Simply because I love the conspiracy theories (and my tinfoil hat has been abducted ... I suspect pirates!) I am going to throw a comment made by my fiancée out there upon reading the last few posts.

"I find it funny that giantbomb hasn't reviewed the game yet. Wait, no I don't, they are the guys who got fired and quit from gamespot for not giving an EA game the review that was paid for. EA doesn't want them anywhere near a review of their latest bug ridden POS."

Going to the hospital with the mother happens automatically unless you cancel it. As for shopping, I am not sure though I recall seeing "go with ..." on some of the buildings.

That and why all driveways, even in the garage have a speedbump at the end of them ... a speedbump was the best they could come up with?

Also amoung my wondering is why others seem to get the lifespan slider to work globally yet it wasn't for me. So I went back in and tested a couple of the mentioned scenarios where the slider is/is not global.

After several test families and much abuse of the Goth family I have changed my thinking on the lifespan slider from "it is household specific" to "It's just broken"

Scenario 1:

Brand new hood with lifespan slider set to "normal" and story progression on. Loaded the Bachelor family to check on Bella's age. Loaded the Goth family checked that Mortimer and Bella did appear to be exactly the same age in all levels of the lifespan slider. Set lifespan slider to "epic" and the speed to fast forward and left them to their own devices for a week (Bella was 7 days from teen on "normal" life span).

I have to say I was impressed with how well they will look after themselves. You almost can ignore them and they won't die ... almost. Not so happy with the ghosts. The ghost are like annoying uninvited guests that take naps in your bed, strike up conversations (and sometimes dances) with your sims and pull a very real, completely not ghost like at all, laptop out of no where and take up your kitchen table in the middle of dinner. I would have preferred they be more .. ghosty?

At the end of the week, I confirmed that Mortimer had aged 7 days on "epic" life span and was now 60 days from teen.

I switched back over to the Bachelor family to see if Bella had aged to teen as I had expected her to. She hadn't, she was still a child, however, she had only aged 3 days according to all of the life span settings on the slider. 7 days for Mort, was only 3 for Bella. Very odd.

Scenario 2:

Two couples, both married, one the Test family the other the Subject family (not very original I know). Move the Tests in, immediately try for baby successfully. Switch to Subject family, move in, try for baby, also successful on the first try.

Switch back the the Test family (who acquired a guitar in the short time I was gone!), set the lifespan slider to epic and play through birth of child (see video in my previous post) 3 sim hours later a Test is present for the birth of the Subject baby (also in videos). From this point on the Subjects were ignored for the next three sim days. I checked back in on the Subject family after 3 days and their child, 3 sim hours younger than the Test child is already a toddler.

Obviously the lifespan slider does not work intuitively as you would expect. If it is working I can't even begin to guess as there doesn't seem to be any logic behind what happens.

I will continue ignoring the Subject family and letting the Tests fend for themselves to see what happens as far as the children ageing goes.

I am in the middle of looking closer at a few things that have been driving me nuts and took a few video's that I thought I would share.

Video 1 http://www.box.net/shared/f5bk2u52d2

A test family with the woman in labour for an at home birth. The father/husband is helpfully providing scene setting music for her! (Immediately after freaking out that she was in labour, he pulled out his guitar)

Video 2 http://www.box.net/shared/d4uixavmma

Directly across the street is the second test family currently being ignored to see what they do. As you will see the woman from the first test family went over to chat and ended up being present for the birth of the neighbours baby (her own only 3 hours old across the street) this time in hospital.

Video 3 http://www.box.net/shared/x9yoa6grod

The trip to the hospital and a rabbit hole building in action. What you see is what you get.

Video 4 http://www.box.net/shared/i89s71kuvf

Out of the rabbit hole and back home. The random male sim leaving the hospital behind the two women in this video is the father of the newborn who was supposed to be at work not at the hospital to witness the birth.

For me, slowing ageing actually made it harder to play more than one family since the ageing slows for the current household only and the rest of the neighbourhood moves on at a "normal" rate.

Other options that seem like they would help the control freaks among us like lowering the autonomy level also seem to be for the current household only. Turning off story progression on the other hand doesn't seem to work at all as expected. For some it seems it doesn't work at all while I am finding it only works sometimes and not others.

And it would now appear I can't save. I keep getting an error 13 which according to the readme the pop up directs you to is 13: Post-save callback failure.

I have also run headlong into a complete game ruiner for me. I seem to recall this mentioned before but I can't recall where (could have been in the ingame help files for all I know) but the ageing slider applies to the current household only. Thus my sims who had a baby 5 sim days ago will still have a baby 20 somethings days from now. Meanwhile their neighbours who had a baby a day later are happily ignoring their toddler.

Have to jump in here with my two cents after having played for several hours over the last 2 days.

A short list of things I dislike:

Again with the faces. 3 hours in CAS and I can almost get rid of the round, play-dough jaw, almost.

Pathing/Action cue (I am not entirely sure which this would fall under). I had a female sim visit her male neighbour who already had a friend over. The friend and the neighbour were in his kitchen, 30 steps away I told the woman to go talk to the neighbour. All 3 sims proceeded to stand around looking stupid for the next 2 sim hours with the neighbour standing in the kitchen doorway facing out, the friend standing directly behind him and the female sim waiting in the hallway facing the neighbour while she waited to go talk to her neighbour. Once I cancelled the "chat" action they all lept into action where the neighbour took two steps forward and one to the left and let his friend go past him out of the kitchen. Presumably the standing around looking stupid was due to the neighbour having to move out of the friends way but was unable to because he had to go chat with the female sim ? (confused!)

The neighbourhood. I feel like I have been transported back into TS1. You can not place empty lots. You can move pre-made lots (to empty lots that are appropriately sized) and you can build on the existing empty lots, but you can not add more lots (unless I missed it in the mess that is the UI, someone please tell me I missed it)

Unfulfillable wants and lack of notification/mystical, magical knowledge of happenings in the rest of the 'hood. Female sim is pregnant by male from another household. Switch over to male's household, play for a few days during which female presumably gives birth with NO NOTIFICATION to the father. Mysteriously he is suddenly aware he has a child (shows up in the relationship panel as his "son" despite having never met the child or even seen the mother once since the conception) and "wants" to hold his son. Send him to go visit the mother's household. Find the baby laying forgotten on the floor screaming and father is completely unable to interact with the baby. Two sim days later, again after zero interaction between the households and father now happily engaged to another woman, he rolls the want to teach his (now toddler) son to talk. Another visit to the mothers household and he is still unable to interact with the child. I have not tested if he could interact with the child were he to invite them to his house, of course I haven't figured out how to get the mother to bring the child with her either.

There are many more things that irk me, most have already been covered in other posts. Suffice it to say while I was reading every other post with complaints I was nodding in agreement.

Likes:

Some of the redundancy has been removed from actions. For example, a sim can be relaxing/reading on the bed and you tell them to go to sleep and they will simply slide under the covers and go to sleep rather than get up and go through the whole process of getting out of bed just to get right back in.

The ability to simply slide a wall over to adjust the size of a room rather than have to rebuild the whole room - when it works properly!

C.A.S.T. though the novelty does wear off very quickly and I find myself wanting more/better texture options.

Overall I think the game has potential. Unfortunately, I don't think that potential will ever be realized and TS2 with or without mods is still a much more polished game offering more playability over the long term.

Of course, that is just my opinion

Edited because punctuation is not my friend.

I made the mistake of picturing what would happen if I actually had this and "the pony" in my game. I may never sleep again.

According to "inspirational" picture in the linked thread they appear to be something resembling Christmas ornaments with pink flowers on them. My daughter assures me that she has never seen this particular pony and "That is just horrible anyway Mom, why do adults do weird stuff like this? That's just wrong!"

While I have unfortunately seen furries of much worse quality, this one is by far the most freaky for me.



http://www.sapphiresims2.com/showthread.php?t=26941&highlight=pony

oh! I might have to try those. I loath Maxis blonde and red and ... Okay I just generally don't like Maxis hair. Of course I don't really like most of the "realistic" hair textures either. TOO shiney.

I actually had to come out of lurking and register to share this beautiful meshing gem.

The original, and yes, it is pay.

Found http://www.thesimsresource.com/artists/Neptunesuzy/downloads/sims2/SetID_390079/

In game:

umm ...


Okay ...


WTF?!

edit: To fix link I borked