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First look at Apartment Life
All right guys, let's play a little game.
Can you see what's wrong in the following picture?
I honestly don't understand what happened here. Last time I played with him, Pippin had a good relationship with all his family, including his cousin Tommy. But when I moved him and his family to an apartment lot, I was pretty surprised to find such a creepy want on a CHILD's panel.
I guess Pippin truly believes it's the Broke's fault that his Grandma Lyla is now a zombie!
No matter if it was caused by a glitch or not, this is already giving me a few new ideas for the plot of the next few updates.
Anyway...
As you can see, I'm already playing with the Brokes, hoping to have a new update ready next week. There's a pretty long 4 day weekend coming up in my country (National Holiday - aka our Independence Day), so that'll give a bit of free time to advance my game.
Now that most of my hacks have been updated, I can play *almost* the way I used to before I installed AL. You see, the main reason I installed AL was to have the ceilings and the playground. I wasn't really interested in the "apartment feature" of the EP, until I read that you could actually visit and interact with your neighbors in real time.
And that's what sold that feature to me. I decided I'd try an apartment out with the Brokes, hoping to have my current heir interact on his own with all his extended family and cousins without need to summon them constantly. So, I downloaded an apartment lot from MTS2, decorated its four apartments and moved the Brokes in.
Besides that, I spent a little while "updating" Strangetown. After almost six generations, you can't expect it to look the same as it did back when Beau was young, right? Here's a general view of my current Strangetown.
To avoid Spoilers, I'll just show you a couple of those changes. In this pic you can see the new Specter lot and what used to be the Broke house. Due to story-related reasons, the Brokes left their home and moved to an apartment complex right in the middle of the "Road to Nowhere". The house was demolished and turned into a park, which was donated to the Strangetown people as some kind of "pay" for all the harm that Cosmo did during his "bad years".
While they don't actually believe Olive's story (at least not completely), deep inside they fear that all the bad things that happened to Marsha and Tommy at Takemizu Village could be some sort of punishment for Cosmo's crimes.
Buck, Rosie and their children also moved out of the Specter lot, leaving Lyla the Zombie in charge of the ghosts and spirits in there.
And this is a close up of the remodeled Specter lot. I suck at building (and lack the patience), so I just demolished the middle part of the old house to create two small buildings. On the right, there's Lyla's tiny home (with a private shrine in the back for her late husband, the General). The gravestone surrounded by water is Olive's, of course.
Finally, the building on the left is the Broke Family's crypt. This is where I'll place the heir portraits (plus spouses) and their urns from now on.
This is the crypt's inside.
Poor Lyla the zombie maxed out her creativity skill because I made her paint all those spouse portraits.
Errr... yeah, that's Tommy, in the middle of a dramatic episode :S (he reacts like this every time I make him mourn his mother's grave).
So, now that I'm done remodeling all these lots, I finally moved the Broke family to the apartment complex. One apartment is occupied by Tim, Tommy and Edward (this will be the main apartment I'll play, of course). The second apartment is Wanda, Puck and Cody's home (though Cody's moving out in just one sim day to go to college). The third one is ocuppied by Buck, Rosie, Ophelia, Lyla, Chip and Monica. And the last one has Helena and her huge family.
I have a general idea of the age difference between these sims, so my plan is to age them with the help of Insim according to my mental time line. So, every time I play with Tim's apartment, I'll subtract the days I played from all the families ages (and grow the members up with Insim once they reach the transition age). This is not going to be exact, of course, but I'll follow this for continuity's sake.
So far, AP is an awesome EP. I think I might like it even more than Free Time. First of all, since I installed, I can see fish in my game!
But the best part is that I can have all my spares and their families interact with each other all the time. The apartment complex I'm using has a very large communal area, so there's plenty of space and things to do together on their own.
For example, this pic wasn't posed. I was playing with Tommy's apartment when I looked at what was going on downstairs. You can even see Rosie and Buck being romantic in the background!
This one was also autonomous. Tim and Fantine (Helena and Calvin's daughter)
had never interacted before I took this picture, by the way.
So expect plenty of spare cameos from now on ^^.
And because I can't end a pointless picture post without some shameless toddler spam, here's little Monica being cute:
See you next time!
Can you see what's wrong in the following picture?
I honestly don't understand what happened here. Last time I played with him, Pippin had a good relationship with all his family, including his cousin Tommy. But when I moved him and his family to an apartment lot, I was pretty surprised to find such a creepy want on a CHILD's panel.
I guess Pippin truly believes it's the Broke's fault that his Grandma Lyla is now a zombie!
No matter if it was caused by a glitch or not, this is already giving me a few new ideas for the plot of the next few updates.
Anyway...
As you can see, I'm already playing with the Brokes, hoping to have a new update ready next week. There's a pretty long 4 day weekend coming up in my country (National Holiday - aka our Independence Day), so that'll give a bit of free time to advance my game.
Now that most of my hacks have been updated, I can play *almost* the way I used to before I installed AL. You see, the main reason I installed AL was to have the ceilings and the playground. I wasn't really interested in the "apartment feature" of the EP, until I read that you could actually visit and interact with your neighbors in real time.
And that's what sold that feature to me. I decided I'd try an apartment out with the Brokes, hoping to have my current heir interact on his own with all his extended family and cousins without need to summon them constantly. So, I downloaded an apartment lot from MTS2, decorated its four apartments and moved the Brokes in.
Besides that, I spent a little while "updating" Strangetown. After almost six generations, you can't expect it to look the same as it did back when Beau was young, right? Here's a general view of my current Strangetown.
To avoid Spoilers, I'll just show you a couple of those changes. In this pic you can see the new Specter lot and what used to be the Broke house. Due to story-related reasons, the Brokes left their home and moved to an apartment complex right in the middle of the "Road to Nowhere". The house was demolished and turned into a park, which was donated to the Strangetown people as some kind of "pay" for all the harm that Cosmo did during his "bad years".
While they don't actually believe Olive's story (at least not completely), deep inside they fear that all the bad things that happened to Marsha and Tommy at Takemizu Village could be some sort of punishment for Cosmo's crimes.
Buck, Rosie and their children also moved out of the Specter lot, leaving Lyla the Zombie in charge of the ghosts and spirits in there.
And this is a close up of the remodeled Specter lot. I suck at building (and lack the patience), so I just demolished the middle part of the old house to create two small buildings. On the right, there's Lyla's tiny home (with a private shrine in the back for her late husband, the General). The gravestone surrounded by water is Olive's, of course.
Finally, the building on the left is the Broke Family's crypt. This is where I'll place the heir portraits (plus spouses) and their urns from now on.
This is the crypt's inside.
Poor Lyla the zombie maxed out her creativity skill because I made her paint all those spouse portraits.
Errr... yeah, that's Tommy, in the middle of a dramatic episode :S (he reacts like this every time I make him mourn his mother's grave).
So, now that I'm done remodeling all these lots, I finally moved the Broke family to the apartment complex. One apartment is occupied by Tim, Tommy and Edward (this will be the main apartment I'll play, of course). The second apartment is Wanda, Puck and Cody's home (though Cody's moving out in just one sim day to go to college). The third one is ocuppied by Buck, Rosie, Ophelia, Lyla, Chip and Monica. And the last one has Helena and her huge family.
I have a general idea of the age difference between these sims, so my plan is to age them with the help of Insim according to my mental time line. So, every time I play with Tim's apartment, I'll subtract the days I played from all the families ages (and grow the members up with Insim once they reach the transition age). This is not going to be exact, of course, but I'll follow this for continuity's sake.
So far, AP is an awesome EP. I think I might like it even more than Free Time. First of all, since I installed, I can see fish in my game!
But the best part is that I can have all my spares and their families interact with each other all the time. The apartment complex I'm using has a very large communal area, so there's plenty of space and things to do together on their own.
For example, this pic wasn't posed. I was playing with Tommy's apartment when I looked at what was going on downstairs. You can even see Rosie and Buck being romantic in the background!
This one was also autonomous. Tim and Fantine (Helena and Calvin's daughter)
had never interacted before I took this picture, by the way.
So expect plenty of spare cameos from now on ^^.
And because I can't end a pointless picture post without some shameless toddler spam, here's little Monica being cute:
See you next time!