Sims2: Neighbourhoods, Lots, and Houses

Quincy Quarles enjoys the fresh spring air as he fetches the mail.  He has just moved to Bluewater Village, and he and his brother Hubbard were grateful to be able to buy this small house.  It's quite a hike down the hill to the stores, but the view of the ocean in the distance is fantastic.  The second bedroom for Quincy's toddler daughter Lucretia is tiny, but it's big enough for them for now.

In the Sims 2, the world you build is based on Neighbourhoods.  There are at least six that come set up in the game out of the box, complete little towns with roads, trees, signs, etc.  They all have varying numbers of residential and commercial lots already set up, with some of them occupied and some vacant.  There is also a 'bin' of lots and houses; the lots are empty if you want to build your own house, and the houses are pre-built and can be dropped onto the neighbourhood.  Your neighbourhood might be flat (like Strangetown in the desert) or hilly (like you see here).  Then you also get to choose the terrain of the individual lot.  This house is custom content I downloaded from "Mod the Sims".  The creator is known as 'plasticbox' and this is one of his 'Newbie Road' line, specifically number 155.  Out of the box, when you create a Sim, they will have 20,000 Simoleons as their starting cash.  All the Newbie Road houses are 20,000 Simoleons or less, so they're ideal for people first starting out in the game.  Anyway, as you can see, the lot itself is perfectly flat - this is also ideal for people learning the game, since there are complicated rules about where you can put things if the lot is not flat. It looks a little awkward because I put a flat lot on hilly terrain, but the game adapts as you see in the picture. Again, the amount of thought and programming that went into these rules boggles my mind!

All the people in your neighbourhood interact with each other in various ways.  There are what players call "townies", which are the people who live in the populated houses, and some automatically generated people that live somewhere in the ether.  When they walk by your house or you see them on a community lot, you can have your Sim greet them, and they will become friends; if they are attracted to each other you can have them have romantic interactions; and if they are good enough friends you can invite them to move in or marry your Sim, whereupon they become playable Sims just like the ones you created yourself.  There are also "NPCs", or non-playable characters, like the letter and newspaper carriers.  Your Sims can interact with them as well, but in more limited ways.  It *is* possible, though, to talk to them every day when they come by, and make them into good enough friends for your Sim to eventually invite them to move in.

When I name new families in my current challenge, I look for unusual names in my real-life family tree.  Filtering for people with first and last name starting with Q didn't find me anything, but I do have a real-life Hubbard Quarles III in my tree, and his real-life daughter Lucretia Isabell Quarles, known as "Lou".  Hubbard was born in 1807 in Spartenburg, North Carolina, USA; and Lucretia was born about 1852 in Huntsville, Madison, Alabama, USA.  I accidentally made Lucretia in the game the daughter of Quincy instead of Hubbard, not that verisimilitude is what I'm going for here.