has always kind of been The Truman Show as god game, hasn’t it? You make your little puppet people, you control every aspect of their lives and personality from birth until death, you make them get in the pool and then remove the ladder. I am become Ed Harris, destroyer of worlds, right? And now, thanks to an incredible build creation shared by Sims community member “Simoniona“, your Sims game can be The Truman Show both metaphorically and> literally.
She’s created a version of Truman’s neighbourhood from the movie, so your Sims, too, can wish their neighbours good afternoon, good evening and good night. And, even more impressively, there are two versions of it. One is the street from, as it were, Truman’s point of view at the start of the movie – a suburban paradise. The second is when the scales have fallen from his eyes. The lot is bordered with big movie set surrounds, a light has crashed onto the set, and we even have the iconic steps and door for your tiny Trumans to make their own escape.
seems to be pivoting toward content that is, firstly, tailored specifically to my interests, and, secondly, designed to allow the creation of strange and reclusive weirdos. Whilst EA’s attempt at a new reality show about playing The Sims rumbles on in the background, and after the Eco Lifestyle expansion pushed me towards creating a stinky, trash-gobbling Oscar the Grouch, here comes new Stuff Pack Nifty Knitting.
Stuff Packs are sort of mini-expansions, and Nifty Knitting is all about, well, knitting. Somehow – whether by bugs that are not yet smoothed out, or by design – the Nifty Knitting Stuff Pack has perfectly recreated the slide from “oh, knitting is kind of cool”, into the creation of wool mailbox covers and jumpers that have scarves built in. I played for a few hours, and in that space of time my Sim evolved naturally into a hunched yarn hermit, rocking incessantly on her new chair and eschewing everything in favour of more knitting>. Including food, sleep and conversation. It is the closest The Sims has yet come to allowing me to create myself. And it is too real.
We are half way through the inaugural season of The Sims Spark’d, a reality TV show based around being well good at The Sims. If you hadn’t heard, 12 Sim fanatics have been whisked away to… some studio, where they’re competing to win $100k by proving they are the bestest at The Sims 4. The first episode premiered last week on TBS, with the episode appearing on the BuzzFeed Multiplayer YouTube chennel the following Monday. Yesterday saw the second episode go up on YouTube as well. EA are as yet only dipping their toe in the murky sea that is reality TV, however, since Spark’d will only run for four episodes total.
Spark’d actually has all the ingredients that I love about terrible reality TV shows, plus it involves The Sims 4. On paper, it should be amazing. And indeed, there are already minor Twitter beefs between fans, and contestants complaining about the broadcast edit not showing the full truth. All classic stuff! But it’s clear that Spark’d will never achieve greatness unless EA loosens the apron strings enough to let their reality TV baby become a hot, hot mess.
“Are you ready for your new knitting obsession”, EA asks, knowing full well it is the height of summer. Nevertheless, the next The Sims 4‘s stuff pack is, indeed, Nifty Knitting – adding a full wool wash worth of knitted goods for your Sims to weave, wear, and (eventually) monetise, all from the comfort of their sturdy rocking chair come July 28th. Just, maybe stick to knitted vests instead of sweaters, aye? It’s still sweltering out.
Our ultimate guide to The Sims 4 cheats contains everything you need to know about how to enable cheats, and how to use said cheats to fulfil your sims’ every need… or brutally murder them. We don’t judge.
Electronic Arts today announced The Sims 4 is spawning a reality TV show, The Sims Spark’d. No, it’s not about strangers trapped in a swimming pool without a ladder. The four-episode series actually sounds kinda cool, challenging twelve Sims players to build characters, places, and stories in The Sims 4 and maybe win $100,000 (£78k). I’m so impressed by so many of the things players make so sure, I’ll give this a go when it starts this month. Anything to interrupt the six seasons of Ink Master I have so far watched during lockdown.
Our ultimate guide to The Sims 4 cheats contains everything you need to know about how to enable cheats, and how to use said cheats to fulfil your sims’ every need… or brutally murder them. We don’t judge.
Alrighty, so as you may or may not be aware, about a month ago The Sims 4 got a massive update ahead of the Eco Lifestyle expansion. As well as adding firefighters, ladders, and Sims peeing fire (which was apparently a bug and not a feature), it added some new Mac makeup for CAS (aka Create a Sim, where you make your digital puppets).
The community reaction to the new makeup was, err… mixed at best, and in particular, people did not like the Sperm Eyeliner.
If you’re a fan of The Sims 4, or you know someone who is, or even if you just follow people who occasionally retweet simsposting into your timeline, you’ve probably seen something about Paralives by now. It’s… a life simulator? A Sims-like? (I know The Sims can’t be the only game of its type, but it’s dominated the market for so long that the only other one I can think of is that weird adult one where the entire point was having sex.) It, by which I really mean the teeny tiny dev team, is being funded on Patreon.
Simthusiasts like myself have been quietly aware of Paralives for a small while now, mostly because of the very cool nature of the in-progress video clips that surface on a fairly regular basis. A few weeks back, though, there was a flurry of new interest when a new character creation video was released. After bunch of Sim YouTubers like lilsimsie did reaction videos and hyped it up, Paralives ended up with a lot of eyes on it, and I, in turn, hungered to know more. So I reached out to Alex Massé, who we might term the lead developer, to ask him some Para-centric questions.
Ahead of their big notE3 stream tonight, Electronic Arts have casually dropped The Sims 4 and its expansions onto Steam, no big deal. How criminal that one of the [cms-block] has been locked in EA’s tower. Titanfall 2 is here too. Steam’s page does note that Sims 4 will install and use Origin, mind, so evidently you can’t have everything.