Scenery in the Sims 3 is absolutely gorgeous (especially in Winter)

One of the things that drew me to Sims 3 was the scenery.

There's supposed to be a boardwalk leading out over the water here...😳

Into a New Freeplay

I've been letting my sims do their own thing, dictating who they're attracted to...and well, Tosh is the "odd-man out"; no hearts when it comes to Jugs attraction towards him on her end...and well neither did Meg, so well...guess who enters the fray. Evidently there is no attraction when one sim is an adult and the other is a "young adult"...probably due to the difference in ages.

Tosh, on the other hand, is a taciturn, stern sort and well, nothing appears to faze him in the slightest. However, there is one person, whom he's served with that has always sparked his interest, a former squadron-mate by the name of Maegyn "Irish" O'Bannon. She is only two years younger than he is and they were tight.

Working on a bit of a Freeplay to test my Sims.

I may have to yank my folder again, mainly because my Bakery oven and my pizza oven from Monte Vista world pack has quit working. So I'm going to have to take them out and reinstall them again. Plus it will give me a chance to go ahead and look up all the cc that I used for my sims and make a sims 3 pack for them with all the cc.

I've been doing a bit of a freeplay with "Jugs" and "Animal". Animal's retired and has moved to Hidden Springs. Of course Jugs shows up on his doorstep less than a week after he's separated from the Navy and well, Captain Kimber "Jugs" Benton has just told him that she'd put in her separation papers about a week after he did. So her ETS (Expiration Term (of) Service) came in less than a week after his...so she decided to look him up.

He thought Jugs was aiming for flag-rank. But no...she's got other things in mind.

Always Keep a Backup of any CC that you download...

in a separate location other than your active games folder that you run Sims 3 from.

You never know when you have to purge your active games folder thanks to some bad cc running around out there. It should be standard operating procedure for games that you employ custom content and mods for.

Thanks to the Arezzo cabinet, I ended up recently having to purge my active games folder including all the cc that was in there. I was luckily able to recover my games thanks to having a backup folder filled with backup copies of every cc that I have downloaded since getting this computer.

I also plan to dump a copy of my backup folder onto a portable SSD drive that I will back up every three months since I will have downloaded more custom content by that time.

DO NOT, it bears repeating, DO NOT have your active games folder be the ONLY repository for your Sims 3 custom content and mods. With custom content creators taking their ball and going home and yanking their cc off the internet, sometimes having an external SSD backup of ALL your downloaded custom content is the only gameplan that you can do.

Creating Sims from my Favorite TV Show

Looks like I gotta lot of work cut out for me. There are some characters missing from this picture. Namely the characters in the first season.

...namely one Meg Austin...

I'll probably be doing this for quite some time since I want to get the facial features of each sim absolutely correct to the TV show's actors. Secondly to start off, I'm not going to dive right into the JAG show's characters, I'm going to delve into my OCs from my JAG fanfiction. The first being Commander Kimber "Jugs" Benton, the XO of VF-41 Black Aces, then I'll work slowly into my OC Commander Toshio "Animal" Nakamura. Those will be the first two sims I create from MY JAG fanfiction. Then I'll get into the other characters like Lieutenant Commander Meg Austin, Commander Harmon Rabb Jr. and Major Sarah "Mac" Mackenzie.

I've created Captain Kimber "Jugs" Benton. I miss my Navy Uniforms I made for my JAG Sims - unfortunately GIMP is a royal pain to work with trying to get transparencies and I currently don't want to make the effort of doing them up in uniform at the moment so in civvies they'll be.

I worked on what would be "Admiral" Toshio "Animal" Nakamura, retired Navy Admiral, former Chief of Naval Operations and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and former F-14 Tomcat naval aviator. I think he's pretty much the way that I want him to be. He's not a handsome guy, been a part of some pretty nasty bar-brawls and bears the scars of such altercations. He's tough as nails. And I can either have him (depending on the story) go with Jugs or with Meg. I've set him up as an "adult"; not a young adult, so I can either have him go "young adult" for anything between Lieutenant and Captain (O-6) vs. adult for "Rear Admiral lower-half through Fleet Admiral"

NOW, I can go on to the next group of sims that I have to do in order to get my JAGSims back. I'm going onto Commander (now Captain) Harmon Rabb Jr. The toughest part of getting Harm correct in The Sims is trying to find a damned picture that has David James Elliott NOT smiling and facing the camera straight on. Does he EVER not smile in his pictures? Why? Because what that expression does, is it crinkles his eyes and makes me unable to get a proper read on what his eyes look like in a relaxed position. It affects the true shape of his eyes and makes it harder to get a true image of what he looks like.

Amidst the plethora of boy-band hairs that seem to inundate Sims 3, I have to find a hair that resembles this:

(to be continued)

Been Taking a Bit of a Break.

The screen-capping for the Legacy is taking quite a bit of time and there are a lot of things to build in the town. It's a time-consuming task. Frankly my mind comes up with more ideas than I can conceivably end up putting down in a fashion that this game is able to support.

Frankly there's actually too many things that my mind comes up with that are near-impossible to do without my knowing how to mesh; creating new clothing and other items, as well as poses that I end up having to learn how to do. It's far more than my brain at this age can manage as far as I know so far. So I've been playing a freeplay and well, this is what it's come up with: I'm currently playing with 10 sims that are familiar Sunset Valley sims as well as a couple of my OCs.

Right now, River McIrish is pregnant - no, she and Haruo are not married so technically this is a baby out-of-wedlock. The whole population of Sunset Valley other than the proprietor of Aleister's and the ten sims that I'm in control of have disappeared. Absolutely no idea what happened to them.

The ten have taken over Sunset Valley's recreation center and turned it into their temporary home. And it's a situation where they are holed up in there, only going out at night while trying to keep under cover of darkness to do what they need to do. At least one of them is a werewolf, Samantha Grey from University Life is also in this along with her boyfriend Shigeo.

Clarissa is wondering if they're going to ever get out of this situation. She's Phil's girlfriend...or wants to be, considering that Phil is a few bricks short of a retaining wall.

I'm not sure what the monsters are going to be or if there are even going to be monsters in this...or whether the antagonists are going to be aliens. Who knows at this point. I'm just winging it.

At least River and Haruo are together.

And the proprietor of the elixir shop is Maren.

I Play Sims 3 (It's the only The Sims game I will ever play)

This game came out in 2009 and ran till 2014, so there's not a whole lot of new stuff directly from EA. However what keeps this game alive is the thriving community of modders and cc-creators who make certain that this game goes directions that the developers could only dream of. In some ways, they're doing it out of the "love of the game" and frankly, that's where one's best work comes out.

People like Fresh Prince whose dream cars make our Sims' existence more comfortable. Why bother running around in a Vorn P223 when a Mercedes S-class is there for your Sims to buy.

There are modders like Spherefish whose Hunting Mod has pretty much turned my game into a reign of terror for all the "small pets" that aren't cats and dogs. I've been trying to get Spherefish to add in horses, because they seem to over-populate the game, but well...y'know how that goes with most people. How dare you hunt horses!!!

Sims 3 is one of the best life-simulation games out there. In fact until recently The Sims was the ONLY life-simulation on the market. Sims 3 out of all of them went the "no holds barred; let's see how far we can push our game development". We had open world that we could send our sims scurrying everywhere trying to locate collectibles. Sims 4 may have collectibles, but with loading screens all over the place, the effect is a disjointed mess. Sims 3 sims could go anywhere on the map hunting for gemstones, seeds and other things. That's what kept Sims 3 interesting.

Sims 4 on the other hand took a giant step backwards. Sure the sims may not look like potatoes...

...but they cut out a ton of stuff, opting to play it safe for the parental controls getting rid of burglars and other stress inducing life experiences.

"Oh, ermagerd...burglars are like sooooo terrifying...whatever will we do? We mustn't traumatize the poor kiddies. Everything has to be a pastel colored rainbow of happy..."-infested crock of shit.

I prefer my Sims 3 raunchy and untamed, like Sims 2, but with more freedom to explore.

See that big lovely open space? Your sims could explore every bit of it. And that's why Sims 4 was such a major disapppointment.