Just for Kicks, here’s my original “About this Blog,” when it was a Sims 2 blog:
Or, Lots of Imaginary and Minute Detail about Sims 2
This blog is part gameplay blog, and a little bit of storytelling about my Sims 2 neighborhood, Simdale Valley, as well as reference for managing my Sims 2 game. Simdale Valley is a small, quaint town. To reach it, one has to take the two lane highway from the mainland, from the south over Lake Simdale, or take the ferry from Port Prominence. Port Prominence is the “big city,” and home of Peninsula State University. Summerton, to the north, is an upscale town with larger homes and businesses than Simdale Valley, as well as a national shoreline. Fort Strange is the military base within the larger region, but with different weather and topography (it is a desert), where most military sims and some scientists live and work. Three Lakes, (in an idea I got from Maisie who writes the Millwood Sims blog), is a vacation area in the mountains, between Port Prominence and Summerton, and close enough for many families to visit and some to own a vacation home at. Twikki Island is in the South Seas, and sims have to be able to afford a plane ticket to travel and stay there, for an exotic vacation. Takemizu is in the Far East, and also requires a plane ticket and good amount of expendable income to visit.
As for story-telling and news reporting in this blog, I plan to blog (pretty regularly, as in about once a week…) as I feel like recording what’s happening or as a story I want to tell develops in my neighborhoods. For a long time now, I’ve played Sims 2 in “rounds,” which just means playing each household for a set amount of time and having the sims age up congruently. Some entries might be like news stories, others may be like journal entries or photo entries, and others may relate gameplay events. It is mostly for my own enjoyment, as I look back at the history of sims, families, and the neighborhood, but if others also want to read it they are welcome to do so. The reference parts, I used to keep on Evernote, but decided to move them to Blogger to have everything in one place, and just in case any of it might be useful to someone else who plays Sims 2. To experienced Sims players, most of my notes are probably extremely basic, but I like to keep them just in case.
Most of the interesting ideas about the way I play and blog were developed over time by a community of Prosperity Challenge bloggers and the blogs they inspired. You can see many of them in the Sims 2 Neighborhood link list in the blog. Some of them have been playing and writing about the same neighborhood for up to about eight years, I think, and the intricacy of the world they have developed is fascinating.
Unless you are really bored or enjoy Sims minutia, you probably don’t want to spend time reading the following bit (& maybe you were already thinking, why I am taking the time to read this!! so you can stop now):
Simdale Valley is actually in its third incarnation…the first one, I used to blog about in 2008, but I stopped when I had too many technical problems and too little time to fix them. Earlier this year, Simdale Valley as an idea of a place (not the same map or buildings) made an entrance as a sub-neighborhood, a small farming community, outside Strangetown, in another prosperity style neighborhood that I played for about five months. (Prosperity Challenges are a certain way to play a neighborhood house by house and also usually includes ideas such as taxing the residents to gradually build the ‘hood as a whole to be more prosperous.) But about the time I added “Simdale Valley II,” file corruption in that neighborhood got to the point where I decided to start fresh. About that time I also decided to rescue my old buildings from Simdale Valley I, from an old hard drive, and did some research on how to avoid my new sims from getting corrupted. I extracted some of my Strangetown sims, and started re-populating New Simdale Valley (aka Simdale Valley III).
With Love From Ayre 