Stargrace

Legacy Family: Growing Pains #TS3 #TheSims3

Ah, a relaxing evening eating pizza, what more could a teenager want?! Until the neighbours call the cops on your “teen party” and you’re forced to break it up of course!

That was My experience with my legacy family late yesterday afternoon. It was awesome although it does seem to mimic real life maybe a little too much? Well, not completely. My legacy Sim founder and her other half were given a free vacation, where they vanished for a few days and left the teenagers at home. Of course the first thing they did with their parents out of the picture was throw a party – but they don’t know very many kids their age, so the result of that party is pictured above.

As someone mentioned on G+ my legacy family has already come quite far from their roots of living on the lawn with a shower and a toilet. The twin girls each have their own bedrooms now, and I’ve been working on furnishing the house with decorations. The value of the property along with furnishings is $30,000 and I’ve been contemplating whether or not they’ll move to a new house or if I’ll keep the family in their current home and continue to live there for all their generations. Undecided as of yet.

The founder is also now an elder, although she has not retired yet. She’s rank 7 / 10 in a chef career, and her life time dream is to get to 10 / 10 so I was hoping I could do that before she passes on. With so many vacations, snow days, and other holidays, it’s difficult.

The twins being teenagers has brought a whole lot of other ‘fun’ to everyday life. They constantly have mood swings, and want to rebel. Jessica got a part time job at the grocery store after school, and Emily joined an after school drama club. One has a lifetime wish of being a famous musician, and the other wants to rescue 6 stray animals and be an animal saviour. Go figure.

Neither of them has much time before I’ll have to start working on bringing in the 3rd generation – remember the “goal” of this legacy family is to live through TEN generations. I’m already worn out living through this single one.

SOE Live and Vanguard #Vanguard

SOE Live is only 9 days away and while a majority of people this year are eagerly awaiting news on EQNext (I am assuming) I am looking forward to what we may hear concerning Vanguard. Yep, that quiet little game that no one admits to playing but secretly deep down inside, still yearns for.

Vanguard has a few panels this year which is fantastic because I remember the years when Vanguard wasn’t even a blip on the radar. You can check out the SOE Live lineup for full details, but as far as Vanguard is concerned you’re looking at the following:

Friday August 2nd – Vanguard Live Quest: Employing Diplomacy in Old Targonor
Friday August 2nd – Vanguard Past, Present, and Future
Saturday August 3rd – Player panel: Vanguard – Recruiting and Retention (sadly this is also at the exact same time that a panel on EQNext is going on about classes, but I still hope they get a good showing)
Saturday August 3rd – Vanguard Create your own adventure

When you have a lot of games to promote in your three day faire I can only imagine just what a huge deal time management must be. If you’re like me, and play multiple SOE games, there’s no way you’re going to be able to catch it all. Hopefully the majority of the information will surface over twitter and youtube videos, and other social media so those who are unable to attend can still get great information about their favorite games.

Of course just because I’m eagerly awaiting news for Vanguard doesn’t mean that I’m not equally as excited about EQNext (or any of the other EQ franchise games for that matter). I’m just taking it slowly, and we’ll see where all of this goes.

What are you most looking forward to hearing about at SOE Live? Let me know in comments!

Blessed Underfoot Prayer Shawl #EverQuest

While end game players are exploring around the final installment in the Heart of Fear, I’ve been doing some crafting. Of course don’t let that fool you, if I were geared up enough I’d want to be in the heart of fear too. Although I did manage to play a bit with my regular group, this week has been quite busy all around.

So in the meantime I’ve been working on my prayer shawl 2.0. It’s an incredibly lengthy quest that takes you through each of the Underfoot zones. There’s killing involved along with the crafting which is well beyond what the current cap is so you should be prepared for a few failures – although I haven’t failed any of my combines yet, I DID accidentally eat one of the food turn ins I needed to make. Whewps.

In other news I’ve decided to try to apply to a raid guild on Drinal. A part of me is very nervous about this and another part is telling me that if I don’t try now, I’ll never get the chance again because who knows what will happen when EverQuestNext releases. There’s one guild in particular that a small handful of my friends have joined, so I’m going to make the attempt. We’ll see how it goes. I’ve never actually raided anything current tier in EverQuest before, so there’s (as always) a good chance they won’t want to take me along. I like to think I’m a relatively quick learner, so we’ll just have to see.

As always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!

Legacy Family: Bald Babies and Elderly Parents #TS3 #TheSims3

I know these blog posts about my legacy sims family may not be all that entertaining, after all, the characters are doing the same things that most people do every single day (give or take a few details) but I absolutely love their quirks and activities. Since it’s too hot to do much of anything around here lately (42c, really Ottawa?) I spent some more time watching the little family grow up. The twin girls are now children (baby, children, teens, young adult, adult, elder, I think is the cycle but I could be wrong), and have inherited some not so wonderful traits because of their ‘difficult’ upbringing. Come on now, you try raising twins and so long as no one dies I say that’s a success!

Little Jessica also grew up to be bald. I have no idea who she inherited that from but I’m going to guess her father. She earned the ‘hot tempered’ trait. Emily on the other hand is ‘grumpy’.

I guess Barrett was a bit older than my founder sim thought because as soon as the children aged up he turned into an elder! One of the rules of the game is not to adjust the length of time it takes to age nor can you level your sims up before the game indicates that it’s a birthday, so I’ve been adhering to that and having the game age them manually rather than throwing parties.

Since one of the parents is now an elder and retired, his daily income has decreased to $70 a day. I had hoped that the other sim could take some time off work to insure that the children grew up properly, but alas that was just not in the cards. If she gives up her job the family won’t have enough to survive on, although as you can see by the screenshot above they’re not doing too badly these days.

One of the more interesting happenings was that when the children aged up, their toys came to life in the form of imaginary friends. Emily is quite taken with hers and spends hours and hours talking to this weird creature that follows her around. Personally I find it more than a little creepy, but hey it keeps her social bar filled. So now the kids are old enough to start going to school. Hopefully they’ll get good grades, and turn into wonderful young adults, so that I can start working on the 3rd generation of the legacy family. 10 generations seems like a long time away.

Lots has Changed #WurmOnline

Even though I typically spend my summer months bouncing from game to game, that hasn’t really happened this year. Well, I suppose in a manner of speaking it has. I tried Rift again and just couldn’t get as involved in the game as I wanted. I tried GW2, same thing. Eventually I found myself back with the games I’ve been playing steadily for the past few months. A bit odd, for this nomadic gamer. As long as I’m having fun it doesn’t matter much.

The MMOs that I find myself in more often than not are Wurm Online and EverQuest (that’s right, the first one). Nothing else seems to appeal to me. For single player games I’m sticking with Animal Crossing: New Leaf, and Sims 3.

So lets talk about Wurm Online. A LOT has changed in-game. In fact so much has changed that it would be impossible for me to name it all, so your best bet to get caught up to date would be to browse a few pages of their Tumblr account. There’s even mention of a kickstarter that will be starting up in a bit. Update 1.1 came out not that long ago, and since then there have been a lot of little bug fixes and some content updates (much needed ones, might I add). Some of my favorite updates include new tree types, new visible barding, the overhaul of the UI, and new items added like flower pots and flower boxes. So what have I been up to?

I still own two deeds, one on Deliverance (Caribou Trails) and one on Exodus (Les Reveurs). Each one has a trader, and I use this trader to pay for both deeds & my alt account. I paid for a year of premium for my main character just before the price went up (which I still dislike, but of course who is ever going to say they enjoy a price increase). The Deliverance deed is “completed” so my Vynora priest resides there, planting trees and breeding 5-speed horses. Things are usually quiet unless some adventurer has come by and starts trying to take things that belong to me or building weird fences against my perimeter. Thankfully there are still rules in place against that sort of thing.

The deed on Exodus on the other hand still has a lot of work to be done. It’s a huge deed and I wish I could expand it another 2 tiles forward and backward. Sadly I’m boxed in at the moment so unless the deed behind me falls I won’t be able to expand. I have a building that’s partially on my perimeter that holds my trader, there was no other location where I could have put it because they need to be a specific distance apart from one another. I’d like to build another house in the center area, as well as a farm. There’s a large tree farm I’ve started on the opposite side, and a never ending amount of mining that needs to be done. Especially since I could use more bricks. Always more bricks. Mortar too, but that will have to wait. I do also have horses at the Exodus deed, but no other animals aside from that.

One day I logged in to find a portion of my wall had mysteriously vanished. I’m not sure if a troll knocked it down or what happened, but I wasn’t too pleased. I patched it back up and hopefully the rest of the walls stay put. There’s more than enough upkeep to go around so things shouldn’t be falling down.

I wish I could explain why the game appeals to me so much. I suppose it’s simply the idea that players create absolutely everything by hand, and it takes a LOT of time – but not too much time as there are still things you can do from the start. Ah well, in any case, I’m looking forward to continuing the work on each deed and I find it a very relaxing way to spend a few hours.

As always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!