The Sims/Headscratchers

• So if bubble blowers are the equivalent of bongs in the Sims world, does that make those bubble wands the children play with the Sim equivalent of joints?
  • They're probably more like candy cigarettes
    • They're the equivalent of bubble blowers that kids play with in real life.
• The Romance aspiration in The Sims 2 can be really unrealistic at times. They will want to bed as many Sims as possible...but go nuts if any of their bed buddies hooks up with someone else, even if the Sim in question was cheating on a spouse/lover to be with them! Yes, I understand people are hypocrites in real life, but there needs to be some sort of Open Relationship or Friends with Benefits option.
  • There's a mod for that.
    • There's another mod by JM Pescado that makes it so that most/many Romance sims don't get jealous and most Pleasure Sims only get jealous if the cheater was actually engaged or married to them. Some are still hypocrites though.
• Sims want hot tubs in a game where hot tubs do not exist. Maybe it's a bizarre variant of I Want My Jetpack...
  • That was just a case of shameless product placement. The patch included that wish because the next expansion included Hot Tubs. "Want to satisfy your Sim's wish? Buy the new expansion!". What bugs Me, is that with the expansion installed, my Sims have yet to wish for a hot tub, when previous to having the expansion, they kept wanting that damn hot tub every day.
    • Fortunately, more recent patches allow those who upload 50 memories to the Sims site to get a free downloadable hot tub.
• Why don't Sims react to certain events? For example, I had a married lesbian couple in one game. One of them had an affair with her wife's brother, and got pregnant by him. The wife never questioned it. Huh? Does she think girls just randomly get pregnant or that her wife got an AI?
  • Unless the Sim actually watches them whilst they do it/flirt/kiss, they don't realize they are being cheated on.
    • Not completely true(at least not in TS2). If one Sim is on a date with another and the cuckolded Sim sees them - even if the cheater is all alone and not doing anything out of the ordinary! - they immediately know they're being cheated on.
  • It's still makes no sense in certain situations, such as the one described.
  • It depends on what's being done. For example, if a Sim cheats on their partner by having sex with another Sim, the Sim being cheated on will immediately know if they are anywhere on the lot. But with socials like flirting and kissing, the Sim being cheated on must be in the room to know (children should be kept out too, as the Sim being cheated on can know from them). Also, if the 2nd lover leaves the Sim a bouquet of flowers and the Sim who was cheated on reads it, they will also know.
    • What gets me is that my Sim was on the computer and his sister walks in and begins to freak out, saying that he was cheating on his boyfriend. Sure, she was an excitable Sim, but still.
• Yes, there are Game Mods for this too, but this troper is annoyed that TS3 does not support more than 5 Traits out of the box. Seriously, EA, what kind of personality-deficient buffs work at your office that you can describe them with only five adjectives? I don't know anyone who can be accurately captured with less than seven. The traits system itself was a major step in the right direction (as opposed to the silly points system of the second game), but you didn't take it far enough.
  • I seem to recall at least one interview where the dev team cited Quirks in GURPS for one of the things that inspired the trait system; it's likely an artifact of that (Which, in turn, is likely an artifact of the fact that GURPS is notoriously pentaphilic)
• The length of the Child life stage in The Sims 3. Beyond just children being cute, it's actually a pretty significant life stage, as it provides a good opportunity to practice skills that will be more useful in the Teen and Young Adult stages, as well as having a fair number of unique options -- even more once Generations comes out. The problem being that on any lifespan setting other than "Epic", it's so short as to render this effectively meaningless.
  • I also find it too short. Especially since childhood is the cutest and most fun stage for me.
  • Fixed in Generations: You can adjust each length of life stage separately.
    • Additionally or actually fixed as of a patch that came around the time of Generations. My vanilla Sims 3 game (plus mods, none of which affect aging and none of which are used in my main game) now allows a lot of new options, including adjusting the length of life stages (in days) within and beyond the basic lifespan settings.
• What's with the way the Sims act in 3? They reach Uncanny Valley a lot, especially Mortimer. Is he mentally sane, or just weird?
• What's with the design changes between the ages? Most of the time, their hair and clothing don't look anything like you'd expect.
  • Truth in Television. Some people grow up and look next to nothing like they did when they were younger.
• Curfew. It can be really unsettling at times. A teenager can be sitting outside his house, on the sidewalk doing homework, and the police will get you. But you can be inside the pool all night, with no problem.
  • Hell, a teenager can be standing around with their parent (the Police Commissioner, incidentally) and still get picked up. Then watch as the Chief of Police sprints after a patrol car all the way home.
• Mary-Sue is not a Mary Sue. There's a very low chance that the creators of the game even know what Mary Sue means. No one I've met outside the internet does. The parody of the "perfect" suburban life is a common trope (look at Desperate Housewives for the same kind of thing) but that is not the same kind of perfection as the Mary Sue archetype. If they were trying to parody the archetype, they wouldn't have made her a middle-aged lobbyist at level 1 in her career track. On that note, there's nothing in canon to suggest that Angela is the cheerleader who picked on you in high school. It's not her fault that her parents neglected her sister and "patient and dutiful" does not a Mary Sue make (or a mean girl, or a preppy princess.) She dreams of being a fishing boat captain. You know who gets turned in a Sue the most in the fandom? Lilith, the special snowflake goth who's soooo much cooler and badass. By the same people who accuse her mother and sister of it.
  • Mary Sue is a perfectionist. She probably wants to be a Mary Sue. And playing Lilith and Angela is boring for me, since I see Lilith as a Jerk Sue and Angela as a Purity Sue. Your Mileage May Vary, of course.
    • It's the opposite for this troper. I see Angela as being a Stepford Smiler and Lilith as being a Broken Bird. They're both interesting to raise in game, but a lot of people are too harsh on Angela. Like in real life, two people can have very different reactions to the same situation (in this case, their dysfunctional family).
    • There's nothing in the game that says Mary-Sue is a perfectionist.
  • It might not even be the Star Trek Fanfic-inspired definition, but rather the classic use of the name where Mary Sue brought up connotations of a 50s-suburbia style high school girl (Pleasantville is one work that [author edit: almost definitely coincidentally] combines the two definitions).
    • Exactly. Mary Sue, Skip, Don and Betty are all cheesy old-fashioned sounding names that were also used in the Pleasantville movie. I'd say there's a snowball's chance in hell that anybody who worked on that movie was thinking of the fannish definition though, so no the movie was not combining the terms.
• Anyone else a bit unsettled by when your children and toddlers age? You make them so cute and expect them to look a certain way, but they end up looking....
  • I think the creators try to make the game somewhat realistic and well, that is Truth in Television. Some parents do envision their kids growing up to look one way and their kid grows up to look like something totally different.
• For some reason it drives me ABSOLUTELY CRAZY that Sims don't pull their pants down/hike their skirts up when they sit on the toilet. I'm well aware that the game just isn't built for clothing to shift around on the Sim like that, but it still causes me disproportionate amounts of annoyance.
  • This troper noticed they don't even pee - there's no urine. Also why is their urine apparently clear, despite them never drinking water?
  • Perhaps the creators did that on purpose to keep the game at a T rating?
  • Think about this: the developers at EA have to fix all the bugs and glitches while preparing the content and new animations for the next expansion packs. Do you really think they'd spend that much time on such a minor detail?! Think about the varying skirt lengths, too.
    • If they spent THAT much time on the pants thing, simmers would go absolutely berserk!
• It is a little weird how Sims still keep a relationship bar for random Sims who they were served once by (like waiters or pizza delivery people.) It really clogs the relationship panel with all these random NPC's who in Real Life you would rarely contact again.
  • It's weird, but surprisingly realistic. I actually struck up a conversation with a girl in a bar once. My opening line was, "Hey, I saw you working the coffee machine in Starbucks once". I'd only ever been there that one time.
• What's with the lack of an afro in the third game? The other two had it.
  • Most Game Developers Are White?
  • More like "What's with the lack of hairstyles period"? There are so few choices, especially for male Sims. Also pretty much every hairstyle seems to be for straight hair - there are very few for kinky, wavy, curly, or any other variations.
• Anyone else bugged by social services lack of care for teenage Sims? Also why can't you adopt a teen Sim?
  • They are much more self sufficient on their own and can legally hold a job until they grow up. But to move in, they merely need citizenship papers from a biological parent
  • Speaking personally, I moved out at 16 and went to the city, completely alone. My nanna did the same when she was 14. And that's Real Life!
• So why does Atheletic sims need cooking skills? I also noticed that the Sports Academy provides insight into cooking and fishing.
  • It may be about protein-carbohydrate balance/workout fuel, etc. And fishing is... technically... a sport.
• In Sims 2 Apartment Life, why don't the child sims in the other apartments go to school if your sim family you're using has kids who go to school?
• Brandi Broke starts The Sims 2 pregnant... yet according to her Memories, she had Beau after Skip died, and she doesn't have a Memory of having WooHoo with anyone else. He might be adopted (though would that affect the Memory?), except Dustin became a Teen after Skip died as well, and he's already three days into that stage. So how exactly did Brandi get pregnant again?
  • Aliens