I shouldn’t be caring about this but I’ve seen this post in the tag twice now - yesterday I was just like “lol” but today I’m like “I can’t control myself” so here we go, let me break it down for you:
1) This is why you use Bodyshop, not CAS, to create sims – you have much more control over how radically their faces change and you can slide between OMG PRESETS!!?!?! (but I’ll get to that in a minute)… rather than sliding specific parts of the facial structure.
2) I’m not sure I’d go as far as putting “HIGHLY” in all-caps, I think it’s more down to how willing you are to go ‘out of your way’ to make these things happen. You can have different last names within the same family, there’s actually several methods of achieving it (the SimBlender, SimPE or even simply making the sims separately and having them move in together without marriage…). You can also have siblings between adults and teens by aging one either up or down.
3) Presets. Yeah. By presets I assume you mean “face templates” – and I dunno, maybe you’ve just decided that they’re the devil and you will forever hate the idea (and that’s fine!) but I feel like you should at least be aware that the ‘presets’ (hereafter “face templates”) can be changed. The standard Maxis ones are fugly, I agree – but there are several others that aren’t: Butterflies & Hurricanes by Joedy76, for example! There’s a collection of face template sets over at sims2defaults, take your pick! Nobody is going to force you to use maxis faces if you don’t want to!
4) I’m not entirely sure in which universe it’s hard to make pets autonomously like each other – pets are like… the simplest creatures in the entire game (have a little sniff, omg we’re bffs!). However, it is correct that you can’t control pets without cheats, but it’s arguably not very hard to type it in (boolProp controlpets on). There is also this magical thing called a userstartup.cheat file in your TS2 directory where you can put in cheats that the game will automatically activate (or deactivate) when you open the game; then you never have to worry about it!
5) Ok, you’ve got me on this one – this is pretty much 100% true, at least about the defaults. Luckily, defaults aren’t hard to find at all.
6) “simple things”? I’ll just leave that questioned like that (that is certainly a conversation for another time) – but I’d argue that perhaps you should reevaluate the quality of the sites you’re downloading things from… in this ‘TS2 day and age’ you’d be pretty hard pressed to find downloads without correct links to meshes – or in most cases, they’ll even be included. Something to think about!
7) Sir, I accept your challenge! *throws glove on floor*
Here’s my “sexy mama” and “handsome husband” – two of the possible founders for my neighborhood, both made by me in Bodyshop:
I know you have no guarantee against me cheating at this or not, you’ll just have to take my word for it… I pressed the baby-button 10 times and took screenshots of them; as adults though, I’m sure you’ll notice – it’s good to keep in mind that children will sometimes look a little derpy (but a lot of the time also very cute!) with disproportionately bred faces, it’s always best to look at the results on adults! Anyway – here are the results:
Two or three of them I would maybe say aren’t “perfect”, but nowhere near “ugly as fuck” – and even if you do count those as ugly, that’s still only 3/10! This is of course very subjective, but one thing that isn’t true is that the breeding will chose a random face template… if your sexy mama and handsome husband has a pure face template face, then yes, there will be very little variety, so like I said in point 1: bodyshooooop. And like I said in point 3: default face templaaaaaates.
(also worth noting is that I think these results would look a lot better if a) I got to change their hair to match their face b) give them some makeup! And c) take them into the game and have them pull a cuter face than the stone cold frozen face of CAS)
8) You did, so let me mention *~default face templates~* again too!
9) Diagonal placing isn’t caused by a mod, but a cheat (boolProp allow45degreeangleofrotation true) – and like I mentioned in point 4) it’s another thing you can put into your userstartup.cheat to have it automatically activate when you start the game. The grid can also be bypassed if you have Mansion & Garden – setquartertileplacement on + ctrl+F lets you place things on quarter of a tile, same as TS3. You can also make the grid completely irrelevant by using boolProp SnapObjectsToGrid false. :)
10) Vague, but yes: in conclusion, The Sims 2 is very limited. It has a lot of potential if you’re willing to dig deeper or experiment with different play-styles, but of course the game is not for everyone – and that’s ok! I think a very worthwhile point though is to remember that The Sims 2 came out in 2004 (or if you count the latest expansion: 2008)… that was 10 (or 6) years ago(!), a lot has happened since the game engine for TS2 was developed and technology is now much more advanced. If created today, could it have been a better game? Yes. If EAxis had employed some of the wonderful people who made mods for TS2, could they have avoided a lot of blatant failures in the game structure? Probably. Is The Sims 2 a shitty game? No. In fact, it is the best-selling PC game of all time. Literally. Followed by The Sims 1, and then another 6 games before TS3’s rank in the same list. Just sayin’. :>
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