Post a Comment On: Digitally Staving Off Boredom

[Image] Hilarious, but is it inaccurate enough for
an Atari 2600 cartridge art spoof? The four days off this week passed in a flash, possibly because I've got a bit of a bug that's wearing me down just a bit, so I spent a little more than usual just sleeping or puttering around in low-energy activities... and there are few activities that take less energy than continuing my Sims 4 binge.

After addressing his weight problem by eating light, jogging, and going to the gym, the next major accomplishment on the ongoing story of the newly-minted golden god of physicality, Trip Delvin, international sim-man of mystery, was to advance to the top of his Secret Agent career.

The higher levels had a bonus requirement to "perform romantic interactions."  Not a whole lot of interactions were required to meet this demand, but I nevertheless decided to go full Bond on this and ended up having Trip score with Summer Holiday, L. Fabia, Liberty Lee, and some rando named Paulina Cervantes who happened to be jogging outside of the BFF household when Trip was invited over but nobody was there to meet him.  That household has the most overworked shower stall in the game.

That night, I had a dream where this took a scatological turn.  Not something I am into, but my subconscious found this to be a hilarious thing to fixated upon in the weirdly artificial perspective that the game series has.  I bet someone has already made the animations for it.

[Image] Santa chooses the wrong time
and place to socialize. In any case, I was now thoroughly bored with the idea of Trip getting lucky.  It's the same old ridiculous dance; such ritual contrivance to make sense of the hormone-induced overrides built into the human creature in order to bring about our tragic need for genetic conveyance.  Perhaps it was a lack of romance in seeing how copulation is presented in The Sims 4, the little computer people aping what infatuation is supposed to look like, the ease and reliability of triggering their reactions through options on a social radial menu.  Whatever it was, the contextual result was a pathetic microcosmic reflection of our procreative processes' overhyped place in our lives.

Instead, I got Trip to work on crafting his first Servo, but it was taking forever, as it required no less than 12 computer chips and 18 mechanisms that he had to craft himself, each one of those taking about 2 hours of Sims time.

During all this, I finally got around to completing Trip's "Strangerville Mystery" aspiration:
Getting the ID card was the hardest step, as you can only forage so much evidence from the secret lab and it is not immediately clear where you need to get the rest.   Trip's secret agent charisma had no problem buttering up a military man for a scanner, but it was ultimately his impressive fitness skills that sealed the deal.   Scanning for spores took time.  I continued working on my servo components between waiting for the scanner to recharge.  (Also, much gardening was done.  And, with much regrets, some beekeeping.)  After reaching the bottom level of the lab, I found that plenty of spores could be found there, so my scanning problems were over.   The bizarre fruit was quite easy to obtain.  Combined with the spores, it was all I needed to forward crafting the vaccines for the next step.  Testing the vaccine was lacking nuance, it was mostly just an excuse to play the "throw drink in face" animation on sims who were possessed. Then it was off to the final battle, dragging along former lover Summer Holiday, Santa Claus, and guy-who-actually-belongs-in-this-story George Cahill to help finish off the big boss in an epic battle that reminded me more of audience participation in a broadway show than the battlezones of video games past.   As with most things in Sims 4, becoming Hero of Strangeville was not all that hard. 
[Image] Trip's new housemate
is assembled.
About this point, I noticed a point of advice on The Sims 4 that I never did before: I can switch my sims' aspirations whenever I want, and never lose progress!  So I did, and earned some quick and easy points:
Two aspirations had already been completed.  The Jungle Explorer aspiration was Trip's first, and that was now joined by the one from Strangerville. I switched Trip over to the Fabulously Wealthy aspiration and it completed instantly since a combination of being a top rank secret agent and being sent artifacts to verify had made Trip well over 300,000 simoleons.   Next was the Nerd Brain aspiration, which completed in under 40 real-life minutes.   Thanks to Trip's past accomplishments, belting out two more aspirations took me less than an hour of real-life play.  In comparison, it took me probably close to four hours of real-life time to play long enough to complete a Servo.  Cashing in a bunch of his satisfaction points for needs reducers, Trip earned "The Most Interesting Sim In The world" achievement for having 12 traits.  Though Trip now had a second pair of hands around the house, his much-reduced needs accumulation meant he needed them less than ever.  There's an achievement in The Sims 4 to achieve 5 aspirations, and Trip is pretty close to getting that.

Shortly after completing building his Servo housemate, I had a strong sentiment that Trip needed to die.  Not because I was done with his goal of visiting all of the DLC I had bought, but rather because it seems to me that The Sims 4 sorely needed some kind of sink to undo all of the skills he was accumulating, and there is only one such sink in the game: they can die, and the household move on without those skills.  But I thought about it a bit and decided that it is not really necessary to kill off trip: mortality is easily enough dodged regardless, and having lots of maxed out skills is not much of a balance issue anyway because a sim is always limited to the rate in which they can perform the related actions.
[Image] A pack of freeloaders lounges about Trip's new Magnolia Promenade living room. Still, it might make for an interesting scenario if I played a sim on normal lifespan length who could only reset their lifespan with cowplant essence.  Because that requires I lure lots of hapless sims to their deaths!  Funny how the need for novelty in The Sims series eventually drives players to sim murder.  (Alternately, I could cut out the middleplant and just roll up a vampire.)

Instead, I had taken the Renassaince Sim aspiration as Trip's next goal, and I decided to try being a Scientist this time, as I had yet to try the Sims 4: Get To Work career.   His work in Strangeville done, I moved Trip and his new Servo housemate out to the Magnolia Promenade, where I customized the Preeminent Domain with a customized version of the Pique Hearth lot that included Trip's trademark secret agent basement. 
[Image] Should someone find their way in through the secret bookcase on the first floor, they would confuse Trip for hiding a simple occultist identity rather than being involved with the hard science behind the second secret bookcase leading into the rest of the basement.  It's an odd time we live in where commonplace delusion is considered less scary than the pursuit of clinical proof. So far, I have spent so much time customizing this huge house (and watching the newly-hired Butler prepare many plates food only to leave them around to rot) that I have yet to see what happens when it's time for Trip to get to work, as this Scientist career is one of three that you get to play on location.  After completing Renaissance Sim, perhaps I'll start a new game with normal lifespans because I really need to mix things up more than this.