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Cause old fashion is new fashion, man!

Review of the new Mid-Century Modern Dining and Style Set coming soon to a blog near you! And said blog would be this one.

Sim Funnies #2

"Yeah...found this falcon out in the wild and tamed it within the hour. No big deal!"

"Look ma, no eyes!"
"Good for you!"

THE SUSPENSE...

"And don't you DARE come around here again!"
(Oh god, foiled by a man in bunny slippers! Should have been a lawyer!)

"Man, this Van dude is soooo boring. I wonder what's for dinner?"

"Creepy cat needs some foooooood."

"You WILL buy my Sweet Treats! And you WILL like them!"

The Sims 3 Store - Level Up Collection

With all the excitement surrounding the release of the Supernatural expansion pack, it seemed like almost everyone forgot that there was a little something else being released the same week.

That little something else is the Level Up Collection, a set in The Sims 3 Store featuring the return of the basketball hoop as well as a basketball arcade game along with 8 other items. Currently the set is on sale for 1,250 SimPoints until September 20th. After that the price will be bumped up to 1,650 SimPoints. Also released was the Man Cave Compilation which includes the Level Up Collection as well as It's Game Time! and Championship Dreams for 3,000 SimPoints but 2,600 from the early bird sale lasting until the 20th.

An interesting thing to point out is that the number of premium content included is misleading...ish. There's an object called The Galactic Simball Arcade that's a redesign of the Atomic Jack Planet Attack Pinball Machine we got with the Fun for Kids of All Ages set we got about a year ago. So really there's three premium content items. Man, we've been really spoiled lately between the three in this set and the three that came with Sunlit Tides (if you bought the Gold Edition).

So here's the first of the three premium items, the Rim Rockin' Basketball Hoop.

An old favourite returns! Man, did I miss the basketball hoop. I wasn't sure it would return but I'm so glad it did. It works very similar to the one in The Sims 1 and The Sims 2 Free Time so don't expect full on b-ball games or anything like that. When sims use this object, whether they practice dunking or hoops they switch into their athletic wear and eventually get fatigued just like a regular workout. The paint lines on the ground are attached to the object. However, you can put flooring underneath and recolour the paint to match the ground better. Or you can give the paint a cow print pattern if you really want to. Going to pass on posting those pictures to save you guys throwing up. :P

There's three new moodlets:

-Burnin’ Up the Hoops
-King of the Court
-Rim Wrecker

Here's the description for the Rim Wrecker (lasts 4 hrs with +25 mood):

"What happens when an unstoppable force meets a movable object? Apparently you shatter the backboard. Well done!"

As you can see in the beginning of the video Ethan threw his ball with a trail of fire. That's the only time I've seen that so far and I'm not sure if there's anything special about it since he still missed the shot anyway.

Thanks to matrix54 I got the idea of trying to fit the basketball hoop into the wall of a garage using the moveobjects on cheat for the typical suburban driveway look.

Since it's obviously made to stand on its own this doesn't work too well. Practicing hoops seems to work okay, but when Cade practiced dunking he scored but landed halfway through the garage door and got stuck, throwing route failure tantrums. Taking away the garage door didn't change things since when Cade shattered the backboard (which almost instantly repairs itself) he went straight through the wall. Not to mention the back of the hoop sticks through the wall.

If you have a long driveway you could still try having the hoop stand on its own as long as there's still room for cars. One thing I'm not so sure about is that the net briefly glows when sims make a slam dunk. Kind of treads on the realism line personally. Also, only two sims can use it at once. So even though I was doing a family outing with four sims, only two could go at a time.

The second premium content item is the Buzzer Beater Free Throw Machine.

And I'm free! FREE THROWIN'! 

Huh..where was I? Oh right. The Buzzer Beater Free Throw Machine costs 400 SimPoints individually if bought through shop mode in-game. This object is another athletic skill-building activity. Put two of them next to each other and two sims can play against each other to see who gets the better score! With all the arcade objects EA has been adding over the past few expansion packs, this is a great addition. I added them to a sports bar where they fit in pretty well.

Of course I can't forget the rest of the objects that came with this set! There aren't many but what's there is pretty nice.

The Galactic Simball Arcade:

The new big screen TV (almost as big as the Showtime one), sectional seating, coffee table, painting with 3 stencils (first one looks like Tiny Tower characters?), and video game console.

Big screen TV in action:

The new foosball table. Goes well with the Futureshock sets!

Overall I'm in love with this set. If you know me from Mod The Sims I'm always in favour of adding more sports to the game. The athletic department was sorely lacking but with this set, the rock wall, the chin up bar from Showtime, and the return of the Free Time soccer net with Seasons it's filling up nicely. If sports or hobbies in general are a big part of your gameplay I highly recommend it, at the early bird sale price of 1,250 SimPoints it's a steal. However, I agree with Aznsensei's review on the point that there should have been some new clothes to go with the set too. Seems to be the way the store's going recently, either all objects or all clothes. If you already own Town Life Stuff or Diesel Stuff, the clothes from those packs do go nicely.

Final score: 9/10. Highly recommended!

If there's any other store sets, or even expansion or stuff packs (own all except Katy Perry Sweet Treats and Supernatural) you'd like me to review, let me know in the comments section below and I'll see what I can do.

Ah Yeah.

Now that's one for the family album. The memorable family pictures are almost always the fails, right? :P

Yep, I bought the new Level Up Collection from the Store. Having tons of fun with it and I haven't even touched anything other than the basketball hoop! A full review will be coming soonish!

Kahuna's So Very Random Life

The Kahuna leads a pretty simple life by the beach in a small hut. Right now I'm trying to get the platinum athletic achievement of jogging over 2000 km. It's pretty crazy I tell you. Kahuna lives on Cloverdale Lite by My Sim Realty and he's probably going to have to lap around the island several dozen times in order to achieve victory.

 One day while jogging around the island, Kahuna got a call from one of my other sims, a singer by the name of Bethany Grissoms. She was hosting a swimwear party at her place (her place doesn't have a pool or even a hot tub. Weird.). Since he was in the neighborhood I decided "Eh, why not. He deserves a break from all that jogging."

It's choices like these that often lead to some very random, unexpected things. One of Beth's roommates Megan decided to start a conversation about food while in her underwear. My guess is she was asleep, but woke up for the sake of the party.

I clicked on her to do something back and that's when I glanced over the pillow fight interaction. Despite it being my favourite interaction in The Sims 2 I hadn't used it much lately. So I decided to have Kahuna randomly hit her with a pillow in her bedroom.

And that's where the fun began.

I never intended for Kahuna and Megan to become partners. Kahuna was made a year ago and Megan is one of my most recent sims. But seeing them together makes me think a surf bum and a stylist could be an interesting couple.

Create A...

Um...yeah it was kind of a spur of the moment idea.

Inge over at Simlogical put up some flat, completely empty worlds to make it easier for testing stuff in-game. My findings with the Mac version of TS3 is that the crashing in Create A Sim hardly ever happens if you load your game through a small custom world rather than any of EA's (most likely due to the loading of a small map using less memory), so now that picture is what I'm greeted with when I want to use CAS.

InvisiSim / New Site Design!

Recently I accepted a SimPort request for an acrobat to perform at my coffeehouse. I sent my sim The Kahuna over there and sat him at one of the tables. I waited...and waited. Huh, where's the performer.

Suddenly, this happened.

I was genuinely entertained by this performance. It was funny seeing the fire hoop and circus ball move by themselves. Like as if a spirit was doing everything.

Oh, but things got a bit stranger than that.

For hosting that sim, The Kahuna got 3000 big ones. Normally that's not much but for Kahuna who lives in a tiny shack on the beach it's a boatload. That presented a bit of a dilemma. Since I'm not doing the typical rags to riches story with Kahuna (he loves the beach bum life and it will stay that way) what on SimEarth was I going to have him spend the money on?

Then it occurred to me...

Books. Those books, man. They really do cost a lot.

Fishing is one of Kahuna's many talents and I completely forgot how expensive the books for the rare fish cost. Now he only has a few hundred simoleans again, heh.

You've probably heard by now about The Sims 3 Seasons. I saw the announcement as it happened during the EA Summer Showcase livestream, what an exciting time that was. Can't believe they finally did it! And ocean swimming too! There seems to be a ton of content, more than any of the previous releases. So hyped for this EP.

Also, I just added the Disqus comment system. I've seen it being used on IGN and a few other sites I follow. Figured might as well try it out as it looks a bit more dynamic than Blogger's system. The layout and design have also been revamped to be much more faithful to the style of The Sims. Like it? Hate it with all your hate? Let me know what you think!