Sovereign?

"Vanguard of our destruction? How's that working out for you, big guy?"

The lamp is called 'The Sovereign', and the description reads: Innocent jellyfish or malicious alien lifeform? You decide, with this great conversation-starter!

Not sure whether to buy lots of this lamp for Kaidan and Shepard's place, or avoid this lamp for Kaidan and Shepard's place. The latter is probably safer.

I eventually want to build them a lot that looks like it's made out of the prefab units seen on some Mass Effect human colony worlds, but I'm not entirely sure if that'll work. It'd be so much easier if Sims 4 had ladders, I must admit. What is a Mass Effect build without either ladders or elevators? I mean, really?

Sims 4: Build Mode

There are a few amazing features in Sims 4 build mode, but for the most part, it's build mode, you build, nothing too exciting. So this post will be mostly screenshots. Note that I play on medium graphics for the most part, so the game can look better than this on a better computer.

No octagonal roof, which is something I found myself wishing I'd checked before settling on a design that called for three of them. Oh well, I made do.

Not shown here: You can choose different tiles for each individual roof piece! Finally! I'm debating recolouring the roof of the 'extension' out to the side there.

The curved fences are great, but they require space. The turret upstairs extends into the required space, so I couldn't put one upstairs. I may change the downstairs railings to not be rounded, we'll see.

Plants need watering. Yes, I queued that up for the Sim.

I did find the 'move the entire house' ability very useful, I was able to start building right away, not worrying if it would fit or not. If I needed more room on any side, I just moved the thing around until I could fit everything in.

Note: It's also possible to move around individual rooms, as well as rotate the house or rooms.

When I was done, I spent half an hour just shifting the entire house one square this way, two squares that, trying to figure out where on the lot it worked best. A blessing and a curse, maybe.

I have no idea why it's so dark inside.

The interior is rather sparsely decorated for now, especially the upstairs bedrooms, but I'll work on decorating, bit by bit. This sim now has the Mansion Baron aspiration, and one of the requirements in the first stage of that is to display 15 pieces of art. So that's something I will be working on.

Just your typical 3 bedroom, 6 bathroom sim house, really.

Serrice Ice Brandy

Since I was healing Shepard's scars anyway, I figured I'd drop in on Chakwas and share a drink. I love this scene, it's one of the few times Shepard gets to relax, unwind. Poor guy is under so much pressure.

"Here's to simply being happily drunk!"
"I'll drink to that!"

It's also a nice scene with Chakwas, she really doesn't get much to do. I must admit, I almost never go to sickbay, because I know she never has new lines. In fact, this time, I had started a mission before I remembered 'oh yeah, the scars', and had to come back to the ship to deal with that. But the Normandy just wouldn't be the same without her. (My renegade didn't have her in 3. It was not the same.)

Next up: Zaeed's loyalty mission (maybe - I'll save first and reload if I can't get his loyalty with my meagre paragon points) because I want to see if the Archangel mission, with all those mercs, is any different after doing this mission. Probably not! But I can find out.

I'll be taking Jacob along, because he's got squad incendiary ammo and that seems like a hilarious idea for a refinery mission. And also because I don't have much in the way of options yet, it was Jacob, Miranda, or Mordin.

This is another scheduled post. Don't know how busy the Sims will be keeping me. But I think this is as far ahead as I can get tonight, so this is probably the last scheduled post.

Sims 4: Live Mode

So I've managed to spend the entire day playing the sims, actually playing the sims. I had my household pre-made and ready to pop in there (though I did have to find out how to get them from the CAS demo to the full game) so I spent no time in CAS. I put them on an existing lot, so I haven't explored build mode yet. I was going to, but whoa, the entire day just disappeared.

No screenshots I'm afraid, but they're sims, they look sim-like, nothing particularly groundbreaking here. The sims themselves look great, but they're still just sims.

I moved my Shepard, the one from my most recent posts, and a downloaded Kaidan into a lot, I set them to 'married' in CAS to speed things up, but I don't think I really needed to do that. Anyway, Kaidan got a job as an astronaut, and they adopted a baby girl. She's a teenager now.

I spent a good deal of time controlling the daughter, but Shepard and Kaidan managed to keep themselves alive (and were constantly flirting with one another, aww) and not start any fires, so that's awesome. The daughter on the other hand, she started several fires. Heh.

So, they have these aspirations, it's basically a lifetime wish/goal as in Sims 2 or 3. Sort of a quest-structure like in Sims 3, but with the Sims 2 feature of 'once you complete one, you can choose another', which I personally LOVE. Advancing in jobs and school has a similar Sims 3 quest-structure to it.

The camera controls were a pain, but maybe that's more of a game-whiplash issue, the post before this one was about finally adjusting to Mass Effect controls after Dragon Age controls, so, that's likely. Anyway, I clicked the 'Sims 3 camera' checkbox, and it's all good now.

I picked up the game at 9am, it's now 6pm and I've forgotten to eat all day, whoops. But the game didn't crash or overheat my graphics card once, so that's getting a huge thumbs up from me!

I am a little disappointed I couldn't set the ages to 'very long', I had sims going for hundreds of sim days in 3, but the longest in 4 seems to be about double the lifespan. Still, it's better than no option at all, I guess.

I don't really know where anything is yet, but I'm finding my way around. I'll try and get a build mode review up tomorrow, or maybe over the weekend. If anything else occurs to me, I'll toss it in there.

It's not a perfect game, there are things I'd prefer to be done differently, but it's fun, and that's really all I was hoping for.

"Steering's a bit off."

Or rather, I'm finally getting the hang of it. The movement controls are a bit different in Dragon Age, I kept trying to move Shepard as though he was Hawke, without much success. Very disorienting. But I think I'm remembering how this all works now, hooray.

Here are some random screenshots from this session, including the Aria's couch armour shot that I seem to like taking. It really is the best way to get a view of the full armour, from helmet to boots, in one shot.

Scars appear to be fading, but I think I'll actually use the medbay upgrade to get rid of them this time. This Shepard is a paragon Shepard, but I am impatient, so.

This post was a scheduled post, written up a day in advance. Today (as in, when this post goes live) I expect to be playing the Sims 4, and will probably post my initial thoughts some time in the next few days. Likely tomorrow, but no promises.

Back aboard the Normandy

Not smiling.

Smiling. Yes, this is a Shepard smile.

I wish this wasn't the only time you talked to EDI in this specific location, because I really like having the holographic Normandy in the background. It makes it feel like you're having a conversation with the ship, which is exactly what you are doing.

Here we go again

I decided to see what I'd get if I imported a ME2 save into ME2. Turns out, you keep levels and armour and stuff (he woke up in formal wear) but paragon/renegade is reset to zero. Probably other stuff is reset too, I didn't play very long. It was a late night idea. We'll see!

Face Code: 233.RDL.SG9.H2C.GMP.CBB.N1G.2NN.BB6.6U4.836.5

The face code here is the same as the one I posted not too long ago for ME3, just with adjusted hair/stubble colours.

Use this one for ME2, and 233.RDL.SG9.H2C.GMP.CBB.N1G.2NN.BB6.6U4.833.3 for ME3.

Armour and customisation: still there.

Initial scars: Back. Oh well. They'll fade soon enough.