Posted in Gates Family on September 30, 2008| 8 Comments »
I would normally have waited until Wednesday to post this, but since I have almost 20 posts saved up in wordpress, I wanted to catch my posting up a bit closer to where I am in the gameplay. So I’ll be posting a few extra entries this week.
Orion had considered moving in with his older sister Clover after college, but now that she had a roommate/boyfriend, Orion instead bought a house next to her.
Posted in Gates Family, Sutton Family on September 29, 2008| 7 Comments »
Cecil Sutton couldn’t believe he’d been so stupid and neglected his studies. Now he’d been kicked out of school and forced to return to Pine Hollow with no degree. But he was determined that Sunny would never be disappointed in him and he would work as hard as he needed to prove himself worthy of marrying her. So when he arrived back in town, he applied for a loan and bought a small house.
Posted in Craig Family, Lloyd Family on September 26, 2008| 9 Comments »
Julie Craig couldn’t be happier with her house. Sure, it was small, but it was just the right size for her.
Posted in Gates Family on September 24, 2008| 8 Comments »
Clover Gates finally gave in to her loneliness and asked Eldon Watson to move in with her. She had wanted to be a single girl on the town, making it on her own and not tied down to anyone, but she couldn’t deny that it got boring living by herself.
Posted in Uncategorized on September 23, 2008| 10 Comments »
I’m not playing with witches in Pine Hollow (the only “creature” type that I really like are the aliens just because I personally LOVE aliens and anything to do with them), so I try to remember to use the Visitor Controller to ban witches from my community lots. But sometimes I forget the first time I play a community lot since AL was installed and it does give me a bit of humor in between the annoyance (annoyance because my game pauses for a minute whenever a witch is about to appear on the lot and because the witches keep messing around with the weather).
Anyway, a few pictures I wanted to share (although these are sneak peeks into the future because these are from Round 6).
Posted in Lloyd Family on September 22, 2008| 7 Comments »
Despite the fact that her parents were back together, Carrie still had a little unresolved issues that bubbled out of her whenever she visited her parents’ house.
“I just don’t understand how you could do that to Daddy,” Carrie said. Now that she was married, Carrie saw her mother’s infidelity as a much bigger betrayal than she had before. She couldn’t imagine hurting River like that. And after the kiss she had witnessed between River and Suzie back in high school, the idea of cheating stung deeply.
“I was confused,” Michelle explained. “I just…I don’t know. I never meant for it to happen…”
Posted in Craig Family on September 19, 2008| 7 Comments »
Dave Craig was so proud of his oldest daughter Julie, having graduated early. He always knew she was smart and would go far in life, but he still felt himself swelling up with pride at the sight of her.
Posted in Smith Family on September 17, 2008| 11 Comments »
Life continued on at the Smith house that winter without many problems. Aidan was preparing his next group of teens (William Lloyd, Suzie Craig, and Sarah Smith) to finish up their studies and head off to college, while Pierre continued his dance classes three nights a week. During the day, Pierre liked to join the art class for a little painting and listen to Zane or Zared plink away at the piano.
Posted in Gates Family, Lloyd Family on September 15, 2008| 8 Comments »
Now that River had graduated college with a degree in economics, Joseph took the opportunity to lecture him on how running the family business was a big opportunity and that EVERYONE in town would be counting on him to supply all of the food they needed to survive and grow strong and should he have a bad crop, little kids all over Pine Hollow would go to bed hungry and crying about how mean River Gates couldn’t keep up with the supply and demand of the local economy. Joseph was trying to make a point about how important the job of local grocer was, but he may have taken things just a bit too far and kind of freaked River out.
Posted in Uncategorized on September 12, 2008| 5 Comments »
I’ve been playing a little this week and getting myself reacquainted with my families. Also, I remembered that I had played through all of Round 5 before I went on hiatus, so those pictures were already waiting in my photobucket account. I’ve typed up the entries for each house, and you can be on the lookout for those over the next few weeks. I’m currently playing Round 6 and am watching as the previous kids of Pine Hollow are starting families and having kids of their own. It’s great to see a new generation starting! And I like that more of my businesses are being taken over by playable Sims so I can actually run them.
My copy of Apartment Life arrived yesterday (although the expected delivery date wasn’t until today, so I was pleasantly surprised!) and I installed it last night. I already completely LOVE the winding staircase. That was exactly what I needed for the Smith household, for the staircase leading up to the third floor, where the family actually lives. The previous stairs kept causing traffic jams because of the way they had to be positioned to fit into the space. The winding staircase makes things much better.
But one thing I’m sad about: AL has already messed up my plans for a retirement home. I had downloaded this lot and was planning to modify it and turn it into a complex of four apartments so some of my elders could live there (some would choose to stay home with their children and grandchildren, but others would want to move out if they can afford to). But then I saw this problem described on the Sims 2 BBS (also mentioned by someone else here), where tombstones are disappearing whenever all of the residents of an apartment die. Which is a major problem for my retirement home because of course the Sims in the retirement apartments are going to die and I want to be able to send their graves to my community cemetery. So until this problem gets fixed–I think having a dialogue box pop up to ask where we want to send our tombstones would be a great idea (and of course, making sure that the tombstones actually end up there instead of disappearing completely)–I won’t be turning the retirement home into actual apartments. I’ll still have the retirement home, but they’ll be just one combined household with fake apartments instead.
I’m also going to work Random Occurrence Scenarios into my gameplay this round. I had always intended to, but never got around to it. I started out with this file which was based off of Jade’s (of Isle of Thyme) ROS file, but made some changes based on how I play and other random occurrences I could think of. (Also, I use Hook’s Randomizer to select a ROS. I made some changes so that it would also give me a number for how many ROS’s I would have in the round [I set the maximum at 4 because I don’t particularly want an ROS to occur in every single house each time], which house number an ROS would occur in [houses are numbered in the order that I play them] and then what number Sim the ROS would happen to if needed [as in the case of a death].) Some ROS’s could be good, others could be bad. I like to have the unexpected happen to shake things up for my game and not make everything so perfect and easy. 🙂
I’ve also been cleaning up my downloads folder. My game starts up in half the time now (five minutes compared to ten) because I got rid of a ton of things I never used. I’m still not done, still need to go through the clothes and hairstyles.
Pine Hollow 