Introduction, Part 1: The House

Welcome to The Crombies! You're probably wondering what the hell this is, and who could blame you? Here's as concise an explanation as I am prepared to make:

The Sims 2 is a computer game, sequel to the extremely popular original, The Sims. Which you should have been able to surmise. The Sims is basically a life simulator, you design people and design houses, then move said people into houses. After that, there's no specific goal, no 'beating' the game. Just doing whatever you want with your invented family until they die of old age or get killed by something inexplicably random. Your sims can do all sorts of things, from getting jobs to humping each other. They've also got to satisfy various needs such as hunger, energy, social, hygiene, et cetera.

What I'm going to do is play this game and record the unfolding story here by way of screenshots.

But I'm not exactly going to be playing this game though, oh no. You see, although your sims will obey your every whim (most of the time), if they have no specific orders they will go about their own business quite happily. I will be recording what they do faithfully for the remainder of this blog until all members of the family die. My intervention with their affairs will be minimal, as there are things that the sims will not do such as paying bills or ordering groceries without the player's interaction and they NEED to do these things. I'll also get them to do other, more interesting, things they won't do by themselves for the sake of entertainment. But, otherwise, they are free to do as they please.

The four sims we will be following are based on myself (Jack) and three friends (Catriona, Pyke, and Nooreen). Oh, and a fictional cat called Rupert because real Catriona insisted. We'll learn more about them in the second part of this introduction.

Moving onwards to the house in which our gang will be living (which was somehow christened Rainbow Cottage).



A nice, bland, two-story affair with a swimming pool.



This house is loosely based on my flat. So, besides the two bedrooms in the foreground and the staircase at the back leading to a purely fictional first floor, this is about as close as I could manage to getting the flat similar. Sims don't wash their clothes so there are no washing machines and they don't have DVD racks either so I had to make do with bookcases. I also left out the storage cupboards because Johnny Sim would be all 'What is dis, I has no use for dis' and throw a tantrum. Some of the rooms are also something like twice as big for a number of reasons:

1) Sims are pretty temperamental about being in small rooms and find it very difficult to move if there are limited means of getting from point A to point B.

2) It's not as easy to take pictures of the interiors of small rooms as it is in big rooms as all the border-room clutter gets in the way.

Here's a schematic! (click for large)



I realise now that I could have got the whole house in if I'd just rotated my viewpoint. D'oh!

Other differences from reality: there's a computer in the spare room (top-right), Catriona's craft things have been replaced with a craft-kit thing for building toys which is very apt. Who's Catriona? Wait until you read the next post. Other than all these small modifications, things are more or less the same.



Well, OK, my keyboard is now an upright piano and the TV is approximately three thousand times larger. Moving on to the first floor...



It's rather empty at the moment, I'm considering adding a robot-making kit somewhere, because that could be fun. But for now what we have, moving from left to right, is a second bathroom because sims have bladders like leaky water balloons, an improbably placed jacuzzi which clips right into the wall of the ground floor bathroom, a litter box for Rupert, an alien rape machine- ah- telescope, a wee mouse toy for the cat, and finally the stairs leading down to the ground floor. Note the statue in front of them. Nifty I think.



Finally, here is a hole that reputedly goes straight to Hell from whence a great fiery demon shall drag himself, breathing flames fueled by sin and death, ready to cast all of humanity into the abyss. Or perhaps a dog did it. I guess we'll never know.