I'm Baaaaaaaack!

Not only did my hard drive crash, but that horrible cold/flu thing that seems to going around my city/state/country/world. What a freaking week/2 weeks. See prior sick entries. Pretty much the same concept. But I'm finally better now, thank goodness.

And, thanks to my very handy hubby, I have a new hard drive in an old lappy. I lost a lot of info, but luckily, we had actually done a backup a season ago. Geeks that we are, we also have a wireless network, so some things were actually still in the system on another computer.

So here's my guilty confession. Want to know what info I lost that upset me most? My Sims 2 hacked objects! Yes, I'm a Sims 2 maniac. The game itself I find pretty uninteresting by itself. Maybe other people like playing god, but it bores the crap out of me. I don't care if the characters go potty or not. How tedious! What part do I really enjoy? The decorating! OK, I admit I love all those deco shows on TV, but I can't directly participate there, just watch. And I've tried several different interior design/home design software programs and they just don't cut it. Either they're too complicated to enjoy, or the walkthrough in real time is ponderously slow, or the choice of materials to use are horrendous and it's difficult to add new textures. I may try again, who knows. But in Sims 2, I can actually see in real time how the space works and how much room you need to leave around objects and structures and why. How the space flows is important. I've gotten so used to this tiny little world and so entranced, that when I'm driving around, I see houses and notice how doors and windows are situated in different ways and what choices they made for styles and types of the doors and windows. So I'm actually teaching myself the practicalities of architechture and interior design. I'm also learning how to landscape.

So when my hard drive crashed, I had amassed a collection of amazing plants, interior design objects, paint, floor, door and window designs and yes, even people, called skins. There are lots of download sites, free and for pay, where people are doing amazing things and sharing them. The original textures of the Sims2 characters and structures are pretty boring, and the faces are just plain bad. The stuff on sites like Mod The Sims 2, my favorite site for safe downloads, is so superior to the original game textures that I can't imagine why EA doesn't improve them as much as the gamers themselves have. Without the additional imported textures of skins and objects and build items, the game is really dull, at least to me.

I used to play Sims 1 and enjoyed it, but Sims 2 does have better dimensional design and you can place more things like doors and windows on an angle, so it's closer to real world designs, and the people skins had the potential to be more detailed and dimensional looking than Sims 1, so I decided to try Sims 2. Well, let me tell you, it's a lot more complicated. I find myself doing a lot more of going behind the scenes into the program itself and adjusting or adding things. OMG, I've become a gamer! Yikes! It does make the whole thing more interesting, though. I'm learning more about the programming, little by little. I'm still not all that comfortable with all the ins and outs of the program, but I have to say that my old habits have changed a bit. In Sims 1 I usually ended up putting the game on pause, adding lots of money to the game with cheats, and decorating the hell out of it till the house could have been in Architectural Digest, then throwing the Sim family out, keeping their money in the house, and re-decorating with the new money from the next poor Simslobs I threw in. I call it Sims slumlord.

Now, in Sims 2, thanks to all the downloads available from fellow gamers, the skins are so amazing for the people that I actually put the characters into play more often, to see how they move through the space. This game is not for dumb people. There are so many different goals to fulfill the needs of these sims that it seems relentless. Unless, of course, you cheat. Now in Sims 2, they actually include the list of cheats if you know where they are. They may have had the same thing in Sims 1, but I never found them if they were there.

So after much hunting, I have found most of the hacked objects I lost when my hard drive crashed. Not only is my lappy recovered, but my favorite things have come back. And now, I am definitely an expert on making regular back-ups of all the things I have lovingly amassed on my computer. Yay!

The next step will be when I feel familiar enough with the Sims2 program to start learning how to make my own obects and skins. I was an art student way longer ago than I care to think about, and my specialty was faces and figures, so we'll see if I can create new skins. I also hunger for things like George Nakashima furniture, the latest bathroom design ideas, furniture like the items from Design Within Reach, all the stuff I could never afford in real life.

Fact is, our house needs a LOT of rehab and we're waiting to be able to afford it. I'm talking bungee cord holding together a 45-year-old oven door! Meantime, I can dream and learn how to design a space in my little Sims2 world. Sigh.