What is the weirdest thing you’ve ever done in The Sims?
Image: Image: EA GamesGraphic: Natalie Peeples Games Features AVQ&A
This week marks the 20th anniversary of Maxis’ beloved people simulator, The Sims, and we’re celebrating with this AVQ&A:
What is the weirdest thing you’ve ever done in The Sims?
Sam Barsanti
I didn’t personally do this, but the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen in The Sims is completely turning off any capacity for self-sufficiency that the poor little people were capable of. The Sim had to pee? Walk to the bathroom and click on the toilet. Hungry? Walk to the fridge. It’s like playing on hard mode, which makes sense, but the horrible twist is when the Sims look up at the camera, bawling or waving their arms for attention as they complain about being unable to go to the bathroom. Just imagine starving to death because someone forgot to drag you to the fridge two feet away. That’s dark.
Angelica Cataldo
When I used to play The Sims fairly (without any cheat codes), I’d skimp on every last thing I could to save money. This meant buying a cheap plot of land and having all their cheap furniture placed outside. Everything was without walls except for the bathroom because Sims apparently have a complex about that sort of stuff. Once I saved up enough to build the house I wanted, I left the old furniture outside. Why? Because, for whatever reason, my Sims would get confused if I removed it and would still go outside and use the old furniture, even with the new expensive stuff inside their brand-new house.
Randall Colburn
We were sick puppies, my pals and I, and found innumerable ways to torture our Sims. Our favorite was to build a shed out back and lock in a Sim with nothing but a bed, some snacks, and some art supplies. All they had was time, so they rather quickly began to produce works of art, which we promptly sold for as much money as possible. After a while, though, our incarcerated Sim got bored and depressed, leaving the easel unattended. So, after a little trial and error, we discovered that a fully stocked bar was all the cure they needed. From there on out, our poor Sim spent his days painting while obliterated on whiskey sodas. And we made a fortune!
Danette Chavez
Instead of trying to accomplish something grand via my Sims creation, I preferred to watch as my characters struggled to figure out the most basic things. The first time I played, I set my Sim’s intelligence level so low that her big goal was simply leaving the house. Actually, I think it was just some kind of ambition or determination characteristic that she was lacking. Whatever the case, I watched for roughly 15 minutes as the Sim shook her head at me and refused to make her way to a door. I eventually reconfigured it so she was less of a slacker; she even tried to figure out how to get money from her mom for her college textbooks.
Shannon Miller
Infidelity. Snark. Poolside brawls. Is this the latest iteration of Real Housewives? No, it’s just my needlessly chaotic Sims house. I promise that when I first played, my intent was to guide my makeshift family through life with intelligence, kindness, and hard work. But that quickly became monotonous, and before I knew it, I was creating couples just to orchestrate breakups, taking every opportunity to lob a shady comment, and allowing affairs to just… happen. Did it make their career advancement difficult? Yes, it made it damn-near impossible, in fact. But I was never bored. And I like to think that they found love once I stopped playing Andy Cohen.
Baraka Kaseko
On my first few plays, I was perfectly content with going through the motions of first Sims game. I would recreate my childhood home as closely as possible, find a career and a partner my Sim loved, and watch as they started a life together. It was all kind of boring. So, I started murdering them. The easiest method was to convince my Sim to jump in the swimming pool, and then remove the ladder so they could no longer escape. For whatever reason, Maxis failed to program Sims with the ability to hoist themselves out of a pool without a ladder, so eventually, they would tire themselves out and drown.
70 Comments
Colburn wins.
“And that, baby, is how I became a producer.”
His sim is living the dream!
I think that’s Weinstein’s origin story.
“I eventually reconfigured it so she was less of a slacker; she even tried to figure out how to get money from her mom for her college textbooks.”We’re…still talking about The Sims, right?
I just never bothered doing anything with the goddamn people. They’re boring. I loved building and designing the houses, so I just used the unlimited money hack that was going around at the time (this was years ago) and built giant mansions on huge pieces of land. I wish I still had them to look at, actually. I built every kind – a castle, a super-modern Hawaiian pad, a cabin in the forest, everything. I even used the tool that let you import your own wallpaper and furniture designs, some of which I got from fan sites. I loved it. Once all that was done, I tried introducing some people into them, but they never held my attention. On to the next house I went.Is there a game that is just about building houses? I have fond memories of games like Sim City and Rollercoaster Tycoon, as well. This has been my daily admission of misanthropy. See you next time.
There’s a free game on steam called Occupy White Walls. I haven’t played it yet, and it’s not exactly the same cuz it’s building an art museum, but it might be up your alley.
Minecraft. If you just want to build houses play Minecraft with mods. You can do creative and just build amazing things.
Good one, thanks. I’ve never really been into Minecraft because a) it always seemed like it was just blocks, and b) I’ve heard the founder of it is a fucking asshole that I really don’t want to give money to.
That guy hasn’t been involved with the company for years. It’s owned by Microsoft now. You really have to get the PC version though because it’s all the community made mods that make the game great, kind of like The Sims.
Ah, bummer. I doubt my laptop could handle it. Maybe someday.
Oof, yeah, Minecraft is resource intensive.
Yeah, my little HP would blow up in five minutes. lolI did find an old copy of RCT3 last night, and I’m digging the shit out of it. Such silly, buggy fun. I’ll post pics of any parks I create. 🙂
Good news on b. Microsoft bought the owner out years ago so if you buy it now you are just giving your money to a monolithic megacorp
So I shouldn’t respond to you on my Windows PC right now on this website that is owned by another corporation via the internet that is owned by yet another?
Nah I didn’t say that. I just said that your money won’t go directly to an asshole if you buy it now.
There is a solid Rollercoaster Tycoon phone port on Google Play that I have wasted far too much time on.
I’m really looking forward to Planet Coaster coming out on PS4 this summer. Man, I’ve spent so many nights staying awake building parks. I think I’m part ant.
Is it RCT 4 or RCT Classic? I see both on Google Play right now.
Also on the iPhone. I play RCT all the damn time. Takes me back.
There’s a game called House Flipper – you just take jobs to renovate people’s houses according to their wishes. Then you use the money you’ve got from that to buy shitholes on the property market, fix them up, and resell them for a profit.It’s satisfying if you’re into that kind of thing, although disappointingly it doesn’t have modding support, so the only houses you can buy and the only furniture and wall/floor patterns you can decorate it with are the ones the devs put in.
Is there a game that is just about building houses?
there’s this pre-Windows 95 game called “LEGO”, it was okay
Just don’t step on any of the lootboxes in the middle of the night.
You can get one of those programs that allows people to design their own homes. I got one and used it to design my backyard… and now my backyard looks like the thing I designed.
Deleted due to misunderstanding
I ensured that they improved themselves, learned to live while saving for the future, ate well, stayed in good shape and got enough rest, while maintaining a healthy work/life balance.
And then abandoned them to play Skyrim.
…where I put buckets on people’s heads and stole all their cheese.
I could never go full sociopath in Skyrim, but I had a great time in Fallout 3 killing every single person in Megaton. After that it was hard to get invested in the rest of the game, though.
I had to stop the vampire questline in Skyrim because I couldn’t abandon my axe wielding wife and our girl-children. We were gay-married by an open minded priestess in Riften after killing a Dwarven Colossus together. That means something.
MONSTER
I haven’t played since Sims 2, but I think it was mod the game to have a bunch of X-Men skins, then put a bunch of X-Men into a house to starve to death, then finally moved a Professor X into the same house, now revamped and comfortable, so he could be haunted by the waking ghosts of the children he’d failed.
Also I seem to remember being obsessed with building a house in a pit and trying to use bridges and geometry tricks to get the entry door at ground level on the second floor, but no matter what I did the sims would only acknowledge first floor doors as “front” doors.
Pretty sure that’s what happened right before the ‘Logan’ movie.
Who knew that swimming pools could be used as such effective Sim torture devices?
Just about everyone, I thought. I’ve been seeing that tip for decades on the cover of People magazine and shit.
I made alien vampire farmers who built a mansion underground on the largest plot and turned the entire plot above ground into a farm/orchard. Then they built a secret dungeon on the bottom floor of their underground mansion to marinate their “food” in. Of course they could only farm by the light of the moon, so I kept one human sim around to take care of daytime business.I called it The Sims 3:Vampire Harvest Moon Edition.
Off topic but what the hell is with the ads recently? I have to use an adblock on GMG sites now, and the adblocker shows 40-ish ads blocked as soon as a page loads. Jesus.
This wasn’t by me but is definitely a complete recreation of Titanic
Drowning your Sims in the pool is not… weird at all? Like most people did at some point (I didn’t because I like my Sims to be happy and I tend to play forever).
I think I have played a total of maybe 30 minutes of the Sims in my life and most of it was spent drowning people in the pool or taking away their toilets. Its like the first thing everyone I know who played the game did.
I’ve honesty never killed my Sims, unless it was for a good reason (like ensuring my Sims had full family trees).
I did it accidentally over and over until I realized “wait, they can’t get out without a ladder?”
How about letting one of your Sims die, waiting for the Grim Reaper to come into their house to collect the ashes, and then deleting all the doors so that he’s forced to bum around your house for a few days? (I think he teleported away eventually; it was a long time ago.)
That at least takes some effort!
In Sims 3, with many mods and cheat codes, I had a polyamorous family of 13 gay male sims (including werewolves, a fairy, a ghost, and a merman) with 2 gay dogs and a gay unicorn living in a 5-store mansion with 3 basements (the bottom one being a secret laboratory with a time machine.They lived in the Sim’s University town — which I had turned from an expansion pack into a fully-playable Sim city.
Unfortunately, I made my game play so complicated, the game became unable to save my games anymore!
I like making huge families then walling them in so that they starve to death in their own waste, then their ghosts can haunt the next victims in that house, and so on.And also in The Sims.
Populated a town entirely with Sims based on the various personas of Roger the Alien from American Dad!.
I don’t play The Sims but my stepdaughter is a huge fan. Recently she lost a sim (& 2hrs unsaved work) to a malfunctioning Murphy bed. The way she told it made us all laugh.
Hard to call it weird when it’s Standard Game Play, but I created a witch and used the charm spell to fuck woo-hoo every NPC that came onto my lot.Pretty sure I even nailed the mail carrier.I finally couldn’t go out in public because I had so many exs that would slap the shit out of me on sight.
These are… not all that weird. Most of it’s just totally normal, awkward Sims gameplay. I was expecting more along the lines of Seanbaby’s Subject Beef Experiments: https://www.cracked.com/blog/exploring-the-mysteries-of-the-mind-with-the-sims-3/
I once had a Sims 3 household where the entire family were very bohemian creative types; the daughter of the original couple grew up to be an author/painter. She had a child with her best friend but the two never married and honestly didn’t even really stay in a relationship, he just kept stopping by the house to party. Anyhow, by the time the grandkid was old enough to work, I had everybody in the household writing “romance novels” (in my mind, tawdry erotica) for money, either in their spare time or as their primary career.
A painting slave is neither sick nor even original.
I once made a couple of vegetarians and denied them access to anything but meat in order to see how long it’d be before they caved. They didn’t; they starved to death.
So I haven’t really played Sims since 3, where everything ended in tragedy.So I made a young couple, a young burgeoning novelist, and his wife who worked at the library, or a bookstore. They were happy, had a child, and things were fine. Then, after the baby was born and I managed to survive the horror of newborns in Sims, the baby sitter arrived. The babysitter was hired to look after the kid while the wife went to work, and the husband tapped away at his keyboard. Then one day the babysitter got hung up in the house until the wife returned home. They got talking, and little hearts started appearing over the wife’s head. I was confused, the babysitter was a teen, and I quickly ended the conversation. The babysitter left and I thought nothing of it. But then, one day while out the wife ran into the Babysitter in a communal spot and something happened, they engaged in the longest conversation I’d seen two sims have ever. Occasionally I’d prompt things along, but mostly they would just keep babbling along, and for whatever reason these two hit it off, the relationship bar was rocketing up. They talked so long, they became best friends, and the Babysitter aged to the next level. Finally, both of them swaying from exhaustion they left. At this point the babysitter was no longer minding the children, and just came over, the wife was in her room painting, the husband had gone out. Anyways, the wife and the babysitter became very friendly, and the wife had started having a little mood thing thinking of the babysitter as her “true love” or whatever, so what happened next seemed inevitable. Now I know they kissed, but I can’t remember if I just said “fuck it” and had them commit to an affair, but either way it did not last long, because while those two were staring into each others eyes, the husband just walked in, and I was legitimately shocked, I hadn’t noticed him return. Whatever they were doing, he saw it and then he freaked out, and just began yelling at both of them. The Babysitter left and the husband and wife wouldn’t stop fighting. The husband wouldn’t stay in the same room as the wife, and he wouldn’t write anymore, he was just crying all the time. They couldn’t sleep in the same bed, they fought all the time and things were miserable. Then came the fire.
All the lack of sleep and the constant fighting (the husband wouldn’t sleep in the same room, would wander around, go back to his bed and then yell at the wife so no one slept) meant both my sims were exhausted and depressed all the time, they wouldn’t maintain anything, and I was barely able to take care of their kid. The Babysitter came over one time, got yelled at by the husband and never returned. So the wife is cooking, I’m trying to get the kid out the door to school, and I get the fire alert, a fire started while the wife was cooking, then in the middle of trying to put it out she passes out, and dies. I manage to save the house, but now the husband is so depressed he basically just cries all the time the kid is sad all the time, and I’m looking at this mess and at my own unfinished novel and thinking “Why the fuck am I engaging in this depressing shit?” so I stopped playing. I ruined their lives, and just couldn’t take the constant weeping (or the time sink).
Okay, weirdest thing playing Sims 2: that one time I didn’t realize I had replicated systematic class-based inequality.
made cousin Eddie’s trailer from national lampoons Christmas vacation… I covered the whole thing in full shitters!
In the first Sims we already had a few households built and were getting bored with the whole thing, so we created a serial killer who moved into the neighbourhood. His house was plain concrete blocks. He was tall, bald and bearded, wearing a plain tshirt and jeans.He’d invite our other created neighbours over for parties, then would invite them into a series of cell like rooms. We would then get him to leave and remove the door. Some of the cells would have beds or toilets some wouldn’t. The inhabitants would die usually from starvation, sometimes lying in a puddle of their own excrement. I’m not proud of this. It was the darkest thing I’ve ever done in a game. However, it definitely felt like some sort of Stanford style prison experiment in how far someone would cause suffering without living with the consequences. It still haunts me.
I used to build houses/buildings based on other video games. Normally very detailed & playable, but one time I went crazy & built a “replica” of the NES Maniac Mansion, following its 2D directions exactly, including connecting doors on the back walls that led off to other 2D sections. What resulted was a really trippy Winchester-esque abomination.Another time I made a sim into every single supernatural creature, one at a time, until he was part all of them. This was Sims 2 when you could do that. He was part alien, vampire, zombie, werewolf, plant sim, & witch. He had green skin, alien eyes, could drink blood, do magic, would wolf out & eat grilled cheese sandwiches, & shuffle around everywhere gurgling like a zombie constantly. He was a mess & I loved him.
In The Sims Bustin’ Out (I think for console only on PlayStation) I would breed a mutant plant that was carnivorous and let it starve, which then would cause it to randomly eat any Sims that walked by it….then I waited for the maid to come, so he’d eat her and her ghost would come back and clean for free while haunting the house. It was actually better than having a live maid because she wouldn’t block other Sims and could walk through walls 😂Also, another funny side story involving the mutant plant – my mom used to play and she loved showing off her houses and sim creations. Anyway, one day she designed her ideal man sim (she apparently spent lots of time perfecting him) and had plans to have her main female sim marry him and have beautiful babies. (She was single in real life btw) She had also made a mutant plant and right at the moment she was showing him off to me, the plant eats her perfect male specimen and he dies (And no, she hadn’t saved!). She was so upset that hours of work had just gone down the drain. She swore she fed her plant and that it must have been my fault somehow since it happened while I was watching! All I could do was laugh and laugh. That’s what you get for being a perv, mom! Lmao.
I would walk my Sim into a closet, then replace the door with a window. Then I would have its spouse fall in love with someone else and perform PDA in front of that window. Eventually the trapped Sim would suffer from wetting itself, starvation and heartbreak, and eventually die.I would also build houses with a pool on the second floor. And of course, staircases to nowhere.
My favourite form of torture was over-feeding them and wearing my sims down with the endless grind of life pumping out endless kids, even as the previous offspring is being carted off by social services until the depression rendered them useless. Then you introduce a new lover to fornicate with the least depressed of the two lovers, foist the member of the original couple who can’t procreate due to depression onto the street, then repeat the process ad nausem. My Sims were tortured with the real world. There was also the time I set the place on fire inadvertently violating the building fire code with too many full fish tanks. Watching things filled with water burn to ash was rather odd.
I have an acquaintance whose house burned down due to a short in his salt-water aquarium. True story.
I hope the acquaintance & whoever they lived with got out alive. On a less serious note, I wonder if the water boiled then evaporated or if the glass broke & the water soaked charred things?
Oh, they got out fine — they didn’t keep fish in their new home, though! Don’t know about the water issue, though.
Sea Monkeys & mer-folk are all the rage these days anyway when choosing water-based pets. Personally i’d be tempted by an otter.
When playing the 100 baby challenge in the Sims 3, I needed a rotating door of new males for my Sim to get pregnant by. The town would get full of ineligible men who’d already fathered her kids, so no new ones would move in. I ended up making basically a sex dungeon: a basement hidden under a shed in the garden that contained only a bed. They’d do the deed, my lady Sim would leave pregnant, I’d remove the stairs, and then the poor guy would starve down there in the basement. Rinse and repeat. It worked horribly well.
This is fairly amateur hour stuff, no offense. Though the autonomy thing was good lol… I made a mean, child hating sim use the wishing well to wish for a kid. It gave her one… an evil ghost child. He was only mean and evil to her, but he used to scare her all the time. Then, when she got eaten by a cowplant (because I starved her lol), he wished for his life back and the well granted it and I changed his evil trait to a positive one. He was great with his siblings and other mother. He was only nasty to the child hating, mean one (who was Judith Ward… you can find the family in my gallery, actually… under jessicalorelai).
For Sims 2 (the best one IMHO), I had a mod that would edit the characteristics of the sims and somehow it made my teen sim turn into an adult while still in a teen body. It was weird watching him flirt with the single mom from next door.The weirdest thing that happened on the game though, during the original Sims, the NPC electric technician got electrocuted and died so you could only call him in the night time to fix things because he was a ghost.
I once created a caricature of my ex girlfriend, coaxed her into a closet, removed the door, and let her die.Fun times!