Hello, everyone! Happy Friday! (Or whatever day you are reading this blog post on.) I was really happy with the response that I got last week after I mentioned my plans to do this “642 Things to Write About” challenge. Thank you SO much to everyone who humored me and played along. It made me so happy to see the notifications of comments on my phone on Saturday morning. Yay! I hope we can keep it up this week. I went back and forth between three different topics for Week 2 and decided to go with the “easiest” one. Some of these topics require some thought, some require some sentimentality, and others require creativity. I didn’t want to scare anyone away just yet… 😉 So without further ado, here’s this week’s topic. If you want to participate, please leave your contributions in the comments!
“Describe something you wanted badly and once you got it, never used.”
When I was a wee girl all the way back in middle school, I was obsessed with all of The Sims products. I loved being able to create my own worlds and stories. Some things never change, I guess. I played SimCity 2000, SimTown, SimCity 3000, The Sims, and SimTower. I should also throw RollerCoaster Tycoon in there too, though that’s not a Sims product. I kinda dabbled in SimLife and SimFarm, but not enough to really give a hoot about them. My favorites were SimTown, SimTower, and The Sims. I loved SimTown because you didn’t have to worry about money and loved SimTower because it was just plain fun to build your own skyscraper.
At some point in my adolescence, I outgrew most of the Sims products except The Sims, which was released in 2000. My grandparents had the program on their home computer and even bought me some of the expansion packs. The Sims: Livin’ Large was my JAM. I remember when I discovered being able to download my own avatars and outfits and furniture and fun things like that and put them into the game. I even had all of the cheats for unlimited money and good moods written down on scrap paper somewhere. Towards the end of high school and into my college years, I pretty much forgot about all things The Sims. Cut to my senior year of college when I discovered that there was a newly released The Sims 2 & decided to break out my old disks. I got back into it as much as a busy college senior could – mainly on week nights when I didn’t have homework or was sitting around watching TV with my roommates. This was back when we didn’t have free wifi everywhere, so it was easier to play a game on my laptop while watching TV than it was to try to sit in a spot where the Internet cable could reach, haha.
Anyway, I had a very brief renewed love affair with The Sims circa 2005-2006. Then life got busy again and I completely forgot all about it. It wasn’t until 2009, after I bought my first [and current] MacBook, that I had this strange urge to play The Sims again. I went into an Apple Store on Long Island to purchase The Sims 2. For some reason, I didn’t like it; I think because my nostalgia had inspired me to buy it and this was just a different Sims than I remembered. I quickly returned it and was worried that I would never be able to find the original Sims game for a Mac. Funny enough, I still have all of my PC-compatible copies of The Sims and 2 or 3 expansions, including Livin’ Large, Hot Date, and Superstar. Anyway, I whined about it for a little while but wasn’t motivated enough to actually go find the right version. I wanted it really badly, but never actually attempted to buy it.
Well. Because I have an awesome man, Jay didn’t forget. For Christmas 2009, he bought me a Mac-compatible version of The Sims Complete Collection! I was super excited. I had big plans to install it and play it while I was on LI for the holidays. Then I actually went to Long Island…and never used it. In fact, since I finally got This Sims Complete Collection, I have never played it one time! I still have that game sitting on my desk in my bedroom. It’s not unopened; I have opened it and considered playing it a few times, but for some reason just never have. I certainly don’t feel like I’ve outgrown it by any means. I think it’s because you can’t do anything else while you’re playing it and I’ve officially hit that unfortunate point in life where its a rarity that I can only do one thing at a time. I’m going to blame it on that. However, I did a lot of reading about all things Sims while writing this post today and it has brought up some really good memories. I could’ve written short stories about the daily lives and back stories of half of the Sims characters I created. It was definitely a tool for my creativity. I think I may actually install it this weekend and give it a whirl for an hour or so. Maybe.
