One of the most prominent things I hear as a female gamer is
that I’m a slut. The second most repeated and agreed upon thing is that The
Sims is not for gamers.
A few friends of mine were sitting at the round table and
started a discussion on Achievements and Trophies, where the topics went to
what games we were recently playing. Some said they were working through
Skyrim, and I answered that The Sims was sucking life from my corpse.
The look in their eyes was half disappointment, and half
they were fashioning napkins into a noose. I quickly picked up the ball and
said that I had already beat Skyrim, and that I would play it again once the
expansions came out. Now wait a minute, most of these people play on the PC, so
they wouldn’t understand, right?
Not exactly. PC gamers are among the bad-asses of gaming
culture. They receive total satisfaction from playing through a game without a
childish reward program rubbing their back. But pre-2005 PC gamers were the
most rewarded for their time spent fingering a Dorito bag and showing off nude
MODS in the back of the school library. They wouldn’t even need to be mentioned
because before 2005, there was NO ACHIEVMENT/TROPHY system. There was nothing
to compare dick size, except for your character buffs.
In 2006-08, the Xbox 360 busted out of it’s factory line and
kicked you right in the teeth. It introduced a loving, smooth, addicting
“bloop” sound that would remind you of your futile success. With each “bloop”
sound, a gamerpoint cluster would be given to you. They come in 5G, 10G, 15G,
20G, 30G, 40G, 50G, 100G, depending on how cruel of a game it is in difficulty.
Each game offered about 1000G to collect, which would be added to your overall
gamer score. It systematically created a mold for which your massive danglers
would fill.
Once the PlayStation 3 came out, it introduced the “ding” and
the PS3 specific “platinum”. Sony kept it simple, you’re sorry ass could only
choose from an array of “Bronze” (grieve), “Silver” (oh boy), “Gold”, and once
all the other trophies were obtained, “Platinum”. Later on they introduced a
level-up system to show other PS3 gamers how awesome you were at wasting your
life navigating digital hatred; essentially the equivalent to a gamer score.
Not as satisfying.
I digress.
The Sims and it’s expansions on console release are a
harder, more in-depth, and longer games to beat than Skyrim, and Oblivion
combined. I hear my deathbells ringing doo-dee-doo-dee-doh. I’m going to turn a
corner into an angry mob who’ll Fus Ro Dah my ovaries off a cliff. River
dancing on my spleen. But you know, I’m not speaking blindly. I have back up.
And by back up, I mean people who won’t kill me first and sift through my
bloody mush for answers later. And by people, I mean I have Wikipedia. WHICH IS
LEGIT.
I’m going to get this out of the way and say that I love the
Elder Scrolls Series. The entire get-up. From Arena to Skyrim. Dungeon delving
and random killing sprees (the ability to arrow someone in the back of the head
never gets old) are my brand of t-bagging. I will always, and forever put the
Elder Scrolls Series before anything I’m fucking, eating, sleeping on, or
donating to charity. They will be the games I play when I’m so old I’m shitting
in a bowl for measurement.
I digress. Again.
One of the more fluid arguments I hear for Skyrim is how
amazing the graphics are. There are a couple of logical explanations for this.
One is, of course, that a league of hard-working assholes spent hours upon
hours tufting the hairs on that bear you just killed with a toothpick. The
other is that they are using the same mechanics, textures, and color palettes
you see in the Fallout series. They added a few mountains, and drastically used
the color palette in large areas to define the rocks, trees, bodies of water, and
grasses. So it’s a REALLY pretty game. IF you’ve never played the Fallout
series before. Now they fixed all that bland bitchy blah blah from the Capital
Wasteland, and gave you MORE things to sit and stare at for awhile. But it
doesn’t change that the speech pathways, character expressions, and even some
of the sounds come from another popular Bethesda title.
But Bethesda shouldn’t get an earful for it; if you having
something that works, either knock it up or slip it into whatever you do. There’s
a game title that’s had the same formula for twelve years, and they aren’t
stopping.
The only thing I ever hear about The Sims is that it’s a
game for children and stay-at-home women. I don’t say “moms” because out there
in the great divides there are simply fat women who claim disability for
something ridiculous like Fibromyalgia, and they play religiously. Then there
are little teens who wank it when they WooHoo with their high school fantasy
cheerleader. Girl turn you down? Drown her in a pool, or set her skank ass on
FIRE. But how does The Sims measure in terms to a gamer’s game?
What defines a gamer’s game? A compelling story,
easy-feed/easily understandable HUD/GUI, replay value, and graphics, and in
some cases, lineage. Both The Sims and Skyrim share these values. You can’t
find humans with that line-up. If you did, they’re dead.
The Sims and Skyrim share similar elements beyond the above
listed; the ability to customize your character is one. In Skyrim you can
choose skin color, race, and build all the way down to facial scars, hair
color, and iris shade. You can do the same in The Sims. There are highly paid
scientists that jut barely hit that point with embryos. What the fuck are we
spending taxes on.
In both games you can also set traits, or skills. The
difference being that in The Sims, you set things to help life (i.e., fishing,
cooking, logic, fitness, writing, gardening) and in Skyrim, you can customize
how to deal death like doom-mounted unicorn from hell (marksman, blade,
destruction, alteration, lock-picking, wood elf tossing).
If you’ve played either of these games, you’ve realized this
shit already. Aside from the other similarities like, custom characters, set
traits, random events, sandbox map, families, AI response to choices made by player,
moral customization, expansive storyline, altering the world around you,
choosing jobs, followers/pets, recurring families, music, made up languages,
long history of devoted gamers, presence of ghosts/ancestors, impending threat
of death, blah blah blah I can go on. But what integrally makes one game unique
to the other? They’re practically twins.
Skyrim takes the mold of dungeon delving and damsel in
distress and smashes it like a million dollar painting. Skyrim does not give
two fucks how you live, where you shit, and how many people you woohoo with
unprotected. The only pet you’ll own in Skyrim will call you “my thane”, or
“master” and will do so while stroking your gigantic DRAGON SMASHING yogurt
cannon bulging from under your armor. When the nameless angry beasts of the
land come to ruin your rather gay frolic through a field, you’re there to
answer with your entire arsenal of fuck you. You can serve the Gods, or Deadra,
at your will, depending entirely on your mood, and they bend to you. Because
you’re not the one stuck to a pedestal on a snow capped mountain with drooling
social pariahs swearing featly to you over and over.
If the human-like and/or cat/lizard like figure gets boring,
there are diseases to contract that change how people view you, how you hold
yourself, and who you fuck with. Vampirism can give you a stealthy edge, but
nothing beats tearing through the wilderness as a werewolf. There is never
going to be a more efficient way to capture a bunny.
Of course, in the event you didn’t catch the bunny, and
you’re depressed about it, there are plenty of in-game narcotics to reach for.
If you’re a pussy there is always ale, but nothing caches your priorities more
than zooming around the city streets strung out on Skooma. Naked. With your
wedding ring fastened securely to your scrotum.
And lastly, you’re character is gifted with the Thu’um; the
ability to speak dragontongue that will cast out different spells the louder or
longer you shout them. Hold the phone, knock-knock, whose there? DOVAHKIIN. In
your face, off a cliff, frozen in ice, stop the clock, abandon hope all ye who
enter HERE, teeth-clenching, nut-dropping, instantaneous beard growth. There is
nothing not cool about being the best at what you do.
The Sims in retrospect promotes a more comical, long-winded
way to accomplish similar feats. But not entirely. In The Sims, you can manage
yourself or an entire household, pets, and even the success of your
neighbors. You can get your dream job
and work your way up the ladder, all while balancing the general mood of your
subject. I say subject because essentially you’re a god. In my case, a very
foul and apathetic god who does not bat an eyelash for your squandering in
urine. I don’t care how late you are for work, you just shovel shit anyway.
Shut the hell up before I create a parallel universe where you come home to
find your living room filled with wooden chairs and your dog farting over a
candle.
You don’t have to create a more successful version of
yourself, as the point of creation in The Sims is limitless and on-going. There
are wishes to fill, houses to build, shotgun weddings to attend, and moodlets
to manage. It’s not easy, without rhythm. But neither is pimping.
Let’s pretend for a second that a gamer’s value was measured
by the gamerpoints/trophies they had acquired, or how many hours they’ve spent
on a single game. If you’re being pissy and don’t like that idea, then lets mix
it in with the gamer’s understanding and comprehension of the story, how well
they can navigate the menus and commands, and their general tactics. I’m not
your caterer. I don’t give a fuck. Pick one, let’s roll.
As I previously stated, the Xbox 360 has a requirement of
1000G’s per game minimum. Which means both Skyrim and The Sims have to have at
least that much to acquire before the game is considered “platinumed”, or fully
beaten. In any other regard, this is a ridiculous method of measuring gameplay,
seeing as Skyrim is a natural 100+ hour game as opposed to The Sims free-play
hour rate. You can play that shit for an hour, or all week. So each is worth
1000G’s, but which is HARDER to beat?
The Sims.
The most difficult achievements to acquire for Skyrim are 15
Deadra Artifacts worth 30G called “Oblivion Walker” and mastering 20 shouts
“Thu’m Master” worth 40G. The deadra artifacts are difficult because not every
deadra will approach you, and you will not always stumble across them. Not to
mention there are only sixteen artifacts to collect, and that at any time, you
can make the wrong decision and ruin your chances of acquiring one. Yes, you
can fuck it up. It takes a couple hours to collect three or four of them, but
15 and the odds of messing it up? I’m tossing this shit like disc golf.
Mastering 20 shouts is more difficult if not frustrating to
pursue. Each shout has three words, and each word is written on a dragon wall,
hidden at the bottom of a dank dungeon, guarded by a something long dead, that
is coming at you with the ferocity of a father who just found out you knocked
up his fifteen year old princess. Each wall gives you one word, and there are
only twenty shouts in the game. There are two methods of getting them: one, ask
the Greybeards. They don’t tell you what word you’re getting, and they’re about
as helpful as anyone at the DMV. Just a lot of old, bitter, sexless assholes
sitting on a hill, enjoying the paling shade casted by the EPIC ELDER DRAGON
THAT BROODS YOUR FATE AT THE TIP OF THE MOUNTAIN. Then of course, you could
just go exploring. Hours of your life, cast into the void.
That’s +2 to difficult collecting for Skyrim.
The Sims has multiple, especially with the new release of
The Sims 3: Pets. The first achievement that made me want to rip off
fingernails with uncooked spaghetti was “Miracle Worker”, which is fulfilling
1000 wishes, for a treasured 30G. Let me explain something to you. Your sim is
capable of wanting four wishes at a time. They can range anywhere from watching
the cooking channel to making out with the pizza guy you barely know, and
everything in between. Normally you can get the little pixelated asshole into a
rhythm, where they only wish for contextual things, i.e. if you’re working on
your charisma, they want it to go up one. No problem, right? Fuck you. The
first three skill levels are practically handed to you in charisma. From then
on, you need to make FRIENDS. And then BEST FRIENDS. And this starts a wish
tree like “become best friends with what’s-his-name” and “make out with that
one lady”. Your sim will need to acquire more friends before they skill will go
up, which takes time; time away from taking other skills up, work, general mood
managing, and other things you might enjoy more than walking around town
greeting old people who hate you from that one joke you told. With four wishes
at a time, you have to be choosy on what you grant for them. It takes so many
real-time hours to get even 150 wishes. I managed to fulfill about 240 before
my week-long attempt came to a grinding halt by my sudden realization that I
was sober, and very very alone.
Next up, the “Pyromaniac” achievement, which dictates to
you, the slave no matter how many sims you create, have to get an insurance
check for $15,000 after using the “fire storm” karma power. First you have to
UNLOCK the firestorm power. I’m not even going to get into that. It costs karma
to activate, so if you haven’t saved up enough by the time you want to set your
house on fire, you’ll just have to wait some more. Once you trigger fire storm,
balls of flame fall from the sky and land in random areas of your lot, wherein
there is no guarantee any will hit your ENTIRE HOME FILLED WITH FLAMMABLE
EXPENSIVE FURNITURE AND ELECTRONICS. Did I mention you have to have the money
to buy all that expensive shit you’ll be getting the check for? So you have to
make the green, buy the right objects, put them close together and pepper them
everywhere, and then active the karma power, hoping a gigantic ball of hellfire
strikes your futile targets. Don’t forget no one can be home, because they’ll
call the fire department, i.e. no kids, maids, babysitters, and your fire
detector will alert them anytime there’s a candle lit. So you had to get rid of
that shit. And if you’re like me, you forgot to put it back and your stove
caught on fire, which burnt down a majority of your home, earning you almost no
money to compensate. Kraft be damned, you never make mac & cheese ever
again.
Lastly, the achievement “It’s Good To Be A Sim” worth 50G.
This requires you to have a child prodigy, get 10 positive moodlets at the same
time, complete 500 wishes, get a spa treatment, have 150,000 Lifetime Happiness
points on one sim, and fulfill a non-lifetime wish worth 7,500 lifetime points
(which is what wishes give). JESUS CRUTCH AMBLING CHRIST.
To get a child prodigy, you have to set your game options to
turn off aging. Then you have to wait like a tool for the kid to realize what
it wants to be, which for this achievement is a chess legend, or famous writer.
Kids don’t have the same rights as adult sims, so there’s very little they can
accomplish. They are the women of the sim world. They can read, and they can
write, so you put that little bastard to work until his eyes bleed or CPS takes
them. Once they get a fathom of their life goal, you deem it worthy and take
off towards child-stardom. All the while wishing they succumb to their success
as children and start a horrible downward spiral of addiction and unsolicited
vulgarity.
10 positive moodlets? Find a rhythm, use a karma power, try
not to hang yourself with an HDMI cord.
500 wishes will put you in your grave. Remember my 240?
Never in your sad life.
Spa treatment is a glorified day-trip that you have to spend
money on. Grieve.
Getting 150,000 Lifetime Happiness points requires you to
become a wish filling machine. Each wish grants you a set number of points,
usually in the hundreds, that will be stacked for you to buy perks like not
having to pee, etc. This takes awhile, but it’s not impossibru. And then
fulfilling a non-lifetime wish worth 7,500. Fuck these people. Seriously, fuck
them. Fuck the lot of them. This requires you to reach the tippy top of a
skill, or job ladder. Your sim will want to better itself over and over until
the 9th out of 10 total skill blips to fill, where it will then tell
you it will grant your pathetic corpse 7,500 LHP if you push them over the
edge. As if you haven’t been lifting their weight the entire game.
The decision is obvious. The Sims is more difficult to beat,
ergo should be on the radar for hardcore gamers wanting a reason to boast. You
don’t want all the gloating saved for the fat ladies, do you? Neither do I.
Although The Sims is a more difficult game to beat, Skyrim
still reigns in a higher satisfaction rate. There’s something more alluring
about stabbing an elf in the rib cage than watching a tomato plant bloom.
