Sims3 Pizzatron's Big Sims 3 Adventure

Okay...first off, say what?!? We have to buy some of these neighborhoods, clothes and hairstyles with in-game microtransactions now?

And what the blazes is a SimPoint, and does it cost any real-world money?


Hey, there's Agnes Crumplebottom!

If TS3 is indeed set in the past, does that mean that Agnes here is the same haggy old Miss Crumplebottom who prowls Downtown and lurks in wishing wells in TS2, hunting for people to batter into submission with her uranium-filled purse?

She doesn't seem unpleasant in any way now. I'd better enjoy her good humor while it lasts!


So like the original Superstar expansion for The (original) Sims, some Sims are celebrities and your Sims can become celebrities too, thanks to TS3: Late Night. Unlike Superstar, celebrity comes in five ranks, with 1-star celebs being something like your local heroes and 5-star celebs being your A-List movie stars, leading scientists, corporate tycoons, Presidents, that sort of thing.

Morgana Wolff there is a 3-star celebrity, so she's definitely someone worth knowing! It's time for Carmilla to make some moves and put her savoir faire to good use....

(Morgana's also wearing hospital scrubs! Maybe she's a famous surgeon or physician, the "Doctor Quinn: Medicine Woman" of Simsville. She's far too pleasant and amicable to be a genderbent Gregory House, at least. )


Of course, wherever there are celebrities, there are paparazzi too.

The good news? The paparazzi can make you more famous and increase your Celebrity rating over time; if they're there taking photos when you walk out of the hospital after cheering up all the children in the ICU, they'll let everyone know how wonderful you are. The bad news? They can easily damage your reputation by spreading word of any untoward deeds you do while they're around, including adultery, multiple lovers and the like. Sometimes, they spread false accusations too, just like real life!

Carmilla could be walking into a social minefield here.


SUCCESS!!!

Keep climbing that ladder, Carmilla.


Apparently, Anne Song got bored of taking photos and eavesdropping on Carmilla and Morgana's witty banter, so she went for a swim.

I hope her camera's okay.

(Note to Carmilla: Seduce the paparazzi chick! She's cute, and it'll be great for PR!)


YAY! Some of Morgana's celebrity rubbed off on Carmilla! YAY!


And see that? Getting noticed by the paparazzi can increase your Mood and make Sims happier! Carmilla definitely needs to rope more papas into her social circle!

(Wait a minute. What's the singular form of "paparazzi," anyway?)


"Welcome to my lair, Morgana. I must warn you that at least one of your articles of clothing will not be leaving with you in the morning!"

Oh, yeah...and Carmilla took a phone call and promised to bake cookies for the local school district. I think that Opportunities are like the Chance Cards of TS3, except that Opportunities never blow up in your face; you just have to do a little work for their rewards instead.


Do you suppose that WooHoo with Morgana will rake in a third star for Carmilla? Let's find out!

(I'll get to the cookies later, dadgummit!)

Oh, it's happening! Make no mistake: it's happening right now!

(And this isn't "out on the town". This is inside Carmilla's house! The public can't see us in here, right?)


I'm not down with Simmy astrology. If Morgana's a Sagittarius and Carmilla's a Scorpio, is that good or bad?


"...that paparazzi also captured the steamy moment!"

"No, they didn't! We're inside my house!"


I like Flirty. Most people like Flirty. Flirty is good!

(You know, there's a term for people who become famous just by romancing people who are famous. But the term isn't at all flattering and it's definitely not mentionable in a family-friendly forum!)


+40 to Carmilla's Mood for two days? I like that Mood booster! I love that Mood booster!

Too bad Carmilla can only get it once in her lifetime, eh?


I mean, sure, Carmilla's a homewrecker and all, but asking Morgana to dump her husband for her benefit would be presumptuously horrible, wouldn't it? Let's just stick to cheating behind his back, shall we?

...

I don't suppose Thornton would be interested in a love triangle by any chance...would he?


Oh, yes...the goofy Leap into Arms interaction made it into TS3 too.

Are Sims still effectively weightless? I ask because I had a big, fat Momma Lisa Sim leap into a skinny-as-a-beanpole Faerie Sim's arms back in TS2, and nobody fell over or dropped anyone! I mean, I myself tried to lift and carry a chubby, bottom-heavy girl named Dawn back in my high school years; she curled an arm around my neck to boost herself up into my arms and I pitched forward and fell on top of her because I wasn't strong enough to support her body weight. It was NOT my proudest moment!


I look forward to seeing Carmilla earn that Mood booster many times!


Perhaps I spoke too soon about that "paparazzi can't see us" thing.

"Get away from my windows, Sunny! There's nothing going on in here! Go home! And while you're there, burn that ridiculous hat!"

(New goal: Seduce Sunny too. Invite her into Carmilla's household. Make Sunny lose the oversized mushroom cap. Then release her back into the wild. I can still do that, right?)


Alas, they didn't actually WooHoo...not at this point, anyway. But...close enough?

(I haven't forgotten about the cookies, daggit! Stop bugging me about the cookies, for Will Wright's sake!)

"Well, if you insist on hanging out on my lawn and peeping in through my windows, then I may as well invite you in."

...

"By the way, I hate your hat."


"OH, GAWD! IT LOOKS EVEN WORSE IN THE LIGHT!"

"And HEY! This is MY house, those are MY freshly cooked waffles...I get first pick of the waffles! Back of the line, Morgana!"


Breakfast was good.

(Oh, yes...in TS2, it was hard to gauge the quality of the food that Sims made. In TS3, you can mouse over the food to get an indicator of its quality, be it Bad, Nice, Very Nice, Great...anywhere on the scale between Horrible and Perfect. The quality of your Sim's food depends on the Cooking skill of the Sim cooking it, as well as a random variable; right now, Carmilla's Cooking is 6, and she'll cook food that's anywhere from Very Nice to Great. She hasn't cooked a Perfect dish yet, but I'm working on it!)


"Thank you, Sunny. I'll be sure to put that information to good use."

(Paparazzi really are nosy little snoops, aren't they?)


"You smell like love...warm, beautiful, sweaty, internationally famous love."


So anyway, that happened.

There lies another improvement: all of you know how marathon sex...I mean, marathon WooHoo goes in TS2, right? Relax on the bed. Cuddle. WooHoo. Get out of bed. Make the bed. Relax on the bed. Cuddle. WooHoo. Get out of bed. It gets tedious, especially when your Sims are on a date and the clock's ticking down!

In TS3, there's no getting out of bed and tidying up the bed so you can lie on it again; your Sims just pop out from under the bedsheets and lie right back down on top of the bedsheets, ready to cuddle and WooHoo again! It's almost like Real-Life WooHoo, except that half of the time, Real-Life WooHoo and post-WooHoo snuggliness happen on top of the bedsheets...and that's not counting all the times when your bedsheets and/or pillows end up on the floor, piled on top of your clothes.

(...or have I been doing it wrong all these years? )


"Morgana? Please stop doing that. It's very unnerving."


Oh, you can bet on that!

(And yes, Carmilla picked up a couple of bad Moodlets: one because Carmilla's Hygiene dropped below a certain threshold, and the other because of having to deal with a rude guest, namely, Sunny and her ugly hat walking into the bedroom during Carmilla and Morgana's rapid-fire WooHoo marathon and acting like, "You two! Stop that! Get out of here! Get a room!" And Carmilla was like, "We did get a room! We're in it right now! The problem here is that you're in this room too! YOU get out!"

If that story ends up in the local newspaper, Sunny is never getting back into Carmilla's house!


Oh, yes...I also threw out the cheap bath tub that came with the house and replaced it with a pricier shower-tub. Carmilla deserved a better shower-tub!

There's no more Environment need in TS3; instead, there are more of those Moodlets. Cheap stuff can lower your Mood, while nicer, pricier stuff can raise your Mood. If you get leftovers out of a cheap refrigerator, you get hit with the "Tastes Like Fridge" Moodlet and your Mood drops by 10 points; if you get leftovers out of a middle-of-the-road fridge, you never get that Moodlet. I have yet to see if you get a good Moodlet for pulling leftovers out of a top-of-the-line fridge, but I'm working on that too!


Okay, okay, fine!!! I'm delivering the cookies to the school! Is everyone happy now?

Delivering the cookies helped, but I really need to bring those numbers up. Same with that progress bar.

I'm off to the hospital to entertain some sick children and fulfill another Opportunity!


Well, that was personally fulfilling. And if I keep it up, I might earn that fourth star yet!


Also, Food Points are out. Now, you either pay a small amount of Simoleons to prepare and cook a meal out of your fridge or you use the ingredients in your inventory — like tomatoes, apples, tofu or anchovies — to prepare that meal free of charge. You can either buy the ingredients at a grocery store or harvest them yourself...growing fruits and veggies in a garden, catching fishies out of a pond, that sort of thing.

It's funny, but ingredients in your inventory never go bad, while meals in your inventory do eventually go bad. Same with leftovers; they'll spoil if you leave them in your fridge for too long. I guess it's more realistic than TS2's refrigerators are, with all that "Oh, I remember this plate of catfish! I put it in here about two years ago, I think. And it's still sparkly too! Yum yum yum!"


Oh, wait. Ooh. OOH! Is that girl a vampire? Carmilla needs a vampire in order to become a vampire! So is that girl a vampire?


She's moving at space-warping, afterimage-leaving Vampire Super Speed! She's a vampire, all right! And she's a three-star celebrity!

Carmilla von Carstein, I command you to befriend Blair Wainwright right this very moment!


Carmilla can't help it. She's just a naturally impressive person!


"Oh, sigh...I'm such a hopeless romantic!"

"You know, I might actually be able to help you with that..."


Say what? "Unfriendly Vampire"? She seems pretty friendly to me!

But Carmilla had to break off their conversation and go home to find her bed. The befriending (or, more likely, romancing) of Blair would have to wait for another night, alas.


OOH! Another Opportunity!

"Come to our studio and do a perfume commercial for us!" "You had me at 'Simoleons.'" "We haven't actually said 'Simoleons' yet." "You just did!"

(She left the music industry and landed that Science job, by the way. So sayeth destiny!)


Three more Celebrity acquaintences, five more photographs and a little more green in that gauge. Carmilla continues moving up in this world!

I told you that Carmilla would try to get that paparazza in the bikini in bed!


Oh, wonderful. Now Anne's doing that weird "I had WooHoo and I loved it!" strut too!


Tempting. Very tempting...

Nah. Live and let live, I guess.


And so Anne strutted her merry butt right out the door. See you next photo op, Anne!


Then after her shift at the local science lab, Carmilla went right back inside and took a Gardening class at that same science lab, and I learned that being a celebrity does indeed have its perks!

(Also, somebody gave her a very large bookshelf for free, just because she's a celebrity. I'll have to take a screenshot of the bookshelf and show it off here! )


If you have a lot of money, you might as well spend it. So Carmilla's house has a back door and a bathtub now.

Coming soon: a fence for her back yard!


If you get enough Handiness skill, not only can you Tinker with various items around the house but you can also improve on them, like making a bathroom sink self-cleaning (which would rob me of opportunities to raise Carmilla's Handiness, so I won't be doing that just yet). Here, Carmilla is working on upgrading her hot tub's hydro jets, thus making the hot tub even more pleasureable or whatever.


The Gardening class paid off too. Behold, fruit!

So Carmilla tracked down that Vita Alto person she was supposed to befriend; knowing Carmilla, she'll do a whole lot more than that!

And lo, Vita turned out to be a vampire too! Vampires! Vampires everywhere!


So is that kind of reputation good or bad?


"Carmilla is very alluring."

Oh, you ain't seen nothing yet, Vita!

(And as long as Carmilla doesn't lose Vita's friendship somehow, the Opportunity quest is almost done! She just has to get back to the hospital now. But first....)


Why does Carmilla seduce everyone she meets? Because she's so sporkin' good at it! Some adage about "When you're a hammer" comes to mind.

And vampires make V's instead of Z's when they sleep! Too cute!

(And that negative Moodlet? Someone falsely accused Carmilla of fighting someone, even though she has never been in a fight in her life! So now she has to go around and tell everyone that she was falsely accused and slandered and whatnot. Celebrity had its downsides too.)


So Carmilla used Vita to get a raise, and the hospital's admin used Carmilla to get a contact in City Hall.

I'm sure that Vita used someone too. But whom, how and why?


And then I went shopping at Walmart, and I just so happened to wander by the Clearance shelves in Electronics...again.

The infection is spreading!

So TS3: Late Night gives us vampires. TS3: Supernatural also gives us vampires.

So does that mean extra-vampirey vampires or what?

*Googles*

https://www.carls-sims-3-guide.com/laten...mpires.php

OH, MY SPORKIN' SIMGOD!!! The "Immortal" lifetime achievement makes your vampire sparkle in direct sunlight? Oh, HELL NO, EA! You did not just Twilightify my vampires! I mean, making them not die in sunlight is fine (since Dracula himself wasn't killed by sunlight in that old Bram Stoker book), but keep Stephanie Meyer the hell out of this! O_O

So I had a little trouble getting TS3 to run after I installed both Supernatural and Pets, probably because Supernatural comes after Pets in the series yet I installed it first. So after I reinstalled Supernatural, I was ready to go again.


As much as I like playing Carmilla, she was looking a bit lonely in that neighborhood. So I decided to remake several of my other old stand-by Sims from TS2, starting with Carmilla's part-time lover, fellow vampire and super-artsy artiste, Viviana la Morde.


As usual, I initially forgot that Viviana's name only has one N, not two.

And lo, we can give our Sims supernatural life states straight out of character creation! Behold, a vampire!


Awww, look at those happy eyes!


TS2 never gave us tattoos (except for a few lousy skintones here and there), but Viviana's artsy, ladylike, elegant, beautiful and emotional. So why wouldn't she have a big tattoo of a butterfly on her back?


So then I tinkered around with her outfits for a bit...


...tried to transcribe her TS2 personality into TS3 as well as I could...


(...though I wonder if I should have put Cowardly in there somewhere, since Viviana tends to avoid confrontation...)


...and because Piscean people are said to be artistic, sensitive, averse to conflicts, very emotional and nice to a fault (like, to the point of being consistently submissive), a Zodiac sign to top it all off.


And now Viviana's ready to be plunked down in my neighborhood somewhere...but not just yet!

Doctor Malevolence and Zenon Roboto (mad roboticians bent on [world/multinational/national/multiregional/some level of] conquest who won't really come into their own until I pick up TS3: Into the Future, of course):






Jazz Freefeet (rural auto mechanic with a natural talent for tinkering and a pronounced disdain for footwear):




Jolene Lupina (teenaged, crime-fighting vigilante werewolf, fitness enthusiast, dog trainer and athlete) and her dogs Champ, Princess and Lightning:




(Now with excessive body hair!)


(...and sometimes very excessive body hair!)


Champ:


Princess:


Lightning:




Gaston de Chef and Claudette Gourmando (Cuisine enthusiasts and aspiring executive chefs and restaurateurs, with Gaston favoring fancy and elegant Upper Class fare served in those notoriously small portions, and Claudette favoring rustic, Country Style dishes that taste good and fill people up, regardless of social status):












Kileighney Hagg (oddly sultry deep-forest-dwelling witch with a very, very large garden and a very, very large, very, very warm and very, very inviting bed. Come inside and lie down on it for a while, won't you? )










(TS3 has kind of earned its reputation for giving us Sims with some rather fleshy faces, hasn't it?)

So anyway, back to Carmilla.


Oh, yes. In TS3: Supernatural, the Full Moon is most certainly a big deal!

(Not mentioned here: the moon affects fairies too; their Moods and magical powers are stronger under a Full Moon and weaker under a New Moon. TS2 never gave us fairies, so think of them as PlantSims (complete with mood-influencing auras) who have glowy wings, who can't self-reproduce like a bunch of walking, multi-celled amoebas and who don't look uglier than a mud fence. That's fairies in a nutshell. More on them later.)


I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that that's the arrival of bad news.


Called it.

But then, has there ever been an episode in the history of the multiverse where zombies were not bad news?

(No, my current online D&D campaign where one of our party's protagonists — a Cleric of Love Beyond Death — is presently hijacking a Necromancer archvillain's zombies and turning them against him doesn't count, because our Cleric is Evil too. Or is it good when two villains are trying to murder each other with zombies? It's quite the philosophical quandary!)


So the good news — all precious little of it — is that the zombie bursting out of Carmilla's back yard found Carmilla's garden more inviting and delicious than he found Carmilla herself.

The bad news, of course, is that the zombie was eating her freakin' garden. Those plants were not easy to nurture to maturity!


This was starting to get out of hand. And to make matters worse, Carmilla couldn't interact with the zombie in any way...no fighting him, no politely asking him to leave, no insulting him to draw his attention onto herself...nothing, alas. And so the horticultural slaughter continued.


Oh, you're all done? Was the lettuce plant to your liking, sir? Good, good. So you're just going to eat and run now, right?


Oh, he ate and ran, all right...ran right into another one of Carmilla's plants!


Carmilla found the whole spectacle to be completely heart-wringing.


Only after the zombie finally turned his dim-eyed attention to Carmilla did I decide that she should probably retreat inside and lock all the doors.


Once she was out of his reach, the frustrated zombie puked a mess of undigested veggie pulp onto her lawn.

Zombies can be so crass.


Oh, you're going to eat a tree now? This ought to be good!

(As it turned out, no, it wasn't good. It was equally awful!)


And then another zombie cropped up out of Carmilla's lawn and joined the botanical carnage...dendrage...whatever.


So did a third...oh, wait. Oh, my SimGod.

Anne? Anne?!? You too? NOOOO!!! Oh, bloody heavens...what did they do to you? o_O

So now my favorite bikini-wearing paparazzi woman was a zombie too. The Zombie Apocalypse was already looking very grim indeed!


But as luck had it, Carmilla had a secret weapon right inside her house at that very moment: a lesbian vampire who was profoundly smitten with her.

(And it's true: Whenever they're not being ominous and blood-curdlingly terrifying with the promise of condemning you to a screaming demise beneath a tide of unearthly horrors from beyond the shrouded edges of our foredoomed universe, Full Moons can be very romantic!)


"All right, Vita...let's do this!"


...and so that's how Carmilla von Carstein became a vampire: The zombies made her do it.


"That wasn't so bad, was it?"

"Well, aside from my whole body exploding into a blood-spewing swarm of vampire bats, I guess not!"

Unfortunately, it turned out that the transformation from mortal to vampire was not instantaneous, as it had been in TS2. So Carmilla couldn't spring into action just yet; she would have to wait for the complete metamorphosis to pass.

But come the next rising of the Full Moon, perhaps then the tables would be turned, because what can rip and tear right through a horde of zombies? A vampire. Just ask the final episode of The Deadliest Warrior!

Vampires are indeed the Apex Predators...at least until the werewolves show up.


So the zombies departed with the sunrise, and Carmilla set herself to mourning for her utterly ruined garden and disposing of the tattered remains of all her beloved plants.


Well, well, well, look who came back!

"Oh, hello again, Anne! You're looking good today! Yeah, that's great. Hey, listen: Remember last night, when you and a bunch of your friends turned into zombies and destroyed my entire garden? Yeah...come inside. We need to talk about that."

Anne didn't remember anything about wrecking Carmilla's garden, of course. Typical.

What I would give to have Carmilla plant a bunch of Peashooters in her yard; too bad that "Plants vs. Zombies" tie-in was a limited release, eh?

There. Let's see those zombies get at Carmilla's garden now!


Fame is great because free goodies are great! The occasional public character assassination or smear campaign is but a small price to pay for a free appliance now and then!


How many Handiness points do my Sims need before they figure out that we should unplug electrical doodads before we go digging around in their guts?


Oh, it's probably just that nasty electrical jolt you just took...nothing to worry about. And certainly not any onset of vampirism or whatnot!


"Vita is Evil!"

Yeah, and she's also pretty, in an elegant kind of way. I'm sure we all have our little personality quirks.

(I wonder if Vita learned that Carmilla is not good at electronics repair!)


I have to eat my words now. The Sims 3 does have Career Track Chance Cards! This is one of them.

(I picked Bloatyheaditis and got a Job Performance bonus. Go, me! Go, Carmilla! )


If you're a Simmy vampire in TS3, you have the option of going to the Hospital and raiding their Plasma Bank for your nightly sustenance. Carmilla's change in career was an obviously beneficial choice!

As I've also found, Job Performance doesn't become completely useless once you hit Level 10 in your Career Track; every time you max out your Performance gauge, TS3 cashes in your gauge to give your Sim a pay raise. So now you actually have a reason for your Simmy Mad Scientist to stay a Mad Scientist until the day she dies.

This even makes those piddly three-Level part-time jobs (the ones that are mostly thrown in for Teen Sims) worth taking; hit Level 3 in a few days and just keep getting regular pay raises after that. Two of my other Sims went to work for the cemetery, graduated from Burial Specialists to Overseers of the Dead to Epitaph Engravers, then went upwards from $88 an hour; they both ended up at around $114 an hour before I decided to reset my whole neighborhood. More on that later.


Maybe it's just the lighting, but that horse looks even more evil than Vita is.