A Little Too Ironic…I Really Do Think

Tomorrow will see the release of Sims2 Apartment Life. Usually by now my pre-order would have been long placed and I’d be bouncing up and down awaiting the latest expansion.  But I’m not.  No pre-order, no pouring over screenshots, nothing, and I have to take a moment to wonder why.  After careful thought, I believe that I’m all Sim-ed out.  Not the game – I still love it and am still determined to turn Brandi Broke’s life around for her, determined to have the time of my (Sims) life at a cool college dorm, and rise to the top of my chosen career…so it isn’t that.  Just that this is the eighth expansion (I’m not even counting the myriad of stuff packs).  That’s a lot to deal with.  Before long, Sims 3 will be out so is it even worth it when I will have to start all over again next spring?

I lapped up the first few – I adored the Uni pack, loved Nightlife and Open for Business….wasn’t fussed about the pets until they picked up and jiggled a tiny puppy about and my heart melted.  (It promptly hardened again when a stray dog destroyed a bed that cost thousands of hard earned simoleans).  However, as every play with each new pack progressed, I found myself with more and more to juggle…teen years, homework, skills, then on to uni – classes, term papers, and pranks, not to mention your Sims’ needs and then their wants and then the lifetime aspiration and influence…then business…trying to juggle managing your lot, dealing with slacker staff and indecisive customers before coming home to newborns screaming, toddlers toddling, an agro nanny who made my adult Sims cry, and your sleep-deprived Sim ends up slumping in the dinner with exhaustion.

Crime doesn't always pay, but counterfitting beats working

Then there were pets needs too…then holidays, and then, and this is what finally broke me…hobbies.  Now I have to fulfil their hobby wants too and keep up their interests in case they wane and I realised that I was so busy managing all this and more that I was forgetting to enjoy the game.  I found myself getting more and more stressed and frustrated.  I became especially irate after a stupid gaming hobby woman phoned my house at 3am after a Sim’s dream had pushed them into the next hobby level.  It seemed she thought it was an okay time to phone and wake up newborn twins to invite me to join her club.  Well piss off love, can’t you see I’m at breaking point?!  I nearly mangled my mouse and ate it.

Seasons brought fun, hassle free interactions

What was happening to me?  This is supposed to be the easy way – managing a life better than I can cope with my own.  Gentle, sedate, making people’s aspirations come true – it made me feel good and I enjoyed every moment, advancing careers and my Sims whoo-hooing and hob-nobbing with everyone in town.  Now, to add to it all, the final nail in my coffin, we have ‘Apartment Life’.  I haven’t even touched the holidays yet and now I’m supposed to build some airy loft space and feed my Sims cheeky Friends-esque cups of coffee and sip cosmos and dream of Manolo Blahniks?  When will I find the time?  How will I fit all this in?  What are the developers trying to do to me?
 
And then it sank in.  In a subtle, insidious way Sims 2 has transformed to this point where it beautifully shadows real life - trying to juggle family,  work,  hobbies, and needs with your wants, desires,  and secret wishes, not to mention holidays and destructive pets.  I can’t cope in the game anymore, there is not enough time.  The game’s perverse juggling is simply a mirror held up to our own lives; mine at least and that is rather sobering and quite apt.  So like the real world, all I can do is vaguely prioritise and hope to muddle through and somewhere in the middle, I’ll find a kind of happiness.