I was dreading that I might have the same reaction to 4 as I had to 3. Play it for 45 mins and decide I entirely hate it. Happily that did not happen. I played 23 of my 48 hours. I made a self sim, played her for a while, got her pretty decently up the career track, made a best friend, and entirely failed at any romantic relationships for her. Slightly discouraged, I decided to give building a shot.
Building and decorating are some of my favorite things to do in 2, so I hoped I would enjoy it in 4 as well. For the first hour or so I struggled without the eye dropper tool. I had the tooltip lessons turned on, but it hadn't seen fit to tell me about my much needed eyedropper tool. Quite aggravating until I found the menu at the top of the screen. I had briefly played around with the room dragging tool, and it's a bunch of fun.
I was intrigued by the styled rooms, and I quickly found myself browsing the Gallery for interesting ones. After a quick google search, I learned how to upload rooms myself. After falling in love with the kitchen wall cabinets, I decided to make a kitchen. I went with some green industrial looking cabinets, and the rest of the kitchen evolved from there. I uploaded it to the Gallery.
To really get into building, I decided to recreate my popular Katrina Cottages. It's been a few years since I made them originally for TS2, and since then the architect has slimmed down her offerings. I had a heck of a time finding the original floor plan images for the discontinued houses. I did eventually track them down. As it turns out, a few of my houses were duplicates of each other, so instead of my original 25, I made 21 cottages. Since many of the houses are modular and they are all part of a set, I used the room push/pull tool to quickly make the entire set.
After each house, I saved it to My Library and started work on the next. It was pretty fun. I had to fix a few things with a few of the houses, and it was simple with the 'Place Lot' tool. Everything loaded quickly, and I wasn't bothered with the load screens, having came straight from TS2. Once everything was the way I wanted it, I uploaded each of the 21 little cottages. They range from 1 bed / 1 bath up to 5 bed / 4 bath. Most are under $10k, and all are under $20k. All have furnished kitchens and bathrooms, but nothing else. They are all on the small 20 x 15 lot size. You should be able to find them either by #katrinacottages or my Origin ID Phaenoh.
So I suppose the real question now is, was it a good enough experience to make you want to buy TS4 or (gasp!) switch over from TS2?
ReplyDeleteI did buy it, because I found a fantastic sale I couldn't pass up, but I haven't actually played it again since. I've been busy, but I'm sure I'll get back to it sometime.
ReplyDeleteI didn't hate ts3 though and played that one for some time. Started with the CE version of the basegame, sine that one was cheaper then the normal version. Bought then every ep and sp, except katy perry sweet treats and diesel stuff. Added also tons of mods to it, such as the famous mods from twallan (mastercontroller, register, etc) I grabbed ts4 too, but then in an other way if you know what i mean, cause i wasn't entirely sure if i like it. Well, can't say that i like it, not as ts2 and ts3. My biggest problem with ts4 is the transport and how you move around from your house to a communityplace or to an other neighbourhood. You bring up the map, click the destination, zippythezap and poof you're there. In ts2 and ts3 you call a taxi or drive yourself to it. But in ts4 you don't have a car and there are no taxi's as well. There is even no option to walk to it like in ts2. A other thing which i don't like is that "aahh" what a sim does in CAS. And the menu with those big buttons looks like a visual novel.It's a step back and actually you can say it's a watered down version of ts2. Currently i'm back playing ts2 again, now hanging around at strangetown. Also planning to play ts3 again. ts4 will probably be played occasionally. For me ts4 is the weakest game of them all.
ReplyDelete