

To get Ambrosia some sim in every household you play has to get seriously into fishing and gardening.  I find both of those very time consuming and repetitive.  And anyway I don't want every household to be gardeners and fishermen!  They're all too alike anyway.  OK maybe Elixir made eternal life too easy, but Ambrosia is too far in the other direction.

I find my sims have bigger mood swings than in TS2.  I find it harder to keep them happy.  You have to chase after moodlets as well as managing needs and satisfying wishes.  When you've been playing a sim for a very long time, it is nice to be able to do what you want to do without micro-managing.  OK, permaplat was too easy to get, but this is too far the other way.

Oops - I meant a noCD package. I'm wary of picking one up from a site I don't know.  I can wait - there's nothing I'm burning to do in Sims 3.


BTW - the sim I had most fun creating was a Nigerian hacker....  I stuck him on an empty lot and gave him the lots of money wish.  I tweaked the traits a few times; I think the last version was an evil, mean spirited family man as well as a computer whiz.

PS I haven't forgotten I promised you a contribution to the Community - just haven't done it yet.

There is a NoCD as part of AwesomeMod (or at least there was the last time I downloaded it, which, granted, was back in the stone age of the Horror).

Yeah - I confess, I'm not using the awesomemod.

Rufio- I went looking for an update of Simsheet.  The last post on the thread is December saying there's a new version, but the file link in the first post is for version 5 dated June.  Is that the latest?

Hey, since this thread is open, and I mentioned earlier I am hella rusty, can anyone please tell me what the best tack to take with patching is? I got almost the whole shebang from Pirate Bay (most EPs and SPs) and I started playing and realized I probably need patches? Or should these versions be patched already? If so it looks like I have bigger problems, because I have the "sims cannot go to work" issue (action drops out of queue). I may need to reinstall, I dunno.

I got this one: http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/5524635/The_Sims_2__The_Complete_Collection_%5BFULL%5D___Games4theworld__

Thanks. I haven't done anything with TS2 for 18 months so it's fuzzy.

The one that's there is the latest (the exe is actually dated in February...), though I notice that all my snapdrive images are gone again.  I've been meaning to fix some bugs that I've found since then, but I got distracted by another project.  I'm at a lull right now, though, so I'll probably go back to it soon.

ETA: Assmitten, IIRC you need to patch every single EP.  Supposedly it's better to have the original exe (and not the crack) in the relevant place when you do so, but I overwrote the original exe with the crack and I didn't have any trouble.

Thanks mang. I will give this a try. I was running off the FT crack, but left the original one in place and renamed it.

I'm glad I'm not the only one who thinks so.

I've given TS3 several tries (I'm halfheartedly poking around in it again nowadays, but it still fails to capture my attention) but I just can't seem to get into it. TS2 however is something I always come back to. I tend to play in cycles, with frenzied playing being followed by months where I don't touch the game at all and do other stuff, but that's more to do with my attentionspan than the game. Considering how much I still play TS2, it's actually been a better investment than most games I buy, which get played through once or twice and then thrown into a box somewhere.

there is another important things in which TS3 FAIL... the voices !
the sounds are important, because they interact with the player in a subliminal way, you can love or hate a character, just 'cause you like how his voice sound, and TS3 fail in this too  >:(

I tried TS3 for about a week when it was first leaked, but it didn't immediately grab my interest like TS1 and TS2 did. I'm sticking with TS2 for the time being, possibly for good. :) I started my current neighbourhood in 2005 and it's still a huge work in progress. I play extremely slowly and like Lum, still have a ton of things I haven't tried.

I had thought I'd love the design tool on TS3, but it turned out to be extremely frustrating. I like building my own houses, but I guess part of the fun for me is matching up weird, useless Maxis wallpapers and floors with even weirder, useless Maxis furniture. TS3 has too much choice!

Also, while TS2 only has two bodytypes and four hair colours, I think TS3 sims still look more alike than TS2 sims. *shrug*

Hardly. There are ways to mass-produce goods and distribute them about that AwesomeMod has made painless and easy. Once you have ONE group of sims capable of doing it, you pretty much have an unlimited supply.

QFT. The design tool makes it too hard to make a room look like a real room. In real life, if you design a red themed room, not every single piece of furniture is going to be the exact same shade of red. You have to go with what's available from the shops. Of course you can mix it up a little in TS3 too, but that requires a lot more work. It's a lot easier to just reuse the same colour, like what was advertised before TS3 came out (camo EVERYTHING!!! (http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y161/Uziwa/sims_3_grab_15.jpg)). So, yeah, the design tool is just too much for me. I like to decorate but I can't be bothered spending an hour on a single room trying to make the colours appear random and realistic. With TS2, I just grab some furniture in a slightly matching colour and plop it down.

I also played TS3 for only a week or so before going back to my precious.

Haven't kept up with any of the developments or EP news or anything. Are the genetics still subpar? Do the kids still inherit one parent's face or the other? If that's the case, I'll never switch over.

I wish more folks were around for TS2 chit-chat. I always loved lurking The Podium, and Planet K 20X6, and whatnot during TS2's heyday.

Actually, the way the design tool works, not everything is going to be the same shade even if you use the same base swatch, because what happens is that the thing you choose is overlaid onto a graymap that provides the shading and texturing. A darker graymap thus produces a slightly darker shade of the final outcome.

TS3 doesn't interest me at all.  Still love TS2.  Still finding new things to do with TS2.

Hair genetics are just about non-existent, but I have had triplets with three distinct faces, so, there's that. I mentioned them on page 2, but here, have a screenshot:

(http://i131.photobucket.com/albums/p282/Lady_Faizah/TS3/Trilpets-2.jpg)
(Middle one resembles CAS-made father a bit, at least with that mouth.)

More images: http://s131.photobucket.com/albums/p282/Lady_Faizah/TS3/

I do still love TS2 and there are things I miss about it.  I especially miss the genetics.  They really need to get that down better for a game like this and the sims in TS3 tend to look VERY similar until they reach young adulthood.  I hate that. I used to live for my sims in TS2 to reach the teen years to see how they turned out because they were all so different from each other.  Plus, the teens were PRETTIER in TS2 - both female and male. In TS3, they all have that exact same look.  And forget about the children in TS3 - you can rarely see a difference between male and female at all. 

However, while I still have all my TS2 and still have tons of stuff I haven't even tried yet in that game, I haven't played it in ages.  2 big reasons being I don't have a No CD crack/patch for Sims2(WCIF a good one that covers everything?) and the game takes 30 minutes to load.

I love - absolutely love - the design tool in TS3 and that is still the most amazing thing about it to me.  While I agree that houses can be tedious to make, what I like to do is: Make the house - furnish quickly - get playing - and then, as time goes by, change room by room as I get inspired.  I don't advise completely creating a house right away - it's just too tedious.  But soooo much more fun when you do it as you go.

The traits also far outweigh the "personalities" of the sims in TS2, but they lack in their animations and abilities.  They should be more fleshed out.  I want my sim snobs to walk around with more snobbery and refuse friendships with poor sims.  I want my couch potatoes to NEVER exercise, no matter what we tell them, and evil...don't get me started. Ambitions is helping that a bit, but the profession "desires" are getting rather old, rather quickly.

Genetics exist much as they did in TS2, as far as facial features are concerned. Hair genetics have basically disappeared because the game has no record of "original" haircolor, and eyecolors have basically become random flip, since with the ability to pick totally arbitrary stuff, there is no longer a clear dominant/recessive/genetic system. However, let's face it: Haircolor is something you can change on a sim at whim, and absolutely no evidence remains of the original, as opposed to in real life, where it is VERY OBVIOUS when someone is a fake, and it looks terrible.

That is because kids in real life tend to look very similar: Like little annoying maggits.

There's a reason for this: "Vanilla Pudding Syndrome". If you're breeding your sims with random townies, you're getting Vanilla Pudding in your genepool.

There *IS* no difference between male and female in TS2 *OR* TS3. Both sims share the same bodies, and they are only distinguishable by hairstyle and mode of dress. If you don't make that distinctive, they are completely indistinguishable in both games!

I think for me, TS3 needs Aspirations. I liked how in TS2 there was that bar to the left that determined if your Sim was a loser or not. In TS3 the closest thing to it is the Ambitious trait "Anxious to Advance" moodlet. Which does not invoke Aspiration failure and mental breakdowns, so meh.

As always, I'm overjoyed to be responded to by you, Sir.

And the thing is, you're right, of course!

After I posted this and played again, I gave a second look to the teens in one of my games and they're not as bad as I thought.  I rarely breed with townies and all my sims tend to be good looking - and I recall having some nightmare-get them in surgery now!-sims in TS2 that drove me mad.  I haven't had any like that in TS3 so far.  I find that in-game sims in TS3 look much better than they do in CAS.

With genetics, I crave features skipping generations - which does not appear to occur whatsoever in TS3.  It's Mom or Dad only.  The random eye-color flip drives me mad. The hair doesn't bother me much as, like you say, can be altered at any time.

You also have a great point about the kids in TS2 and after looking around today - everywhere in RL too! It's kind of creepy, now that I've noticed it more how much kids around 7 to 10 years old look like any other kid, M or F! Only notable racial differences seem to make any large effect in facial features.

So now I'm back to just missing weather, mostly.  *edit* And the occasional puppy.

Actually, color features do get derived from grandparents as well, with lower frequency, to simulate this behavior, so this isn't true either. Facial blends are mom/dad only...just like TS2.

See? Little maggots, all about the same.

Weather is prototyped in TS3 already, so it's coming.

The one thing to note is that TS3 has A LOT LESS PEE than TS2 did. They really did finally move away from peeing. In TS2, every expansion with the possible exception of FT gave us new ways for sims to pee themselves. In TS3, there are only two additional ways to pee, both fairly esoteric, and none of them are really special.

Mh, it seems TS3 is slightly more 'serious' in more ways than just pee. A lot less wacky antics and general hullabaloo. I quite like this in TS2.

And TS2 has a lot less wackiness than TS1. It seems they're trying to make it more serious each time.

that is the reason why i prefear TS2 respect to TS3, also TS2 looks more like an AI Experiment respect to TS3 that looks much more like a game that need to be followed step by step, while TS2 can play alone (more or less)

That's a good thing to you? Sounds like A LOT LESS FUN to me :P
I haven't tried the puddings s3. I still have a lot of playstyles and stuff (creatures especially) to try in s2 . It'll be a big "Phew! Finally!" day when I finally have all the sps and eps, when I can finally just get to playing instead of waiting to see how some ep will affect the way I build/furnish/CAS/CAN.

So yeah, I'm still playing s2. And I'm pretty happy so many talented creators are still sharing new stuff :)

edited for typo

yes, when I play it is ts2.  I never bought ts3 and don't ever plan on it.   I still have fun with ts2 and my goofy little people but actually ts1 was my all time favorite. My sims in ts1 were partying fools.  24/7.     ;D

I have both, though only play TS2 regularly. I'm finally, finally, finally invested in it and the neighbourhood! Which took me long enough, really.

Now, I also do miss a few features TS3 has when I play TS2, but I seem to tire of TS3 so much quicker and it didn't manage so far to make me care about it/its sims.



Exactly. On both accounts.

Actually, it's far easier to mod TS3 than TS2. To do some of the stuff I've done in the Pudding so far is basically impossible, like making the buy/build dialogs show USEFUL information instead of utter twaddle.

I played Sims 3 for a couple of months and then gave up.  I could not make the sims I wanted to make in the Sims 3 Cas.  I like to make sims of my relatives and friends, and populate the neighborhoods with them.  I can do that with Sims 2, or at least make sims that remind me of them.  In Sims 3, the only way I can make sims look like someone is if the model already looks like a Sims 3 pudding.  I also find it boring to play sims that all look like first cousins, at the very least.  Combine that with the inferior genetics, and Sims 3 is not interesting to me.  Too bad, there are things in Sims 3 I like a lot, but they do not make up for inferior sims.

For me it's the record keeping: you just can't keep records of sims lives in TS3 like you can in TS2.  I am a very heavy user of the camera/story-telling facility of TS2.  That, and the lack of memories, it's just a pointless game to me with little meaning.  I also like genetics and very inter-related neighbourhoods so that's another turn off for TS3 for me.  I do like the design aspects and the open neighbourhood though I have not bothered with AM or anything else that would seek to control who gets wiped out when you don't want them to, mainly because I've only played the game twice since I played it in June last year to see what it was like.  I get BORED with it very quickly.

In Sims 3, there is supposedly more opportunity for storyline,, but what's the use of storyline if it isn't recorded?  I hate them not having memories, and I do understand that memeories were the major cause of corruption in Sims 2--but I still miss them.  I use to check them and laugh at what they have done while I was away.  Sims 3 is okay as long as it's heavily hacked, but so is Sims2.  I want to go back to Sims 2, but I have a bug that is effecting vacations and it's been too long to figure how to fix it.  I have Deluxe now and I can't get the hack utility program to work with it.  Maybe I'll just live with it and stop taking them on vacation.

The capability exists to hack in a memory system, if you REALLY want it. Just don't blame me if it chews up your game memory. Feel free start a specific thread to bitch about what you'd like added to the memory system. The question, of course, becomes: What events are worthy of record that are not immediately evident anyway? Do you really need a record of every time Brynne pisses herself?

Perhaps not, but I'd be up for a record of every single fight.

Oh, better than that. It's actually a prototype item in the Pudding that records fights to FAR greater detail than the Sims ever did, short of Rhaydenstats. In AwesomeMod's Undiscovered Shinies, there is a FIGHT TRACKER....which will track each and every fight your sim gets into, recording win/loss ratios vs. individual opponents, numbers of enemies defeated, and even some skill challenges for FIGHTING. There is even an "I Wanna Be The Guy" minigame.

Sounds like you could hold sweepstakes.  Well, I admit it sounds fun.  If you can also add a tracker of the number of times they get drunk and hit on their boss's wife, I'm in.

Well, there aren't any actual drunkenness effects, unless you want to use some crappily written mod by someone else, but it's certainly possible to add a Romance Skill with tracking stats.

Like many here, I never saw a good reason to downgrade to pudding. Why have pudding when you can have pie, specially prepared just for you with mods, cc, and hacks?

I don't know why Pescado is pudding-pushing so much, because even despite the ululations that Sims 3 has everything Sims 2 had and moar! (well, at least minus drunkenness effects and actual dominant/recessive genetics), it's just not a mature pudding. It might be someday. Heck, I didn't switch from Sims 1 to Sims 2 until Seasons had just come out.

I think the traits and moodlets are too transparent and take a lot of the "surprise" out of the game. With Sims 2, knowing how the code works might allay some of the surprise, but I still am encountering issues that I've never encountered before in Sims 2 that I've never had need to know how worked. Even if you know how the code works, such as with personality points, you can get surprised just because you might not have that in the forefront of your mind while immersed in play.

For instance, for the first time, I had a child catch his father cheating the other day and he just started sobbing uncontrollably. I didn't know that this was in the game code. I couldn't get it to happen again. He was also my first runaway teen. That may be 2006 to some people, but  I was completely surprised and amused by it. I'm a slow player like so many here, and I don't get a lot of chances to sink hours into playing anymore, so perhaps that's part of it.

The Sims 2 community is still alive, but mostly it's over as GOS now. And it's, in many ways, better than ever.

I'm happy with the sims2. And I haven't seen any talk of pudding that makes me want to buy or arr it.

After nearly daily reading of the official forum for the game for the past year, I'm determined to never buy or install the sims 3, mostly because EAxis is determined to ruin: 1). your computer 2.) your game 3.) your mind.

How many times does one have to reinstall the game to get a patch to work? How many times do you have to rebuild the game from the start when you crash it? How much time do you have in your life? How much software do you have to fix when you install it? How much do you have to buy to get the game to work properly? In fact, do you have a limitless bank account for EA to just grab?

That's just the start of the problems I' ve seen. I won't even mention that I don't like how the puddings look, what limited interactions they have, the rabbit holes, or the intolerance of CC from the game. We won't mention the fact that EA would like you to hand over the control of your computer to them for their "phone home" opt-in.

Plus the fact that EA is not improving their customer relations, their technical support or support, period. I know that only a small fraction of players are on the forum, but if they're any indication of what's going on with the silent majority, fuggedaboutit. I don't want a half-made, poorly written, badly coded piece of overpriced shit near my computer.

In other words, I'm staying with Sims 2. Still discovering some things I haven't done-and it doesn't crash at all!

You know, I've never had any of these problems, and I'm the one who does the craziest crap to it. The people who can't install the patches correctly are just idiots.

Buy? Huh?

Mary, most of the reinstall issues actually dissapeared with the last patch. Now that you can put your Mods in your My Documents folder, patching is relatively simple. Plus, EA figured out that there was an issue with the Download Manager (surprise, surprise) and once you update the EADM, the game patches in the right order and there's no need to reinstall.

As to the question of the look and feel of the game though, that's purely personal choice. Personally I really like Sims 3 and the couple of times I've fired up Sims 2, I haven't played it for all that long. The load screens between houses annoy me now I'm used to Sims 3.