Do you play SimCity 4 and The Sims?

[Star21Sim 5]

I play both.  SimCity 4 I like because I'm creating my own world.  The Sims I like playing, because I'm living in the world.  These games are reality in life, and also a good learning tool.  

[SimRico 968]

I play sims on the computer and on android. last time Ive played, allbmy sims were locked up on "barney fife charfes"

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

The Sims is a total waste of time.  Haven't played it for years.

[Turjan 1,048]

I don't really play the Sims. I always tell myself I should try to just see how it is, but I always end it quickly after starting the game up (and you have lots of time to think about things during that start).

 

To not totally waste everyone's time, Sims 2 Ultimate Collection is free on Origins till end of the month. Just redeem the code I-LOVE-THE-SIMS .

[Tropod 144]

SC4 yes. Sims no, played sims once & found it very very repetitive repetitive.....

[JP Schriefer 5,591]

I just played The Sims to build houses

[Cheddar 119]

^Agreed.

I do believe that was the original purpose of the Sims. Build houses and the Sims were just there to evaluate the builds.

The actual game itself, controlling the Sims and all can get quite repetitive and boring.

[jmsepe 2,039]

Both but I stopped Sims 3 at the moment. In sims, I mostly try to create a family and simulate it to run until the nth generation while making sure they all reach the highest position in their chosen field of work. I am bad at making houses, btw. Haha. 

 

In sc4, I just try to create whatever comes to mind, I am a bad city planner and I love traffic. Congested cities with terrible road networks is just something I like. I mostly just let the city grow on its own and make some changes when there are already problems that needs solution.

[eufl 133]

I think I need to give my two cents into this...

 

Well I like the Sims, I play Sims 2 as well as Sims 3.

There is a big missunderstanding about this dollhouse game, and yeah, I call it so, and I call my Sims my dollies. Like every dollhouse game it has no restrictions how to play. What you will do is exactly, what you want, you are the one to rule everything, and to make these rules working. So the most Sims players play their own challenges. For example playing a homeless during winter or playing a life after some zombie apocalypse can be very funny, and there are thousands of threads where people explain their rules.

 

What I really like is the fact, that Sims is a game, that works without violence, a game, that doesn´t simulate war. Like in SimCity the game wants you to grow things instead of destroying only. And like in our community here, the Sims community is utterly creative, and it is possible to customize the game and it´s look completely to your own likes.

 

In Sims 2 I started with building houses, mostly framework or rowhouse style. With Sims 3 I did another step last year. Working with modding tools is very similar to SC4, there is a program S3pe, that works like our reader, and the EA made CreateAWorld-tool is something like the terraformer. So I started playing around with these tools to make my own dream of a typical south hessian town.

You wouldn´t imagine, how it feels to create a town in full 3D, with masses of details, building every house form the basement to the roof. And related to SC4 I only can say: good bye grid...

 

But I should show, what I mean, here some pictures:

 

The old Jewish lane with the synagogue (the white house in the left middle):

 

The historic marketplace with the town hall:

 

The townhall inside:

 

Backyards and gardens:

 

Google Street View:

The - unfinished - train station:

 

Nature:

 

More of it:

 

I think, these pictures can show, what is able with Sim 3 and the CAW. And I hope, you like them.
 

[Prophet42 1,503]

Nice pictures!  I especially like the nature pictures.

 

I never did get into the Sims.  From Maxis, I really only play the SimCity series (totally skipped SimCity Societies), and maybe a little bit of Spore on the Wii.  Once I played SimCity 2000, I was hooked for life.

[Jim14409 448]

I play SC4 regularly and at times excessively one could accuse, but have never played The Sims. Somewhere early on I got the idea that the game was for pre-adolescent girls so never investigated. Since then when I read anything about The Sims my eyes glaze and I fast forward. The pics in the post above look rather inviting but other posts sound rather uninviting so guess I will continue to pass for now unless someone has a convincing argument in favor of the game.

[Lazarou Monkey Terror 1,838]

I play Sim City 4 and my missus (in my profile picture) plays the Sims. I manage the city and she manages the virtual dynasty that lives in it! Some day it would be great to integrate our two worlds.

[Fantozzi 4,068]

Five or six years ago my daughter played Sims2. But she didn't like to build up houses or cities, she wanted to create and dress up sims. So I builded the houses for her.

,

 

In search for new content for Sims2 houses on the web I stumbled upon Simtropolis. This way I became interested in sc4. If my daughter hadn't played sims2 I probably never would have played SC4.

[Star21Sim 5]

That is so cool, thanks for answering.

[monkeywater 910]

The actual game itself, controlling the Sims and all can get quite repetitive and boring.

 

Played the sims 1 years ago.

 

Easy to beat, really happy player, best jobs, best money.  Just establish a routine.

 

I had a routine down that would max all stats but social.  Social I would enter another house and invite myy character over.  These other sims would get hungry, have to piss, etc during socialization, but because my dude was socializing and getting laid outside his game, his stats were never affected except social.  Re-enter his game and all stats were maxed. 

 

Do this and the guy would get promoted pretty much every day, he reached the top of every job and then I got bored with the game. 

[BlakeMW 84]

I used to play the Sims, a long time ago. I think it was the Sims 2 with the university expansion and some other expansion, I think it introduced vampires and sims could go to the shops. I remember one of the big things with Sims 2 was you could make hideously deformed sims, and they would pass on their genetics to their offspring.

 

It could be entertaining but it would get repetitive if you didn't mix things up a bit. I remember one of my games, I made a house which consisted of a 'phone booth' (a 1x1 room with a door and a phone), and a park bench. That was my sim's house. He would sleep on the bench and seduce passing women. He could use the phone to order pizza (or just eat at work). He could go into town and do stuff in town to raise some stats which couldn't be raised on his park bench.

 

I would sometimes 'white picket fence' as well and I found it quite engaging. The Sims is pretty easy, and as a rule every expansion pack makes it even easier. The one which introduced life goals meant you could easily perma-platinum your sim's mood, although being nearly permanently platinum was pretty easy anyway for a skilled gamer, it is a game which is readily gamed. Normally sims raised from babies could be pretty much maxed out in all their skills by adulthood.

 

But when I was bored with white picket fencing, I would so stuff like make hobo or mad scientist sims. Killing sims was always entertaining as well, fire and drowning  being ever popular, also bricking them up so they starve to death. If you killed a lot of sims you needed ghost management strategies as ghosts could be a real downer on moods, and could even scare sims to death. Unfortunately you could not kill babies/children as the welfare lady would kidnap them before they got low enough to die. Babies were in fact fire proof (leading me to wonder why sims didn't make stuff out of babies), and if you tried to incinerate a child alive in a room of burning furniture with no valid entrances, the childcare worker would somehow teleport the child out. Since you couldn't kill children, an alternative, and a great challenge was genociding the adults and running a child only household - you could definitely do it with teenagers who could have after school jobs and earn money from home with painting and stuff (you had to be careful to not skip school too much, because that could also lead to kidnapping). Children under stressed situations would constantly be in danger of the dreaded welfare lady, and having lots of children in a household could make for quite a challenging game.

 

Sims could accidentally die as well, I remember one Sim zapped himself to death trying to repair the dishwashing machine. Sims could be killed by falling satellites (while stargazing, I think). Sims could be abducted while using the telescope, and be returned pregnant (males only). If you played conservatively nanny-style you could avoid all these dangers, but if you played recklessly and still tried to make a good life for your sims the game could be unpredictable.

 

So it's one of those games which is about as entertaining as you make it. Boring if you just try to maximize stats, entertaining if you do things like hobos, child only households, serial killers and so on.

[mrodgers 1]

Sims 3/4 is what led me to try SC4.

 

My youngest daughter loves The Sims.  We are tech deficient and only had an old desktop in the basement from 2005.  My brother-in-law gave the girls his old laptop with missing keys, etc, and the youngest was excited, she wanted to play The Sims (had been trying out the freeplay on her old iPod and such.)  I got her Sims 3 just months before Sims 4 came out.  So, had to get her Sims 4 not much later.

 

My laptop I bring home from work isn't the greatest.  I could load Sims 3 since she is now heavily into playing Sims 4 (ie, I could use the Sims 3 disk.)  I played around with it a little bit, mostly designing and building houses and such as others have said.  I could only get so far before the laptop just couldn't handle it any more (start the game loading, go eat dinner, clean up dinner, go shovel the driveway, come back and wait the remaining few minutes left for it to load kind of slow.)

 

I was searching around the net looking for stuff to download for my daughter.  I came across a post about SC2000 being free on Origin.  I downloaded it, tried it out, was a little lost, and glanced online to seek info on how to run.  That's when I started seeing how SC5 sucks and the comparisons to SC4.  Started reading about SC4 and ended up buying it.

 

Still haven't created anything other than a few starter cities and downloading some regions.  I've been working on creating a region that is quite large (20x28 city tiles) but I'm having trouble with it working with such huge files on the laptop I have available.  Waiting for the refund check to grab up a current spec laptop.  I want to mock up where I live, western PA.  I don't plan on recreating perfectly, but I want to play around with all the little towns along the Allegheny River and such.  I have a pretty good map of rivers and streams from north of I-80 where I live down to Pittsburgh, but don't have any elevation.  Not worried about the flatness, I just want the rivers.  I have a custom config file to center all the towns I want to create, but using the config file, the map renders all flat with no water.  If I create (sc4Mapper) the region without a config file, all the rivers and streams are rendered, but the city tiles split up the small cities into multiple tiles.  I don't know why I can't use my own config file where I have medium city tiles tossed around in strategic places to center the small towns on a large tile.

[Star21Sim 5]

Good answers from everyone.