Life With My New Sims

I've been working hard at creating my new Sims 2 university and it's turning into quite the college! I decided to build my first dozen or so ideas and then create a household of 6 random young adults to start populating it. This way, I have plenty of room for new buildings but these people have plenty of places to visit as well.

As the theme of this particular college is "Big State School" I made a lot of ivy-covered buildings with tall columns and lots of brick, inspired to some extent by my own college visits of long ago. The main campus buildings include a library and student union as well as a bunch of "academic" buildings focused on particular hobbies and areas of study, like a performing arts center with lots of musical instruments, a ballet studio, and so on. There are also two sports stadiums, an outdoor one for soccer and an indoor arena for basketball (I also plan to build a "hockey" arena even though the skating rink is definitely more for figure skating).

Hopefully this will make my new Sims graduate with skills beyond their college requirements. This is the ragtag group that will be responsible for populating the world. I tried to make them diverse, from the money-loving blonde snob to the goth chick who (somewhat surprisingly, I think) wants nothing more than to start a family to the pleasure aspiration hippie dude who just wants to create fun for everyone. They all started out in a dorm together, but now that they've finished their freshman year I split them up into groups. The guys will start a fraternity (I'm building their Greek house right now) and the girls are moving into other dorms according to their interests.

What I find rather funny is their preferred hobbies, some were so surprising! The goth girl loves cooking above all, not what I was expecting but it's a fun twist. Luckily, the nerdy one is into science, couldn't have planned that better! She even wants to be an oceanographer, which dovetails quite nicely. Her logic is already at 6! In practically no play time!

Not too much happened during their tenures as freshmen, I let them have a bit more free will than I usually do and just watched their personalities and learned how I can guide them in the future. They also started some good friendships together, which I plan to exploit like crazy later.

I think I'm having more fun with this game than I did before TS3 came out, it's like the new game made me appreciate the old even more. I do get a little confused at moments, though, forgetting that some of the features of TS3 are NOT in TS2. I also miss the ability to turn objects diagonally. Oh, well, it's worth missing those things to play the overall better game.