My thoughts on Strangetown
What brought you to it?? what made you stay??
First time around, I barely registered any of the Maxis hoods. I had just migrated from the PS2 version of the Sims (and Sims 2, but the PS2 version of that is pretty lame in a lot of ways). I was going to make my sims in my custom neighborhood dammit. (Then, I did not know that the Pleasantview townies get dumped into every new neighborhood unless you get cleaned up templates.) So I clicked through the pictures, decided the Grunts were assholes, the Beakers and Curiouses weird, and the Smiths just plain improbable. But nothing against Strangetown, really, I just didn't want to play Maxis sims when I could make my own.
Obviously, I came around. What did it for me was reading some stuff on various fora about Nervous Subject. More specifically, how annoying it was to play Nervous because of his extreme personality. That piqued my curiosity enough to draw me into Strangetown. I'd deleted it along with Veronaville in the first pass, but I figured out where to copy them back in from. I had played Pleasantview but only with an eye to messing up as many lives as possible.
So the li'l guy with the mohawk was the catalyst. I decided I wanted to read stories about him, so I googled "Nervous Subject", realized I would have better luck if I googled "Nervous Subject -photography -psychology" and stumbled across "Strangetown, Here We Come." Because of reading that, I began to play some of the characters and got into the whole thing more.
Who do you think of first when this 'hood is mentioned?
You have to guess? ;) Nervous Subject, of course.
Who do you play? Do you have any favorite sim or household on the 'hood?
Favorite Maxis sim is Nervous, but favorite Maxis household would be the Grunt household. Buzz and Ripp really grew on me. Tank and Buck, not so much, but I should play them a bit more. I have to admit, I really like throwing other sims into the neighborhood, both CAS and clones of other Maxis sims. Oh, I did enjoy playing Strangetown Bella too. If you ignore the Bella hype, she's just a really nice sim to play. I guess I just like playing Romance sims, but that's a tangent.
What do you think of the storylines?? Do you think they fit the families?? Do you follow them or not??
Eh, the past is established, but the future might not always be what Maxis intended. Ophelia and Johnny don't necessarily wind up together, depending on how things go. I haven't played all the households in a sufficiently balanced way to be able to claim that I followed the storylines. However, I love looking through the memories and seeing why perhaps Buzz Grunt and Olive Specter have that animosity between them. What would explain it? ;)
I think the families' backstories fit them nicely. I don't feel constrained to adhere to the most obvious hookups.
Do you leave the families in their original household or move them out??
I have never been able to leave Nervous with the Beakers. Ripp and his father had an argument, one argument too many for Ripp. So Ripp decided he was grown, and making enough as a record store clerk so he could move into a tiny house with a heavy mortgage. Now he has the freedom to boink all the sims he wants without his father's disapproval.
Also, I decided I didn't like the Singles women lumped together like that, so I broke that up. The two Curious sisters are in their own place, as is Erin Beaker (yes, I gave them their proper surnames back). Other than that, the families are pretty much together. The Curious place really has to be reworked to make that tolerable though.
What about the lots, Do you like them as they come or do you rebuild/redecorate before using them?
I HATE HATE HATE the lots! Did I mention that I really hate them? The Beaker mansion and the Curious residence do win points for cool, but they both lose a lot more points for piss-poor playability. First of all, I don't much like lots that are more than 2x2. I can play 5x5 without my computer lagging, but with the 8-sim limit, it's just a lot of wasted space really, and I don't like the sims to scatter far afield so I have to pan all over the place to see what they're doing.
Second, the Beaker place demonstrates that the AI pathing is full of FAIL. Loki's in the kitchen and I'd like him to go up to his and Circe's bedroom, right? Does he turn right, go up the inside stairs, and then left into their little sitting room? Noooooo, he does not. Instead, he goes out back, around the grill, up the back outside stairs, then does who knows what, and finally appears in the bedroom. GAH. Not to mention the amount of inane wandering around when I ask one of them to fetch the mail or the newspaper.
The Grunt place would be decent if it weren't for the watch tower in the back yard.
At least the Beaker mansion doesn't make my game camera spaz as badly as the Curious place or the Grunt place do when I attempt to go up to the second floor. I really do wish Maxis hadn't made a foundation its own level. There's all kinds of screwiness involved when there's a foundation. I hate them, at least in this game. If I build for looks and realism, I don't put sims in those houses. I build differently for playability than when I build for effect. "Show" houses will have foundations, realistic bathrooms, and all kinds of cool crap. "Play the game" houses will be built smack on the ground, have two 1x3 or 2x2 rooms for the toilet and the shower, and are most likely on a 1x1 or 2x1 lot (thank you, modder who made those lots). But anything up to 2x2 is pretty good, actually. More than that is overkill.
I actually rebuilt what I consider more playable versions of the Curious house and the Beaker mansion on smaller lots. I did my best to keep the flavor of both while making them a lot less annoying. My gender-reversed Strangetowners were going to live in those houses but the neighborhood ate itself. :( At least I packaged up the houses before that happened. I found that I could recopy the exact Grunt house's floorplan on a 1x3 lot. The house just wouldn't fit on a 1x2 but it's actually kind of nice to have a bit of yard for the Grunts. That obstacle course has to go somewhere, right?
Do you like the townies on town??
I didn't really know them well but I got to know them a lot better once I moved Malcolm Landgraab IV into Strangetown and had him open up some different businesses. Kendal Lawson is a real bitch of a customer. She kept picking fights with the other customers. There was one hilarious incident that I wish I'd gotten a picture of: she dropped into that snarling stance they do when they're thinking of someone they're furious at. Then a gold star popped up over her head. "This place pisses me off so much I just have to give it another gold star." Huh? I'm sure she was just coincidentally mad at someone but pleased at the fine service. It was just a buffet too...half the townies got fat at the Strangetown Smorgasbord. *snerk*
Quinten McAuley was a bad customer in general. Just really hard to please and make a sale to. Trista Shaw, both of 'em, were pretty good customers. Blair Mace is another customer I had to direct Malky to kick out, over and over. Very stubbornly loyal; he always kept coming back, and he would buy. It's just that he kept picking fights too.
I dunno. With the exception of Crystal Vu, Bella Goth, and Kendal Lawson, few of the Strangetown townies really make an impression on me. I have many more opinions and impressions of the Pleasantview townies. The playables are so colorful that they overshadow the townies in my mind.
Do think Abhijeet Cho is hotter than HBD!?? (... Do you even know who A. Cho is!?? )
I had to look him up. He's kinda cute. I'm not a fan of that shaggy hair on either one of them. Malky was doing free makeovers at one point, but I forget what new look I had him give Abhijeet Cho.
Do you feel Bella Goth as one of the neighbors too??
No, she's an outsider. I have my own theory about Strangetown Bella. She is NOT the Bella who was Mortimer's wife. Instead, she's the love child of Mortimer's sister and Bella Bachelor's father Simis Bachelor, hence the extreme physical resemblance. And Strangetown Bella might want to ape her aunt Bella by wearing the same hair and outfit, for whatever reason. "My goodness, you certainly do resemble your Aunt Bella...how odd, isn't it really?"
Of course, I tend to assume that Maxis meant all three of their base-game neighborhoods to be on the same timeline. Strangetown Bella is far too young to be the mother of even the child Cassandra. So even if you assumed the three different neighborhoods were on different timelines, it still doesn't work to consider Strangetown Bella the original Bella Goth née Bachelor.
In conclusion, I'm not sure why anyone would hate Strangetown. Dislike, sure, but hate? It's weird, why hate? I will admit that I really dislike mpreg scenarios. I wonder if the Maxoids who thought the alien pregnancy via abduction were fans of the late lamented animated Dilbert show. The last two episodes...wow.
Anyway, whether that idea came from that show or not, I don't like it. Abductions, sure, why not, but the rest of it, I could do without. And the Maxis aliens seem too much like sims who just happen to have green skins and big shiny black eyes. I'd rather have something more alien in Strangetown. Same with the Servos, I don't like their implementation. They should be more robotic, really. It's too bad, because Strangetown is the perfect place for robots of all kinds.
What I think is great is that little line Maxis dropped in..."Strangetown...a place where seekers come to find the truth." Not verbatim, but I don't have the game open right now to check the quote. To me, that practically invites one to make their own sims with their own histories and drop them into Strangetown. It's a lot of fun to mix in some CAS sims and have them mingle with the Strangetowners.
I've been letting my Strangetown just sit for the last few weeks. I blame my recent installation of Uni and Seasons. I have to make sure those EPs play nice on my computer. Wouldn't want to mess up my version of Strangetown. :) I'll get back there soon, and I'm going to pattern the 4 seasons after the Las Vegas climate. That means Strangetown will be Spring-Summer-Summer-Fall.
Mmm, I've probably tested Uni and Seasons enough now. ;) I should be heading back to Strangetown, shouldn't I?
First time around, I barely registered any of the Maxis hoods. I had just migrated from the PS2 version of the Sims (and Sims 2, but the PS2 version of that is pretty lame in a lot of ways). I was going to make my sims in my custom neighborhood dammit. (Then, I did not know that the Pleasantview townies get dumped into every new neighborhood unless you get cleaned up templates.) So I clicked through the pictures, decided the Grunts were assholes, the Beakers and Curiouses weird, and the Smiths just plain improbable. But nothing against Strangetown, really, I just didn't want to play Maxis sims when I could make my own.
Obviously, I came around. What did it for me was reading some stuff on various fora about Nervous Subject. More specifically, how annoying it was to play Nervous because of his extreme personality. That piqued my curiosity enough to draw me into Strangetown. I'd deleted it along with Veronaville in the first pass, but I figured out where to copy them back in from. I had played Pleasantview but only with an eye to messing up as many lives as possible.
So the li'l guy with the mohawk was the catalyst. I decided I wanted to read stories about him, so I googled "Nervous Subject", realized I would have better luck if I googled "Nervous Subject -photography -psychology" and stumbled across "Strangetown, Here We Come." Because of reading that, I began to play some of the characters and got into the whole thing more.
Who do you think of first when this 'hood is mentioned?
You have to guess? ;) Nervous Subject, of course.
Who do you play? Do you have any favorite sim or household on the 'hood?
Favorite Maxis sim is Nervous, but favorite Maxis household would be the Grunt household. Buzz and Ripp really grew on me. Tank and Buck, not so much, but I should play them a bit more. I have to admit, I really like throwing other sims into the neighborhood, both CAS and clones of other Maxis sims. Oh, I did enjoy playing Strangetown Bella too. If you ignore the Bella hype, she's just a really nice sim to play. I guess I just like playing Romance sims, but that's a tangent.
What do you think of the storylines?? Do you think they fit the families?? Do you follow them or not??
Eh, the past is established, but the future might not always be what Maxis intended. Ophelia and Johnny don't necessarily wind up together, depending on how things go. I haven't played all the households in a sufficiently balanced way to be able to claim that I followed the storylines. However, I love looking through the memories and seeing why perhaps Buzz Grunt and Olive Specter have that animosity between them. What would explain it? ;)
I think the families' backstories fit them nicely. I don't feel constrained to adhere to the most obvious hookups.
Do you leave the families in their original household or move them out??
I have never been able to leave Nervous with the Beakers. Ripp and his father had an argument, one argument too many for Ripp. So Ripp decided he was grown, and making enough as a record store clerk so he could move into a tiny house with a heavy mortgage. Now he has the freedom to boink all the sims he wants without his father's disapproval.
Also, I decided I didn't like the Singles women lumped together like that, so I broke that up. The two Curious sisters are in their own place, as is Erin Beaker (yes, I gave them their proper surnames back). Other than that, the families are pretty much together. The Curious place really has to be reworked to make that tolerable though.
What about the lots, Do you like them as they come or do you rebuild/redecorate before using them?
I HATE HATE HATE the lots! Did I mention that I really hate them? The Beaker mansion and the Curious residence do win points for cool, but they both lose a lot more points for piss-poor playability. First of all, I don't much like lots that are more than 2x2. I can play 5x5 without my computer lagging, but with the 8-sim limit, it's just a lot of wasted space really, and I don't like the sims to scatter far afield so I have to pan all over the place to see what they're doing.
Second, the Beaker place demonstrates that the AI pathing is full of FAIL. Loki's in the kitchen and I'd like him to go up to his and Circe's bedroom, right? Does he turn right, go up the inside stairs, and then left into their little sitting room? Noooooo, he does not. Instead, he goes out back, around the grill, up the back outside stairs, then does who knows what, and finally appears in the bedroom. GAH. Not to mention the amount of inane wandering around when I ask one of them to fetch the mail or the newspaper.
The Grunt place would be decent if it weren't for the watch tower in the back yard.
At least the Beaker mansion doesn't make my game camera spaz as badly as the Curious place or the Grunt place do when I attempt to go up to the second floor. I really do wish Maxis hadn't made a foundation its own level. There's all kinds of screwiness involved when there's a foundation. I hate them, at least in this game. If I build for looks and realism, I don't put sims in those houses. I build differently for playability than when I build for effect. "Show" houses will have foundations, realistic bathrooms, and all kinds of cool crap. "Play the game" houses will be built smack on the ground, have two 1x3 or 2x2 rooms for the toilet and the shower, and are most likely on a 1x1 or 2x1 lot (thank you, modder who made those lots). But anything up to 2x2 is pretty good, actually. More than that is overkill.
I actually rebuilt what I consider more playable versions of the Curious house and the Beaker mansion on smaller lots. I did my best to keep the flavor of both while making them a lot less annoying. My gender-reversed Strangetowners were going to live in those houses but the neighborhood ate itself. :( At least I packaged up the houses before that happened. I found that I could recopy the exact Grunt house's floorplan on a 1x3 lot. The house just wouldn't fit on a 1x2 but it's actually kind of nice to have a bit of yard for the Grunts. That obstacle course has to go somewhere, right?
Do you like the townies on town??
I didn't really know them well but I got to know them a lot better once I moved Malcolm Landgraab IV into Strangetown and had him open up some different businesses. Kendal Lawson is a real bitch of a customer. She kept picking fights with the other customers. There was one hilarious incident that I wish I'd gotten a picture of: she dropped into that snarling stance they do when they're thinking of someone they're furious at. Then a gold star popped up over her head. "This place pisses me off so much I just have to give it another gold star." Huh? I'm sure she was just coincidentally mad at someone but pleased at the fine service. It was just a buffet too...half the townies got fat at the Strangetown Smorgasbord. *snerk*
Quinten McAuley was a bad customer in general. Just really hard to please and make a sale to. Trista Shaw, both of 'em, were pretty good customers. Blair Mace is another customer I had to direct Malky to kick out, over and over. Very stubbornly loyal; he always kept coming back, and he would buy. It's just that he kept picking fights too.
I dunno. With the exception of Crystal Vu, Bella Goth, and Kendal Lawson, few of the Strangetown townies really make an impression on me. I have many more opinions and impressions of the Pleasantview townies. The playables are so colorful that they overshadow the townies in my mind.
Do think Abhijeet Cho is hotter than HBD!?? (... Do you even know who A. Cho is!?? )
I had to look him up. He's kinda cute. I'm not a fan of that shaggy hair on either one of them. Malky was doing free makeovers at one point, but I forget what new look I had him give Abhijeet Cho.
Do you feel Bella Goth as one of the neighbors too??
No, she's an outsider. I have my own theory about Strangetown Bella. She is NOT the Bella who was Mortimer's wife. Instead, she's the love child of Mortimer's sister and Bella Bachelor's father Simis Bachelor, hence the extreme physical resemblance. And Strangetown Bella might want to ape her aunt Bella by wearing the same hair and outfit, for whatever reason. "My goodness, you certainly do resemble your Aunt Bella...how odd, isn't it really?"
Of course, I tend to assume that Maxis meant all three of their base-game neighborhoods to be on the same timeline. Strangetown Bella is far too young to be the mother of even the child Cassandra. So even if you assumed the three different neighborhoods were on different timelines, it still doesn't work to consider Strangetown Bella the original Bella Goth née Bachelor.
In conclusion, I'm not sure why anyone would hate Strangetown. Dislike, sure, but hate? It's weird, why hate? I will admit that I really dislike mpreg scenarios. I wonder if the Maxoids who thought the alien pregnancy via abduction were fans of the late lamented animated Dilbert show. The last two episodes...wow.
Anyway, whether that idea came from that show or not, I don't like it. Abductions, sure, why not, but the rest of it, I could do without. And the Maxis aliens seem too much like sims who just happen to have green skins and big shiny black eyes. I'd rather have something more alien in Strangetown. Same with the Servos, I don't like their implementation. They should be more robotic, really. It's too bad, because Strangetown is the perfect place for robots of all kinds.
What I think is great is that little line Maxis dropped in..."Strangetown...a place where seekers come to find the truth." Not verbatim, but I don't have the game open right now to check the quote. To me, that practically invites one to make their own sims with their own histories and drop them into Strangetown. It's a lot of fun to mix in some CAS sims and have them mingle with the Strangetowners.
I've been letting my Strangetown just sit for the last few weeks. I blame my recent installation of Uni and Seasons. I have to make sure those EPs play nice on my computer. Wouldn't want to mess up my version of Strangetown. :) I'll get back there soon, and I'm going to pattern the 4 seasons after the Las Vegas climate. That means Strangetown will be Spring-Summer-Summer-Fall.
Mmm, I've probably tested Uni and Seasons enough now. ;) I should be heading back to Strangetown, shouldn't I?