Watching Sims 4 Play Itself

I haven’t really played any Sims game since the second one and back then I just gorged on it for weeks at a time until I was burnt out. I own the Sims 3 and haven’t played it. Now with Sims 4, I just feel burnt out within half an hour. I’ve played it already. I’ve played it to death. Even with the upgraded graphics and new silliness, its just the same game that I spent a few hundreds of hours in. There are no new story lines, no new missions and the objectives feel the same as they’ve always been. Make your Sim happy by any means necessary.

The game just isn’t for me anymore. I made a family of 8 people hoping they’ll either pair off or murder one another. I’m watching it play on my television while I sit here and type. Before that, I was playing FTL: Faster Than Light as I I listened to the Simlish dialog.

These eight are women, because I’m a man like that. To my credit though, I let the game generate 8 random women and their names. Then I just accepted them as is. In a way, the basis of the Sims is exactly like FTL. Randomly generated characters in a contained area that I manage. I buy them upgrades and they gain skills on their own. The real difference is the combat doesn’t happen from house to house like FTL, but internally inside the house. No fights seem to have broken out even if quite a few people are angry, sad or tense.

At least with Sims 4 the characters seem intelligent enough to carry on life without me at the helm. Everyone keeps a schedule and makes it to work on time unlike what I remember about the first two Sims games. I needed to be pretty strict with them. Is it really a game when no one is needed to play it?

Its like a beautiful ballet seeing 8 people try to cook their meals at the same time, because while the computer is better at managing things, its still not smart enough to realize that one person can cook the meals for everyone. Eight people with only enough money to afford 6 beds. That’s okay though, because they all have different sleeping schedules and jobs. Its an organized chaos in this house. When they do all sleep at the same time, two of them end up on the couch sitting asleep like zombies.

Oh what’s this? A choice? I need to decide something for a character’s career path? Looks like the game might need me after all. Well at least I get to do something other than cater to my Sims every desire. The choices end up being games of chance though. A random gamble that goes with or against whatever you decide.

It looks like no one out of the eight people living in the house can clean it. That’s okay just hire a maid, they make about $2,000 a day. Its like power leveling. Just go to sleep with the game on, come back in the morning and watch your Sims have over $200,000 saved up. Well assuming they don’t just burn down the house making a salad.

There are just so many new useless features like putting a smoke detector on the floor. I’m glad that people making a game about designing houses have never been in one. Well its not all bad. You can have windows on the floor and photos of windows over them. Just adjust the height. Its more customization I guess.

The sad part about how little I enjoy the game is that I spent hours just to get this game to work. At first its default resolution just wouldn’t work with my television. That made my screen go black while I could still hear the music from my computer. After a few hours of examining the problem and looking for a solution. There wasn’t one. The quick fix was to start the game in -w windowed mode, but alas, even windowed mode made my screen go dark. The real solution was hooking the computer up to a normal monitor, going into the game and adjusting the resolution. The odd part is when testing resolutions on my Windows desktop, I had tried the one that ended up working. With the game finally visible, I adjusted the resolution to my television’s native resolution. Now it works on my television. Hurrah. One of life’s little whims has been checked off for my own Sim.