What doesn’t kill you

Welcome back – and as  you can see, our new heir has wasted no time in getting on with things.  The house is pink, the first baby of Gen 5 is on the way, and here she is completing her athletic skill challenges.  Go Fuji!

As for her husband, Fireman Elvis, I had been tempted to keep him around to do science or to change his LTW to something easy like renaissance sim.  But he didn’t roll anything useful with a change of LTW and I couldn’t be bothered to save up for him to have the 30K required for a midlife crisis and a change of LTW when I really just wanted him dead.  I was tickled by the idea of burning a fireman to death so I built him a death box.

Those of you that were paying close attention to the previous entry may have noticed that I didn’t pay much attention to his traits.  This proved to be a mistake.  One of those traits was ‘brave’ and he kept autonomously putting out the fire.  Also: the stupid ghosts can float through walls and kept getting in the way.  So I sacked off that plan and decided to dispose of him another way.

Dishawashers are notorious harbingers of legacy doom, so I had him tinker.  Yeah, one of his other traits was ‘handy’.  Oh, and another one was ‘lucky’ (the final two were grumpy and clumsy).  The guy’s frikkin’ Captain Scarlet (indestructable).

While I was pondering what to do with Fireman Elvis, I noticed Adrian roll a want I’d never seen before: to beat someone up.

I couldn’t resist trying it out on Gandalf, seeing as how Gandalf, like everyone else in the legacy house, hates Adrian Mole.  Well, except Fuji who seems rather indifferent to him, and Fireman Elvis, whose relationship panel I’ve never even bothered checking.  Ady warmed up nicely by saying that their mother was a llama.  Also: you may have noticed in the previous shot – they are ‘half brothers’ according to the game.  I assume this is because Adrian was conceived when Harry was a ghost and Gandalf when he was alive, because they definitely have the same parents – I was there at both conceptions!

Awww, a good old sim fight.

Despite Gandalf having more athletic points, Adrian Mole won.  I guess this is because he’s a big fat meanie.  Or maybe he just wanted it more.  Anyway, Gandalf immediately rolled the want to win a fight against his brother.  I haven’t indulged it yet but for now I’ve promised him it.

Now, the latest on our bete noire, the photography skill challenges.  Spacing out the plants worked a treat and we completed that collection, which means we have three finished.  Of those remaining, we have one shot to get in Around Town, a police car.  Gandalf will be trying to get caught out after curfew next play session to get this one.  We have one shot to get in family and friends – Eddie’s party-based guitaring has earned him more mates than I realised, and now we just have ‘my spouse’ to get.  I can’t believe we didn’t nail that when Babysitter was around.  Oh, and speaking of Babysitter, remember how I sent her back to the netherworld but never had a grave for her after that?  Well, in China, the family had the options to call her from their mobile phones and Fuji even had a chat with her.  She and Eddie are still showing as married, but she is nowhere to be found (they can’t call her in the Valley).  I have been considering getting Eddie a trophy wife but if he’s still married to his dead first wife then that won’t work.  That leaves us with the final ‘home sweet home’ item – party.

We had a townies-only party to avoid shots of our family (though Koi, party animal that she is, still turned up).  We took photos of groups of sims dancing.  No joy.

We had a birthday party and aged up some random poor townie to get shots of him blowing out the cake and sims cheering him on.  No joy.

I invited the family to this particular party as we’d had the message that Repairlady was about to die and I knew that Piranha and Evel couldn’t be far off.  I didn’t see Repairlady so I assumed she’d died off lot and the game didn’t tell us.  They all had a little dance and a celebrate and still NO PARTY PHOTO.  I did, however, hear the Grimmy music, but the camera didn’t zoom to him and I didn’t see him.

It was only when checking on the plants that I discovered him, and the grave of Repairlady Meghan Quigley Daye.  Farewell Repairlady Meghan, you were a fine legacy spouse.

Here Harry demonstrates for us the slight problem with the good host LTR – your wife and soulmate can die on you and you’ll still have had a great time.  Sick and wrong!  But kind of funny.

Fuji partied in the sprinklers, as sims that love the outdoors are wont to do.  I essentially just included this because I love the shot.

Welcome to the world, Discus Daye!  He’ll do something World Adventurey and has been given Disciplined and… something else.  He likes purple and one of the WA foods, but I forget which one.  Poor Discus hasn’t been the focus of my attention since his birth as you’re about to see…

With one baby out of the way, even if he isn’t a ghost, I decided it was time to resurrect Fuji.  I got her dad to make some ambrosia in case the licking the plate thing didn’t work – only she had the same glitching that Harry did and couldn’t lick the plate or eat the ambrosia.  I had to quit and stick the good stuff in the fridge.

She still couldn’t lick the plates, so eating it was the only option – and quickly, before her pesky husband decided he wanted more of his wife’s destiny.

Here she goes….

Meet the new, living, Fuji Daye!  All three girls have the same face, by the way – Babysitter’s genes were ridiculously strong – the younger two also age up with her hair every single time.

The next morning I took Repairlady’s gravestone to the family plot to see Abe and Sherry’s daughter Christen there, alone.  She knows it’s her destiny (despite it being a family plot, I let Sherry be buried there – after all she was practically family by the end, and Christen is actually related to the Dayes so she can be buried there too).

Look at this shot of Elvis blatantly trying to curry my favour, thinking that I make a fuss over Kodak doing this, so if he does it I’ll like him.  But I couldn’t give a damn about the fish, I just like Kodak, so it’s not going to wash.

Speaking of Kodak, she got fatigued when exercising so I sent her to swim and this happened!  Noooo!  That action got Xed out pretty sharpish.  I am interested to see if born ghosts die, but not born ghosts who still have a lot of work to do for me.  She and Gandalf have been plugging away at boosting their athletic, Kodak by going through the menu options, Gandalf by staying on the normal option.  Although ‘push self’ and ‘quick burst’ (the latter especially) build skill in a shorter amount of time on the machine, when you take the fatigue into account it doesn’t actually build all that much quicker – of course, you can moodlet manage fatigue away, but we haven’t been doing for the purposes of this test.  You can also use them for other things, which is handy, but I suppose there is something to be said for sticking a sim on a treadmill and leaving them to it while you attend to everyone else.  Anyway,  the net result is that though I still prefer the moving through the modes option for skill building generally, the slower options are not that bad, particularly if you don’t want to be micromanaging every few seconds.

Kodak loves her nephew like she loves those fish, and the plants – she’s always rolling wants to garden, despite not being a green thumb, and is currently level 8.  With all this tending to the needy, you’d think she was secretly family oriented like her parents were.

Polaroid has mostly just been meditating and is coming closer to fulfilling the final one of her martial arts skill challenges, to meditate for 150 hours.  Just 50 hours to go!

Adrian Mole also aged up at one of our many, many parties of no photography joy and I made him look like Seth from In the Valley of the Sun for kicks (and because I couldn’t remember what his teen hair looked like).  He was given hydrophobic because it seems like it’ll be one of those traits that torture sims and who better to torture than our Ady?  Also, a water ghost being hydrophobic is one of those things that appeals to my sense of humour (much like a pyro or immune to fire ghost being made of fire, hence my desire to bump off Fireman Elvis in this way).  To be fair, he is getting in my good books – he’s now a Chess Grand Master!

Because I don’t want to do chess again, I’m going for the logic challenges with him.  The tutoring  sounds like it might take some time but we’ll see.  He fulfilled his LTW by maxing out logic while searching for stars.  So far he has found: ‘Ady Chess Legend’, ‘Secret Diary’, ‘Growing Pains’ and ‘True Confessions’.

We got the message that Piranha died, so I took her gravestone to the family plot.  Before I even placed it there was a brokenhearted lady there griving for her.  I thought it cute that she knew where to go to grieve even before I placed the grave.  Also: how many people did Piranha fall for in her time stream adventures?

While I was there, I thought I’d send Fuji to visit the ancestors, as she was going stir crazy.  Only Amaryllis was about, and the reinstall hasn’t been kind to her hair.

Apparently Ama has a laptop in the afterlife, as she whipped it out of her bum and started playing games on it.

I bought Fireman Elvis a midlife crisis and replaced handy, lucky and brave with loser, green thumb and slob (in case he comes back as a ghost and can try the plate licking thing).  He still kept trying to put out the fire.  (I thought this might be due to him being a loser, so after a billion fires, I testingcheatsenabled it away and replaced it with something boring but he still kept putting it out – I guess it’s all that fire brigade ‘training’ that has previously proved so useless).  The box kept igniting, he’d keep trying, the ghosts would keep coming, I would keep sending them away, X-ing out his actions and it was all a mess of chaos and failure.  This kept happening again and again, all night.

The next day we held a party for the twins’ birthday.  Discus was supposed to age up the day before the girls but he didn’t and that suited me fine – babies don’t need training, so he could just stay one for a long time as far as I was concerned.

It was a bad omen that Koi died before it happened.  I also invited Ming Si over to visit so he and Polaroid could get reacquainted as YAs.  The first thing that happened was that Polaroid never got round to greeting him what with all the candle blowing business.  The second was that the box caught on fire again with all the chaos that involves.  The third was that Evel Knievel decided to die.  What is it with people dying at parties?  This isn’t the Kyoti Legacy you know, Grimmy!

Here, you can see a little of the chaos – fiery box, Grimmy reaping, Ming Si being ignored, lots of party guests being made to go near cakes and stereos for photo opps.

As for the birthday girls, while I remember, Kodak didn’t ever go to school and rolled flirty – I can’t wait to see how that plays out with her commitment issues (am desperate to get her romancing), and Polaroid somehow messed up at school despite always doing her homework at school (I think the fires may have been the cause as everyone ended up being late for school/work on several occasions) and rolled unflirty.

I then got this amazing Grimmy pop-up: ‘ooh, a fire.  I’ll grab a sandwich and come back in a bit, I do hate reaping on an empty stomach’.  I was convinced he’d take Fireman Elvis this time.

So in summary, Ming Si was left on his own, the box kept igniting, the ghosts kept floating into it, Fireman Elvis kept putting out the fires and he didn’t die, but Evel Knievel did, and we STILL couldn’t get that stupid, evil, horrible photo… and yet Harry still had a great time.

Ming Si arrived on the lot at 9am with a warning for us to great our guest.  At 22.30pm, Polaroid (pre-makeover – as IF she’ll get a coat like that) greeted him.  She then proceeded to spam romantic interactions on him – she didn’t get any flirty ones, being unflirty, but she got all the others.  I suspect unflirty is more of a problem if the sim is trying to start a relationship rather than if they’re in one.  Hmmm… maybe I sense some light cheating on Polaroid’s horizon.

But Ming Si got the huff that he hadn’t been invited in and he ran back to China.

As for Fireman Elvis, I decided he would never burn, so I got him tinkering again.  He got singed and I was excited so sent him straight back in, anticipating the death I’d been waiting for.  He  then raised his handiness to 7 and made it unbreakable through his tinkering.  Bah.  Fortunately, trying to replace unbreakable with silent running proved too much for him and he finally succumbed.

Man, that was hard work.

Join us next time for a special episode on LTR experimenting (or maybe two special episodes).  Following your comments on fast learning and dirt defiant we will be running yet more tests on these (I tried to do that for this update but you can see the “fun” we’ve been having), along with hardly hungry, steel bladder and any other LTRs you would like us to test (not the specifically WA related ones, as Gen 5 and 6 will be playing with those).  I’m not sure how much LTH we have to spend but if there’s an LTR we haven’t covered and you’d like us to test, let us know here or in the suggestions and we’ll see if we can fit it in.

Also next time: see Polaroid and Kodak’s aging up pictures, find out if Gandalf manages to get detention and we manage to get a police car pic, discover whether baby Discus will ever become a toddler and hopefully meet the next member of Generation 5 (somebody had just heard chimes when I saved the game)…