Nine Muses

After playing Sim games as long as there have been Sim games, sometimes the basic gameplay seems a little too easy. It’s still fun, but it’s easy to burn out quickly. I think any sandbox type game is prone to this, at least for achievement oriented gamers. Once you get to the point where you’ve tried a little bit of everything, and a lot of some things, you have to think up and set goals of your own to keep that successful achievement buzz going.

For the Sims games, this is where challenges come in. Challenges are sets of goals and rules created by players. The goals give you something to strive for. The rules make things tougher.

For example, my child Sims almost always manage to grow up well, and so I’m always allowed to choose their traits. I would never think to make a Sim inappropriate, or even hot-headed, even though these traits would make the game tougher. I’m just too nice, even to my Sims. (Although once, in Sims 2, I did torture one with commitment issues by making her continually pop out kids. It drove her loony.) The Legacy Challenge rules, however, state that the traits must be randomized, and so I might end up with a Sim who is a kleptomaniac, or maybe even evil, and I’ll have to play it that way and still try to make the next generation come about and prosper.

I’ve seen challenges mentioned before, on previous Sims forums, but never participated. I was usually already close to burnout by the time I started roaming the forums, for one thing. And anyone who knows me knows that I’m almost terminally shy. It’s difficult for me to talk to people I don’t know, even on forums, and part of the fun of a challenge is comparing how you’re doing with other people.

This time around, still early in my Sims 3 gameplay, I’ve decided to start a Legacy Challenge. It’s posted on the Sims 3 forums, and I’ve even posted a question or two regarding it. (Shocking, I know.) The official rules post is here. I’m going with the matriarchy and family trait options (though I haven’t decided for 100% if the family trait will be Lucky or Good). I’m in Spring Valley (because my first family is in Riverview and I wanted to see the other neighborhood).

I used Create-A-Story for the events of my first evening of gameplay, but I haven’t decided for sure if I’m going to continue to do it this way or if I’m just going to blog it (or some combination of both). My founder Sim should be viewable from my profile creations as well.

This should be interesting. Nine more generations of the Winters family to go!