Ben’s Simple life

Get it? Simple. The clue is in the name. Sim-ple. I’ll show myself out.

Anyway. Before I launch into my blog, I want to tell you a little bit about me first, and more importantly, why I’ve not been around recently. The reason for my silence was that I was in and out of hospital a few times and ended up having surgery. So… I decided to take a break from everything. I can’t say if it was the right choice to make or not, but I’m trying to get back up on my feet now, and get my life back to normal. I’ve re-enrolled into my acrobatics classes, starting to make plans with friends and the final piece of getting back onto my feet was to get back into gaming.

During my absence I lost interest in video games. Almost entirely. Occasionally I would play a Final Fantasy game, or a Tales of game, but not even my beloved Tales of Symphonia could keep me entertained for more than a few hours a week.

So this is me getting back into the saddle of gaming. I don’t want to bullshit my way through a JRPG related blog, especially since I haven’t played any. So I’m dedicating my first blog back to one of two games that I did manage to play occasionally. The Sims 3.

So. Why The Sims 3?

To be honest, I only played it to build houses. That’s the fun part of the game for me; making beautiful mansions, kitting them out with the best stuff then plonking my characters into these lush, over-the-top homes. Once I got past that point of making a city of billion Sim Dollar houses, I find the game mind-numbingly boring.

Moving onto the characters I made? I must admit that I’m somewhat lacking in the creative department so I made my family. And when I say my family… I mean, my grandparents, aunts, uncles and all my cousins. Well… those I can remember… I’ve got a rather large extended family. As you can no doubt tell, I had a lot of spare time on my hands.

Eventually, the inevitable happened. I got bored of “Sim Me” being the perfect teen, so, I tried to spice things up a bit. With the Supernatural expansion pack, I turned my immediate family into fairy tale creatures. I just made myself a witch. As you do. Bewitching everyone and everything I could. Broken TV? Zap. Fixed. Shower grubby? Zing! All clean. Pet Unicorn? Sure? Why not. I’ll have one of those too. I turned my dad into a werewolf, my sister into a fairy and my mum into a vampire. What could be more entertaining than a family of different creatures of the night?

Regardless, my Sim turned out to be the Gayest. Sim. Ever.

1) Rainbow coloured walls? Check.

2) Witch? Got that.

3) Pet Unicorn? I called him Freddie.

If my Sim got any gayer he would quite possibly kick Chris Colfer off “Sims Glee” and take over. Like creator, like Sim I guess. Let’s face it. I’ve said there’s a “Sims Glee” on the Internet so somebody has probably made a version of “Sims Glee” somewhere. And low and behold, there’s an entire tumblr dedicated to it!

Then the inevitable happened. The Sims 3: Into the Future got released. And I just had to play it. So I threw my wallet at my laptop and BOOM. Nothing happened. So I opted for the more conventional method of entering my details into Origin and got the newest expansion. Downloaded it. And after installing it… my laptop decided enough was enough. It could handle the other expansions, but this one was a step too far.

So I did the only logical thing to appease my addiction. I uninstalled The Sims 3: Into the Future. And then I tried to run The Sims 3 without it… Except that wasn’t good enough for François (my laptop). He refused to play any rendition of The Sims 3 that had helped to make the last 5 months of my life semi decent…

So in conclusion? I had too much time on my hands, I made too many houses that nobody could afford and turned my Sim family into different species. Rock on!

My next blog will be about my adventures in Final Fantasy XIV, the other game I managed to play while I was off. This was my first real experience of a MMO… because I’m choosing to ignore my level 15 Elementalist in Guild Wars 2 as I really don’t think that counts!