Tork's Blog: The Bumblefudge Legacy: Generation 0: Chapter 5

Welcome back!

In the last chapter, Sally got married, then she got a house, then she got laid!

Now that Sally has a front door, the papergirl sees fit to put the paper nearby. No more thirty mile treks across the lot to throw the paper away! We should have gotten Sal a front door a long time ago.

Sally isn't as excited about the newspaper development as I am. She's feeling a rumbly in her tumbly.

Kind of an emergency, it looks like.

Eww. Thanks , The Sims 3, for portraying morning sickness with a degree of detail never before seen in a Sims game.

Fortunately, pregnancy only lasts, what, three days? So this will be over before we know it.

Later that evening...

No!!! You can't steal our stuff!! It's new!!

"GAH!! Shit! That wasn't supposed to be there!"

Ha ha! And so is the burglar alarm. Take that!

"What is all the racket out here? Preggos need their sleep, you know. Who the hell are you? Are you wearing eyeglasses over your burglar mask?"

Wow. She is. I thought those were freaky burglar night goggles or something, but they really are just her glasses.

"Ohshitohshitohshit!!!"

"Hey Foureyes. Just received a call about a disturbance on this lot."

"Ah. Well, actually, Officer, I am the owner of this fine home and this was just a false alarm. You can go home now. Thanks for coming out."

"Uh huh."

And they both collapse into a filthy pile of random Sim parts!

Or maybe it's the fight animation sorting itself out. Hard to tell.

That's a little more like it.

And that's definitely more like it! Good job, Officer.

Foureyes marches herself out to the police car while the cop throws his wrench into the air.

I have no idea what the wrench is for.

Now that he's awake, Jebidiah decides to pull out his laptop and surf the net. Wow! I had no idea he had one of those! I never bothered to look in his personal inventory when he moved in! I look now.

...Nothing really interesting except...

A NEW CAR!!!!!! (cheering crowd noise)

It's Jebidiah's day off so I decide to send him out to run some errands. While looking for one building I see this. Stonehenge! I didn't even know that was there.

For the one or two of you who played the last game, do you remember how there would be all this cool random crap on the town map like stonehenges and crashed UFOs and stuff, but you couldn't actually visit them? Well, now you can. I tell Jeb to go check it out.

Though if I'd noticed it was so far away from any roads you can drive on I might not have.

Eventually Jeb gets out there, though. There doesn't appear to be anything terribly special out here, except that it makes a good collection point.

In this game there are a few things you can collect: rocks, bugs, and fish. You can see a couple of rocks that Jeb can pick up if I tell him to, and I do. There's also some bugs crawling around that you can't see in this pic. Jeb picks those up as well.

There's not much point to the collection other than that you can sell what you collect (and bugs can be sold to the science lab for a little more than you can get by just dragging to the sell box). I guess your Sim also gets some kind of bonus if he manages to collect everything, or whatever. Like I bother with that.

Here Jeb picks up an unknown seed. Those are cool. If your Sim is into gardening, he can plant them and see what sprouts. There are other ways to get seeds to plant, too. Gardens are cool because they're mostly free and if you do a decent job with one you won't need to buy hardly any groceries anymore. Jeb doesn't know the first thing about gardening, so we'll just save the seed in the family inventory until we get a family member who would get a kick out of that kind of thing.

So Jeb kind of failed at the errands I was actually planning to make him do. Sally doesn't have anything to do now that she's on maternity leave, though, so I tell her do her pregnant lady waddle into town to do them instead. First she goes to the cafe to take a cooking class since she wants to learn more cooking stuff and because she can.

After that I send her to the bookstore to buy some books. Unlike previous games, your bookshelf doesn't come stocked with every book you ever want. You'll probably get a freebie book or two when you create a Sim or marry one, but to do much skilling through reading at all, you'll have to go to the bookstore eventually.

Once Sally is out, I send her across the street to the park to see if maybe she can meet a new friend or two. Once she's there, everybody in town flocks to the bookstore she was just in. Fine. Back she goes.

At first I have Sally start a conversation with the pink and yellow girl behind her, but then some cop butts in and starts flexing. Sally talks to him for a while and they discover they both like cooking. Then I get a popup telling me that Sally isn't allowed to earn any more charisma points until she puts the ones she has to use and makes more friends.

Fine, game, I'll get to it. Yeesh.

When Sally finally drags herself home, it's only to discover that Jeb has been paged by the hospital and has to go to work.

That's one of the annoying things about the medical career. Your Sim will be On Call and may be asked to go to work at any time even if he's got a day off.

Later, Jeb.

Sally puts her new books in the bookshelf. I like that the bookshelves' appearances will change to reflect how full they are.

While Sally's reading, I think it's a good time to buy her some lifetime rewards, and show you how they work while I do.

During a Sim's lifetime he or she will have wants (shown with little icons to the left of your Sims's pic in the control panel). Achieve these wants for your Sim and you get points toward buying them some nifty stuff in the panel below:

As you can see, I'm about to buy Sally the "Legendary Host" reward. It's great for charismatic Sims because you can throw a party and everybody will show up and you can pretty much ignore them entirely and they'll still all think it was the best party ever and give you a little relationship boost.

I also got Sally the Office Hero reward, which makes it easier for her to make friends at work... if she ever gets to go back to work. Stupid maternity leave.

Your rewards don't wear off or anything, so that's pretty cool.

When Jeb finally gets home, he wants to talk to Sally's belly. That's cute.

Jebidiah kind of wants the baby to be a girl. Sally kind of wants a boy. I just want it to be healthy. :o)