One of my great enjoyments in life, at least, in the years it has existed, is The Sims in its many forms. And you know what? I couldn’t even tell you particularly why. I don’t sit there creating mini-mes and living out fantasy lives for myself – I’m pretty content with my here and now. Nor do I draft out grand tales like my dear friend Aissa (or the more famous Alice and Kev, whose tale I don’t follow); I admire her spunk, but I don’t have the patience for it. No, I just… liked seeing how nice a life I could make for my little Sims, and have loved how each new generation of game gives them more to aim for.

Which is why, of course, I love the Legacy Challenge, and have been struggling to successfully complete one for years. I’d made my first attempt at one in Sims 2 right before , and due to my addiction to the sexy open neighborhood, I’ve not gone back much. I’ve been tempted to for one salient reason though – Sims 3 is bugged to the moon and back. Even with doing my best to be plain vanilla (which translates to no vacations, and not trying to knock up the entire neighborhood (sniff!), it’ll just randomly start breaking and crapping everywhere. Resetsim * only goes so far, and seems to speed along the complete corruption of the game file. It’s incredibly disheartening to barely make it into the game and have it die, and moreso when you get halfway through and everything goes horribly wrong.

Halfway through has, to date, been my best and luckiest effort – mega-lame!

So as I’ve mentioned before, I decided to break down and get my mod on with the best and the best known – Awesomemod. It is reported to fix pretty much all the bugginess, and enables a person to do lots of other little tricks that help smooth out gameplay. The problem with it? That’s twofold – it’s not super-easy to install, and the community associated with it are Dicktastic+++++++. Even with the installer framework for dummies, it just was not happening. I would do everything to the letter in a handful of different ways, and nada. Absolutely nada. Broken game-level nada. It was… well… crap. I put it aside, and kept trying my luck. After all, what else could I do?

After another half year of mucking through and having no luck, I bit my luck and decided to try again. This time, however, I found an updated version of the framework installer, crossed my fingers, and let it do its stuff. And ohai, guess what? It seems everywhere on the internet tells me that the place I should be installing stuff is 500% wrong, oh so wrong. Instead of the blah blah//program file//Electronic Arts//Sims whatever, it’s oh… blah blah //DOCUMENTS//Electronic Arts//sims whatever – big.freaking.difference. Makes a lot more sense, considering. And having had success on the easy OS (Windows XP, which my desktop is still on), it blessedly was just as simple on Dozy ol’ 7 – woot.

And with that, I stood a chance – woot! I bravely opened up my poor fragile and fractured save files, and started running down the list of shiny commands that Awesomemod makes available, such as fixall. And while I still had to do a Resetsim * for both of my Legacy games, between those two, things are actually *gasp* working. People are mating and marrying (hooray updated story mode!), townies are doing more interesting things in general, and my family tree is slowly but surely flourishing. Add in things like being able to track other Sims (useful for some quests), having overstuffed houses (bwahahah!), and being able to switch active households without losing your work… I might just actually be able to ‘finish’ a Sims game, and I am just thrilled about it. *laughs* Not that I can do that last one in a Legacy game, but it’s kind of hot for a non-Legacy game. Especially for those who prefer Sims 2-style aging, since there’s an option to turn that on too.

Though having said that, my girl had twins to spite me, so now I’ve got more Sims in my house than I want – d’oh! 4 is my ideal number; I’m about to have eight. But that’s alright – at least I have the luxury to complain about that rather than whinging about how my everyone gets stuck in bed! And it’s a good time-killer, hee hee – I’m all about that.

Anyhoos, as one can probably surmise – I loves it, and recommend it to everyone. And if you need something even more goal-oriented, check out the recently released Sims Mideval, which is also fab. So y’know… get your Sims on. I’m going to while doing other things, ’cause that’s multi-tasking. *giggles*

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