Anime, Games, and Other Tomfoolery: The Unknown

There are times as a gamer when something so unpredictable, so horrifyingly foreign, so hideously absurd happens that one knows that they'd be a madman to press that 'save' button. Yet the save button is there, offering passage into a completely new world, a completely new experience. People like me often hit that save button, as a smaller act representative of our journey towards the banishment of ennui. Nowadays, there isn't as much of a dilemma since you can just save it into a separate save file, but on older games you didn't have this option.

Now, I'm not particularly proud that I play The Sims. On the contrary, I'm a little embarrassed to admit that I play it, though my elitist frozen heart is slightly consoled by the fact that I'm still playing The Sims 1 when everyone else has moved on to The Sims 3. Until just recently, the only version of The Sims I had played was the original, expansionless. My friend also owned House Party and I think I got to borrow that for a while as a kid but lost the disk shortly after burning it from his copy. I recently (*cough* legally *cough*) acquired all of the original Sims expansions in the form of The Sims Complete Collection, and I was a bit disappointed that I was unable with the Complete Collection to install the add-ons one by one. Since that was the form I wanted to try them out in, I was slowly building families specialized to take advantage of all the features that I perceived to be part of each individual expansion.

As I was going through the House Party expansion, one of the moments that I described in the first paragraph happened. I had gone about building my house to gear it towards throwing parties, with a small section for my Sim and his wife to live in and the rest containing massive dance floors, a large pool and hot tub, buffet tables, a single bathroom with both male and female doors on them, a karaoke bar, and a volleyball court. Now, I didn't know precisely what everything I bought did, but you can usually figure it out without too much guesswork in The Sims. One of the items I bought for parties was a firework stand. I naively thought it would innocently give a firework show and all the partiers would sit around blindly clapping like the dumb Sims they are. So here I was, throwing a party with tens of Sims at my house, and I think 'Lets set off some fireworks, woohoo!'. Well it turns out, the fireworks can fall back down to the ground and start a fire. Okay, not a big deal, except I had the fireworks next to the volleyball set. Anyone who's played The Sims sees where I'm going with this, but the ENTIRE volleyball set caught fire. The volleyball set is easily the biggest item you can buy in all 7 expansions, at 9x5 squares. Immediately after, the main female Sim whom I spent several hours on, killing her dog, making the main male character marry her, etc, caught fire. This blew me away. The sheer odds that an item that I thought was safe would cause a fire WHEN there were tens of other Sims at the house and make the biggest fire physically possible have got to be a hundred to one.

The Sims is largely a big RP game, and the concept of saving the game to the devastation that occurred and thinking of feasible reactions each of the different families involved in the fire would have was a very large challenge that I chose to take for the sheer hell of it and because the concept appeals to me aesthetically as an actual realistically unpredictable event happening within the confines of a video game. I failed to get good pictures when the fire started, but below are some pictures of after it happened with the subtitles I gave the pictures(And some with the default subtitles). Keep in mind what I said about The Sims being an RP game; I had to be a bit dramatic with some of the subtitles.

As an aside, this was the first time I really noticed the Grim Reaper system that I think the 'Livin Large' expansion introduced. I found it a little strange that Sims were not programmed to automatically plead for the lives of people who they cared for.