Friday, May 29, 2020

Sims2: Ziglar family

Tori Ziglar traces her ancestry back three generations to her great-grandmother Zoe Ziglar, one of the founders of Strangetown.

Here Tori is putting her newborn son Travis down for a nap.  Her toddler daughter Sheena sleeps in her crib nearby.  Tori was the daughter of Lucille and Todd Ziglar, and grew up on in a good-sized house with a huge yard in the old part of Strangetown.  Her family bought a restaurant when the girls were teenagers, so there was not much cash to spare when Tori moved out.  She and her partner Shea Johnston bought this small house in Bluewater Village, across the street from the water's edge. Shea doesn't make much money as a medical intern, so they have raves in their backyard sometimes at night to make a little extra cash.  They'd like to have a lot of kids, but they're not sure how to manage it in their tiny two-bedroom.


This is two views of the same moment in time.  I generally play in this view, where the walls between my Sims and me are cut away.  You can see the size of the lot (their property is a different shade of green) and the houses near them. The game is rendered fully in 3D, which is taken granted for now, but was a big deal when the game was released, and a huge step up from the first Sims game's isometric view.

This is an example of a home business with a ticket machine out front.  They have an open/closed sign, so they choose when people come by.  That boxy thing in the backyard is a DJ booth.  I can either have one of my playable Sims "work as the DJ", or sometimes a visiting Sim will do it autonomously.  Either way Sims can dance or even have a dance competition, and if it's one things Sims love, it's dancing.

I found that I always bought the same things, like the same crib, for example.  Now when I need to buy something, I randomly select the item and its colours, which is why I ended up with these camouflage crib mattresses (something I wouldn't normally choose).

I am strict about giving unique names to babies born in this challenge.  I have my own complicated scheme, which is roughly this:  boys are named after their mothers, and girls are named after the fathers.  I use the Baby Name Voyager from the Baby Name Wizard to find the next name alphabetically that hasn't already been used.  This means I should eventually cycle through all the possible top-1000 names in the US from the 1880s to the present day.  This is why Shea's daughter is Sheena, and Tori's son is Travis.  It's still my game and supposed to be fun, though, so I allow myself a little leeway.  I don't use names that are close enough to a name I've already used, so for example, Travis could have been Torrey, but that was too close to Tori.  I also like siblings, and especially twins, to have names that 'go' together in my mind.  So I'll skip names occasionally to get ones I like, knowing I'll eventually come back around to the ones I missed.

In this challenge, Sims only move houses in exceptional circumstances, so Tori and Shea are stuck with this little house.  If they can get enough money, I might build an addition on the back so they can have both a living room and dining room downstairs, and a third bedroom.  I'm *not* strict about Sims having their own beds, though, so sometimes my kids (teens in particular) end up sleeping in shifts.

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