I've pre-ordered from the official EA Store site, just cuz I get them newsletter $15 discounts, but I still have to pay for S&H. Total, it ends up about 25$ or something. Which ends up at least being 10$ cheaper since retail is about 35$.
And it usually ships fairly early. In the past, I've gotten Uni and NL essentially the same week that it's released.
As for the guides, they don't really seem worth it. Prima I believe has digital versions that you can order online for only $9.99. But regardless, the info doesn't seem all that useful or interesting to me. I don't really care about the specific values/stats for objects and interactions. Especially with SimPE, if I was really interested, I could just root through the "code" but meh.
What I was hoping to find in them was unexpected or "secret" interactions that are like personality dependent, which I don't always see, because the majority of my CAS made sims have very
average personalities and don't fall into the extremes of 10 or 0 points in a certain trait. From what I've seen, the majority of Maxis made personality tweaks depend on these extremes. So I pretty much never see these interactions available, or even witness them period.
Unfortunately, the books don't contain this info, so that pretty much makes them worthless to me. I always get more info from reading other people's posts or just asking other players about their own experiences.
The one thing that I
do look forward to about the guides, is that now, I usually go to Barnes and Nobles with my sister to check them out. We'll spend a good part of the day "browsing" through the guide while sippin on Starbucks
Basically, we'll hang out and chat and gossip and brag and tell secrets about what we find in the guides. We'll squeal with glee and giggle like little girls over our anticipation of what's to come in the new EP. I think I have just as much fun just chatting about it with my sister than I do actually playing the game.
Ste
PS. For anyone that remembers... about the pretty
evil thing I did to my sister's game. She
finally noticed about a few weeks ago while she was playing. In her Pleasantview, she had one of her sims go to college and use the Uni directory. Apparently, it lists sims in alphabetical order (by first name of course
) and 'lo and behold, the first name that pops up is that of her ex. Hehehe. If anyone recalls, I made a sim that sort of looks like her ex, and then I hijacked one of the dormies in her game and used SimPE's Sims Surgery to replace his skin and renamed him. I initially intended for her to discover him when she sent her selfsim to college (they ended up going to the same college in real life, but they broke up about the time of her 2nd year which was unfortunately also around the time that he was entering his first year
). But, she ended up starting a separate 'hood for our self family (this original 'hood just had CAS made adult versions of her and her current bf, and adult versions of me and my hubby - i.e. we didn't start off related in this game, I had to use SimPE to edit our relationship).
Anyhew... so she finally noticed, and when she brought it up to me, she was just totally shocked and dumbfounded. The painful yet funny thing is, she totally believes it was an in game thing! I sort of semi-lied to her, and told her that the name could have come up randomly either by Maxis, or the fact that I was using jordi's better names hack.
Aren't I evil?!?!?! The thing is, she is just totally shocked, and she almost thinks that it might be like a "sign" or something. She and her ex try to remain friends, but it's obviously really hard because of what they went through. I'm not like doing this to be cruel or anything, I just thought it would be funny.
And the thing is, I actually liked her ex. He was nice and friendly and all around, a pretty cool, stand-up kind of guy. I thought they were good together, and he took care of her. But then again... she kind of has this knack of finding guys that sort of do that for her.
Anyways, the thing is, it's all kind of funny that she seems to honestly believe that it was just random chance. That the sim just
happened to look like her ex, and just happened to have the exact name as him. Still... I don't think I could tell her that I did it. She would probably hate me for it. Well... at least for a little while. Lol. God... I'm going to hell aren't I? Meh... not like that's news.
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