Pffff...forget what I said then. lol

Romance Sims without secondaries can roll wants to get engaged/married to other Sims. Though they're likely to also roll simultaneous fears.

Also casting spells on the hobby club instructors works, but they just ignore it and walk off the lot. I wanted to see the music lady get chased by bees.

You should totally send that card off.

I've considered it.

*Wonders how old ihatemandatoryregister is* ... :p

I'm 25.

Ha! Did you also have an age-old hand-me-down computer (with age-old games) as a kid? I actually had SimLife as a kid... By the gods that manual confused me...and I was at an advanced reading level for my age :-P
I remember the manual had this weird comic thing about a Family altering each others genes... the mother got scales so that the dishwashing water wouldn't wrinkle her skin, the daughter became a monkey, the father got four arms...

Anyway i had no idea what I was doing with SimLife, I just wanted to make pretty forests and it never quite worked but in hindsight it actually taught me a lot about biology.

My first compter was an IBM Aptiva E Series, but as it's from the mid-late 1990s I don't think it could be considered age-old.



SimCity 2000 was my first 'serious' video game and I made some pretty nice looking cities that ultimately I had no way to transfer off the Aptiva. No floppy disks to spare and I don't think things like Dropbox or Google Drive were a thing yet.

In SimEarth I remember managing to set off the nanobot invasion (I think you had to use a nuke on one of the modern cities) and being amused by it.

The Aptiva was pretty solidly put together though. Once it fell off a desk while running and absolutely nothing happened. I expect if I threw it off a rooftop it'd just bounce off the ground.

Nah I was talking about my old hand-me-down computer I had as a kid, and well "age-old" in computer terms. I have no idea anymore what it was, i only remember I played SimLife on it. hahah
In the tutorial you are supposed to give lamas the ability to fly, I did and then was confused why they didn't have wings, since I gave them the genes for "wings". Well in SimLife you actually had to draw the animals yourself with like extremely tiny pixel icons, so I smeared some badly drawn wings onto the lamas.

In SimLife I accidentally screwed up the ecology of my planet multiple times by making carnivores that had extremely fast breeding times.

SimFarm was also great. Since the livestock could push down fences I just put irrigation ditches around them. I bought up all of the land on one side of the river and kept crashing crop dusters on the other side. A few years ago I bought some game called Farming Simulator 2012 expecting something like SimFarm but I was terribly disappointed.

I got a hand-me-down 8086 in 1997 (when the latest thing was the Pentium, if that helps give a scale for how out-of-date that was). I was delighted to have something of my own to play Paganitzu and Maniac Mansion on...

Quite a few of the games I got in the 1990s had those nice boxes, though they tended not to last long. I even got a traditional-style box for The Sims 1, but never got the cover for it (my parents gave it to me as a Christmas present and felt this would continue the suspense a little longer). As it happens, that incomplete box is still in my possession...

First computer we had was an Amstrad 464 (see photo here) with tapes that took forever to load. I think our favourite game was the Stock market one. We had a book of computer programs for simple games that we could enter and play - that also took forever but it was fun.

(Yep I'm a lot older than you, ihatemandatoryregister)

My parents got my brother a ZX81 back in, guess what? 1981. It came with a game called Nightfall, where your plane flew across the screen and got lower on every pass, so you had to bomb the tallest buildings before you crashed into them. He wouldn't let me use it, though (actually, he wouldn't even let me in his room, because I seemed to crash the computer just by being there!).

I don't remember the first computer I bought for myself at college, because I couldn't handle all the essay-writing by hand, but I loved Master of Magic. I was gutted when we switched from DOS-based to Windows and couldn't play it anymore. My husband recently found something similar from Steam, but it's not quite the same and I'm still nostalgic for the original, and hoping the same thing won't happen to TS2.

ETA: I was just Googling "British computers" and I think it may have been an Amstrad PCW.

Aside from the handful of teenagers on this board, I have a feeling I might be one of the younger members hanging out in TS2 section.

@BlueAlien - if you can acquire a copy of the game, look into DOSBox. It's a DOS Emulator. I use D-Fend Reloaded as a frontend on top of it and have all sorts of games in there. Or you could just set up Windows 9x (which, aside from ME, is one of the last versions of Windows to have native DOS support) in a virtual machine.

EDIT: Actually, it's available on GOG for under 10 dollars. It'll come with DOSBox included, I believe. https://www.gog.com/game/master_of_magic

Bet I'm the youngest.

I barely remember the first computer, but it was an old monstrosity running Windows 98 or something like that. For some reason, I vidly remember playing one of the Putt Putt games on there, and sort of remember other educational games. After that, our next computer was an Dell slightly less old monstrosity that ran XP. We got rid of it finally in 2011, I'd like to say. (It feels like a long time to me!)

Ooh, thanks, ihate! I think we tried DOSBox with our original game and it didn't work, but maybe this will!

@alljoj - were you around when they had the games in cereal boxes? I got my copy of Roller Coaster Tycoon from there. I don't even think I even liked the cereal.

Nope! I was never much of a cereal person, but I think that was either over or when it was still a thing, I never noticed.

The newspaper deliverer can also steal the newspaper. Don't you have a copy you can read in the office/distribution centre, Aline Perez? Or for that matter a free copy you presumably delivered to yourself at some point?

@ieta_cassiopeia - when I delivered newspapers, the distribution office actually gave the carriers around 5 extras to account for ones that got damaged or lost. When one of my teachers ended up in the newspaper I brought all the spares in for her.

If a cat plays with the catnip mouse long enough, stars will appear around their head, and an action will appear in their queue called "Bat Fly." They run back and forth and bat at the stars, and the animation seems to run at double-speed.

What has that cat been sniffing, anyway? Catnip is definitely an herb of fun..

I think the Maxis developers confused catnip for something a little harder. When my two cats got into a bag of it, they just ended up sprawled out on the kitchen floor stoned out of their minds, not batting at invisible objects in the sky.

Human sims seem to find this highly entertaining. I have a catnip mouse at my pet park. When it's being used, human sims will gather from all over the lot to point and laugh at the kitty.

Why do I need a message when I have pictures?