's Blog

I've Been Busy Again! - Another Sneak Peak!

I like long weekends - gives me time to get all the boring stuff out the way and get on with creating, which is exactly what I've been doing!  So just to keep anyone who's interested in the picture, here's a few more sneak peaks at my upcoming paintings.

Firstly, a set of four gorgeous chickens - great for your country cottages and kitchens:

 Secondly, a set of rather sophisticated flowers - great for those snobby sims!

Thirdly, a collection of dancers:

Fourthly, two sets of rather delicate flowers - great for bedrooms:

And fifthly, a set of four traditional drinks recipes - great for the kitchen or behind the bar:

 I have lots more paintings in the pipeline, but if anyone has any particular suggestions, please let me know.

Enjoy!

Drive-By Blogging and Big Weekend

Hey guys and gals, just a quick update blog entry from yours truly.

As some of you have probably known ( especially all you stalkers, you know who you are.. ), much of my time is pre-occupied by my studies and social life here at university. Generally struggling to keep my time divided between drinking, working and sleeping, I get very little time on the computer..

And when I do, I tend to be exhausted and tired. Not exactly the two main moods you need to be creative.

And make Sims houses.

And all that jazz.

So, yeah. Instead I spend my time on Skype. Most of the time. Either that, or Spore seems to be getting most of my computer attention these days. And before any of you ask.. Its not exactly a "100% legal " version, so I can't post my creations online. Though that may change soon.

Anyway, back to the main topic.

In short, my time is very limited. Exams, project proposals and Radio One's Big Weekend on my doorstep, all distract me from my time usually dedicated to this site. But as soon as its all over ( by the end of next week ) I should get back into a regular routine. 

So if anyone has any requests, feel free to leave a comment. Or drop me an email, I'll gladly respond as soon as I can.

Well, there you have it. Another blog just about wrapped up.

'Till next time!

Sims 3 Ambition Preview

On Friday may 21st I was very fortunate to tag along with Angela to the Dutch preview of Sims 3 Ambitions (much love to her and of course the Dutch EA for inviting her in the first place).

We played with a dutch version of the game so the English translation may be wrong, tell me so that I can fix that :) Also this was not the final version of the game, so there were bugs (fog inside the house?).

I have a feeling EA is going a new route with The Sims 3 expansion packs, with Sims 1 and 2 they expanded onto the game but the original game was still the main way of playing. With Sims 3 they add completely new angles of playing. This was shown in world adventures and has happened again with ambitions.

The new occupations are just a tip of the iceberg that they added, Blackgarden has a very good preview of these in her blog. As we only had a 2.5 hour preview, I did not have time to play with everything, so I will only discuss the things that I played with myself or either amused me severely that the other people played with.

Professions

The first notable difference with professions is how the career menu is shown, work progress bar has changed, you cannot go into the negative! Technically, you build up work experience now, instead of performing well or not. And instead of smileys for each thing that influences your performance, you now get simple icons explaining things that improve your work experience.

By far, very FAAAAAAR and maybe even further the most amusing thing I saw was from the private investigator profession. Your sim can go on a stake out, this in every detective tv show I have seen means you sit in a car hidden and just watch a building. In the humorous world of EA this ‘stake out’ means your sim stands in the middle of a lot, displaying all the subtlety of an elephant in ballet shoes, gets a branch with leaves in each hand and holds it in front of him-/herself and voilà covertly hidden sim! So hidden that other sims do not even notice your sim when her phone rings. I was laughing for like 5 minutes about that, it is so funny.

Side information from Blackgarden:  Grant told them at UK preview how they came up with the stake out, apparently there is a guy who dresses up as a bush and stands in an empty park in SF. And it's like a TOTALLY empty park, no foliage anywhere.

The rest of the private investigation profession is similar to an adventure in WA, but in your home hood.  You can also increase your work experience by building up skills.

I also played with the fire-fighter profession, for a lot of the working ‘day’ you sit around and just lounge at the firestation. Chat with co-workers, bounce on the trampoline (more on that later), maintain the fire truck (I wonder what happens if you don’t maintain it, does it breaks down on the way to a fire.. and the house burns down? Something to try later...). ALARM!!!! Seriously, it is super loud, do not get deaf from the fire alarm. EA should add warning signs about that in the game.

You jump onto the big fire truck and go to the house that is on fire, when my sim arrived there she was a good girl and put out the fire. AnoeskaB’s sim was not such a good guy, he started stealing from the poor sim!  Can be even worse, instead of using a fire extinguisher you can also destroy the object to put out the fire... effective I suppose, not very nice.

Dumdi dum GHOSTBUSTERS! Something strange in the neighbourhood.. Who you gonna call? GHOST BUSTERS! If you think I am a fool here spraying nonsense, be ashamed of yourself, it means you have not seen the brilliant ghost busters movies. So yes, there is ghost hunting in this game! And it is very similar to how it is done in the ghost busters movie. Your sim gets called by the owner of a haunted house, sim goes there and finds the ghosts (who look more like the green colored ‘bad’ ghosts in Casper), your sim zaps it with a cool looking zapping gun (I am sure it has a more proper name, but I did not check) and then has 1 ghost in his inventory bag. You can then give it a name or release it.

Then we come to the inventor, I did not play with this much myself, but my neighbour at the preview did. He got his sim to such a high level he could blow things up to get some scrap. This blowing up of things is not a small thing, blowing up car is BOOM! This neighbour was a guy (cheetah)  who thought blowing things up was so much fun, he went around the neighbourhood and destroyed everyone’s car!! He got caught once and was asked to leave for misbehaving... just a minor behaviour problem. Then moved onto a community lot and started blowing up tables, at least he got some punishment for this, a fine. His sim did not even get in touch with law enforcement.

Then another person at the preview made a time machine and created a baby that started at teen years. I wish I had more time to play with the inventor myself... it sounds very funny.

For the other professions I refer you to Blackgardens preview, I did not play with them. There is also a confusing bit about how much your sim gets paid, they get paid for each job but.. also get a weekly salary? Something to check.

Other new things

I did play with some objects, like the trampoline. Warning for all the parents who have a trampoline at home, do not let your children play with the trampolines in game, it will give them the wrong idea. The sim regular jumping action on the trampoline is already hilarious! But they can also fall off (I think I saw that once, it went fast), somersault and it looks just hilarious. But I noticed the sim jumps near the side of a trampoline instead of in the middle.. very safe....

Laundry is a cute touch that they added to the game, there is an even a laundromat where you can wash your clothes if you don’t own a laundry machine yourself.  You can also sculpt and make money that way, I did not play with this so much. I did find it funny how enormous the block of clay is that your sim starts with and the eventual object can be tiny... very typical Sims humour.

I did look around the new neighbourhood a bit, it is called TwinBrooks and has a more darky/dirty bit to it (aka, swamps – cyclonesue is going to like them). This darky mood is also created with a fog object, from the buydebug menu. In total there are 5 new community lot types:

Laundromat

Firestation

Junkjard

Beauty salon

Meeting point? Dutch translation was hang plek (literally 'hanging about spot') in game it was like  a cafe but in Dutch hang plek means a place where (bad) kids hang about do nothing/skip school... they should change that name I think.

Last community lot is the Consignment Store.The Consignment Store allows your inventor/sculptor/painter to sell their goods, they give it to the store and when another sim buys it, your sim gets money. It’s not an automatic sell, which I personally found cute. It’s a small detail that EA did keep in mind.

If you load sunset valley or riverview, you will get the option to add these community lots, so the neighbourhoods are still compatible.

In CAS I found new hairs! Very cute hair for females, not so much cute clothes – but blackgarden has told me they may be in the salon in game not in CAS. And I found something I wanted but forgot to ask EA! You got influence on your sims makeup with the use of transparency! No more fighting with the colors to make the makeup not THAT bold.. just use the transparency slider.

Something for the builders that I found: columns can be 1, 2 or 3 stories high, just by changing a slider. I also saw new terrain paints and trees and possibly plants. You can adjust the height of each roof individually, allowing more freedom with them. You can also add ceilings now and that was all the build stuff I found, there could be more.

Your sim can also buy community lots, there was something similar before, you could own a rabit hole. Now you own the entire lot, this means you can change the name of the lot, and build/buy on it. Also, a community lot has 3 levels. The higher the level the higher the more profit from that lot your sim gets. I do not know how this works exactly, cause in my mind – a park is free to use so no profit from that. This is something we will have to see when we got the game.  

So we got the wonderful create a world tool, but it is tricky to use and some real effort needs to be put into it to learn it. Now you can also edit the neighbourhood, add trees everywhere and new lots of different sizes with the in-town editing tools, very useful if you just want a little change.

And last there is a new education career, did not play with this but I am glad they added it.

Fantastic

They gave things for builders, players, decorators and did it all with humour. I am glad to see they know on how many different ways people play the game and catered for all of them. We all can be very happy with this EP ^_^ EA went all out yet again, fantastic.

Ps. You can put a hole on your property from the buydebug menu and then your sim can fill it up ... I am not sure how useful this is.

Pps. EA please give us back collections, pretty please, I miss collections.

It's Friday

I'm honestly very happy that the end of the week is here. Though chances are I'll have to work on Sunday (and had to work today), Saturday is my day off and I want nothing more than to relax in the house under the AC. More than likely I'll read some of the tutorials. I really wanna create a skirt. Lol, or change the logo on an exsisting shirt. Wish me luck.

Old Fashioned Community Lots

Finally I have begun to upload these lots! The Arts District will come out first, beginning with Theatre in the Park, followed by the Museum of Historical Societies and then the Theatre Royale. Next will be the Victorian Grocer's Market, which is funny since it is the last lot I started! But it is finished and ready to go. After that will be City Hall and last will be the six main street lots. I'm stilled tweaking those. I have changed a few of the buildings around, like putting the spa next to the lady's shop and a fitness center next to the gentleman's club. There are eleven lots altogether in the series. I may add others later, but these will be it for now. I have made a park in place of the graveyard, but it it very sparse and simple. I have also taken out the center lots and made them into old fashioned paved streets. If anyone wants those lots, I will certainly upload them as well. I'll post pictures of those in my gallery.

poll

thanks to fobmroweczka and Sandra for filling out my poll :o)

My Thoughts on The Sims 3..

I have been playing The Sims 3 since it first came out i find it brilliant!! but there are a few things that i think should be in it im not saying it should be like Sims 2 but there are things missing that will make it a i lil bit better. Firstly i think the Sims 3 should have a diving board and should be able to dive there should be a tool that lets you have round corners on the pool. i love the fact you can create a sim exactly how you want it but i miss going to clothes shop and buying the clothes or having woohoo in the changing rooms..

My favourate bits of the sims 3 are been able to move around the neighbourhood going to other sims houses having a picknik in the park or fishing i miss getting sun burnt or freezing and sweeping the leaves up all though i love the fact you can go to other countries and have different adventures and i cant wait untill ambitions comes out.

Clutter

Before the old styled office will come, I will publish a breakfast clutter set! Here the loaf.. ((:

hey ya!

Hiya all, it's pretty warm here in the UK for the time of year, I have been doing some work outside today, laying the foundations for a wall I am going to build shortly..if only life was as easy in the real world as it is in the Sims world, I could just drag and drop the darned wall without as much as a care in the world for foundations. Wonder if there has ever been a case of subsidence in Pleasant valley?

I dont know if our friends in other parts of the world have to suffer scrap merchants trawling the neighbourhood in a lorry looking for scrap..we do here in the UK  and when they are in your area they blow a flipping trumpet to let you know that they are about. My god what a racket, not one note in tune! you would think that with all the practice that they get during  their 'career' they could go on to perform 'En fermant les yeux '  at the Royal Albert hall when they retire, but so far I have yet to hear of one. If the one who has been around here this morning keeps it up I am gonna shove his flaming trumpet where the sun don't shine.

 okies my lovelies, thats my moan for the day, catch you guys real soon!!..happy Simming!

Weekend.. full of promise

Not much planned. Except probably clean the house and then catch up with a friend.