Hetalia Sims 1: Maybe The Worst Idea I've Ever Had.
Some of you may have been wondering why the fic has dried up around this joint all of a sudden. "Whyfor this bullshit?" you may well ask.
The answer is that my husband bought me The Sims, the "life simulator game" in which you make little people, put them into a little town, and guide them through their little lives, hopefully helping them to achieve their hopes and dreams along the way. (There is another school of thought, wherein The Sims is more akin to a diabolical social experiment, designed to test the limits of human misery, but that's a sordid sort of business and it will not be countenanced here.) It's utterly banal and strangely fascinating, and then two weeks of my life disappeared.
But that's not the end of the story. After all, I wouldn't be putting this in my fanworks journal if I was just "playing The Sims."
I've been playing Hetalia Sims.
How do you play Hetalia Sims?
First order of business: evict all those disgusting NPCs filling up my pristine houses and businesses.
They'll trickle back in later, but for now I can swipe all their swag and put the nations into good houses without having to design them myself, which takes forever and which I suck at anyway.
Next, tweak the gameplay settings:
We're turning these things off. The important thing here is Story Progression - normally it would be fine with me, and I actually had it on when I was screwing around with this idea on my own. It means that whatever households I'm not controlling at the moment can carry on with developments on their own, and it led to some fairly surprising moments when I got back to driving those nations: discovering that Belarus and England had gotten married while I wasn't looking was a bit of an eye-opener (and now I kind of ship it), and finding out that Poland had left Lithuania to shack up with Canada and have an ungodly amount of sex pretty much made my day. The problem with story progression is: they adopt. CONSTANTLY. I switched back to France's house at one point--emphatically single France--to find three babies laid out on his living room floor like miniature dachshunds. What was he doing with them? Better not to speculate. But nations don't procreate, and turning off aging means that babies will never stop being babies.
You can get rid of babies--by starving them to death. Then a social worker comes and takes them away. But I feel bad about that. So, no story progression. This is cool, too, because it means we'll get to make all the important decisions in the nations' lives.
Let's make a household! Who's first?
AMERICA, THAT'S WHO, BECAUSE HE'S THE HERO. His lifetime wish is to become an astronaut, which shouldn't be too hard.
Here's his traits. Traits make up a sim's personality cocktail, I guess you could say.
Perfect, yeah? One last thing:
There we go.
Also in his household: CANADA!
I made them brothers. Incest is not available in The Sims 3. Sorry, shippers.
And since I mentioned America's favorite food, have Canada's, too.
A little flavor of France laid over the essential blandness of Great Britain!
Right, so, I move them into a nice loft house together. It's a pretty sweet pad, because North America is rich, you dig? Well, rich like a 17th century aristocrat, anyway, where being wildly in debt is indistinguishable from rolling in cash, but that kind of lifestyle isn't implemented. Oh yeah, I'm gonna be cheating money in for all the nations, because they're nations, not barely-grads. Some nations are richer than others.
One more in-game "here's how the game works" screenshot:
This will be on the test.
A lot of those mood buffs and debuffs are essentially under our control. For example, because Canada is neurotic, he gets an option like this whenever you click on a household appliance:
Which gives him this buff:
Oh Canada. You have to savor the little things, with your life.
I get them into their professions (politics for Canada, the military for America) and train their basic skills. Canada gets Charisma (he'll need it) and Guitar (because everybody knows Canadian rockers are better). America gets Athletics and Handiness. They'll learn more stuff when we're driving them.
One last thing about their house: Canada's room looks like a little girl's room, because that's how it was when I bought the place and now I refuse to change it.
Sleep tight, princess.
Next household: ENGLAND.
England wants to be a writer. It was hard to pick between this wish and the "be stinking, embarrassingly rich, so I never have to work again" wish, which traditionally has been the English Dream, but since I can just cheat in money, the latter wouldn't have been much of an accomplishment. So he's a novelist.
England also gets a frowsy sweater set. I'm sorry, England, but you do. Also, dig a closeup of his eyebrows:
Pure sex, baby. Never change.
Okay, traits.
Hee hee hee. His favorite food is fish and chips, by the way.
All right, so let's get him into a house. He lives alone (we call it splendid isolation, excuse me) in a stylish little cabin overlooking the water. As soon as we get him in-game, this is what we see:
He's grumpy, so. We'll be seeing a lot of this. Also a lot of this:
He enjoys being alone! Really! He--he really does. *stiffens upper lip*
I teach him Writing, Fishing (there is, alas, no "Sailing" skill, so this is the best I could do for letting him enjoy the ocean) and Cooking, because I thought it was funny. He's too antisocial to work, so he'll be staying at home, hammering away at his keyboard and not needing any friends, really until we decide to pick him up again.
Let's meet his next door neighbor, shall we?
He has normal clothes, too. I'll try to make sure he's in them as little as possible.
There is, sorry to say, no "Nudist" trait. The speedo is the best we can do.
He lives in a swank, modern single with some bewildering and pretentious modern art in the front lawn. I thought that was very French, so I left it there.
I needed to get him signed up to his profession and teach him his skills, but obviously my first order of business was running him across the street to irritate England. This was accomplished with a quickness.
Excellent.
Then I got him into the Culinary Arts profession and taught him Cooking and Charisma (he'll need the latter to achieve his lifetime wish of Nailing Everybody).
And that's our first three households and four characters! I'm not going to show the breakdown for every household as I make them, by the way: a lot of the minor characters I'll just churn out and then dump in world. So my question for you guys is:
Poll
Continue to Part 2.
The answer is that my husband bought me The Sims, the "life simulator game" in which you make little people, put them into a little town, and guide them through their little lives, hopefully helping them to achieve their hopes and dreams along the way. (There is another school of thought, wherein The Sims is more akin to a diabolical social experiment, designed to test the limits of human misery, but that's a sordid sort of business and it will not be countenanced here.) It's utterly banal and strangely fascinating, and then two weeks of my life disappeared.
But that's not the end of the story. After all, I wouldn't be putting this in my fanworks journal if I was just "playing The Sims."
I've been playing Hetalia Sims.
How do you play Hetalia Sims?
First order of business: evict all those disgusting NPCs filling up my pristine houses and businesses.
They'll trickle back in later, but for now I can swipe all their swag and put the nations into good houses without having to design them myself, which takes forever and which I suck at anyway.
Next, tweak the gameplay settings:
We're turning these things off. The important thing here is Story Progression - normally it would be fine with me, and I actually had it on when I was screwing around with this idea on my own. It means that whatever households I'm not controlling at the moment can carry on with developments on their own, and it led to some fairly surprising moments when I got back to driving those nations: discovering that Belarus and England had gotten married while I wasn't looking was a bit of an eye-opener (and now I kind of ship it), and finding out that Poland had left Lithuania to shack up with Canada and have an ungodly amount of sex pretty much made my day. The problem with story progression is: they adopt. CONSTANTLY. I switched back to France's house at one point--emphatically single France--to find three babies laid out on his living room floor like miniature dachshunds. What was he doing with them? Better not to speculate. But nations don't procreate, and turning off aging means that babies will never stop being babies.
You can get rid of babies--by starving them to death. Then a social worker comes and takes them away. But I feel bad about that. So, no story progression. This is cool, too, because it means we'll get to make all the important decisions in the nations' lives.
Let's make a household! Who's first?
AMERICA, THAT'S WHO, BECAUSE HE'S THE HERO. His lifetime wish is to become an astronaut, which shouldn't be too hard.
Here's his traits. Traits make up a sim's personality cocktail, I guess you could say.
Perfect, yeah? One last thing:
There we go.
Also in his household: CANADA!
I made them brothers. Incest is not available in The Sims 3. Sorry, shippers.
And since I mentioned America's favorite food, have Canada's, too.
A little flavor of France laid over the essential blandness of Great Britain!
Right, so, I move them into a nice loft house together. It's a pretty sweet pad, because North America is rich, you dig? Well, rich like a 17th century aristocrat, anyway, where being wildly in debt is indistinguishable from rolling in cash, but that kind of lifestyle isn't implemented. Oh yeah, I'm gonna be cheating money in for all the nations, because they're nations, not barely-grads. Some nations are richer than others.
One more in-game "here's how the game works" screenshot:
This will be on the test.
A lot of those mood buffs and debuffs are essentially under our control. For example, because Canada is neurotic, he gets an option like this whenever you click on a household appliance:
Which gives him this buff:
Oh Canada. You have to savor the little things, with your life.
I get them into their professions (politics for Canada, the military for America) and train their basic skills. Canada gets Charisma (he'll need it) and Guitar (because everybody knows Canadian rockers are better). America gets Athletics and Handiness. They'll learn more stuff when we're driving them.
One last thing about their house: Canada's room looks like a little girl's room, because that's how it was when I bought the place and now I refuse to change it.
Sleep tight, princess.
Next household: ENGLAND.
England wants to be a writer. It was hard to pick between this wish and the "be stinking, embarrassingly rich, so I never have to work again" wish, which traditionally has been the English Dream, but since I can just cheat in money, the latter wouldn't have been much of an accomplishment. So he's a novelist.
England also gets a frowsy sweater set. I'm sorry, England, but you do. Also, dig a closeup of his eyebrows:
Pure sex, baby. Never change.
Okay, traits.
Hee hee hee. His favorite food is fish and chips, by the way.
All right, so let's get him into a house. He lives alone (we call it splendid isolation, excuse me) in a stylish little cabin overlooking the water. As soon as we get him in-game, this is what we see:
He's grumpy, so. We'll be seeing a lot of this. Also a lot of this:
He enjoys being alone! Really! He--he really does. *stiffens upper lip*
I teach him Writing, Fishing (there is, alas, no "Sailing" skill, so this is the best I could do for letting him enjoy the ocean) and Cooking, because I thought it was funny. He's too antisocial to work, so he'll be staying at home, hammering away at his keyboard and not needing any friends, really until we decide to pick him up again.
Let's meet his next door neighbor, shall we?
He has normal clothes, too. I'll try to make sure he's in them as little as possible.
There is, sorry to say, no "Nudist" trait. The speedo is the best we can do.
He lives in a swank, modern single with some bewildering and pretentious modern art in the front lawn. I thought that was very French, so I left it there.
I needed to get him signed up to his profession and teach him his skills, but obviously my first order of business was running him across the street to irritate England. This was accomplished with a quickness.
Excellent.
Then I got him into the Culinary Arts profession and taught him Cooking and Charisma (he'll need the latter to achieve his lifetime wish of Nailing Everybody).
And that's our first three households and four characters! I'm not going to show the breakdown for every household as I make them, by the way: a lot of the minor characters I'll just churn out and then dump in world. So my question for you guys is:
Poll
Continue to Part 2.