If you want your Sim to hit the top of his or her career ladder, the first thing you need to do is get their skills up as quickly as possible. Once your Sim takes a job, there will be precious little time for skill building, so start them early!

Your work as a slavedriver begins when they age to Child. Obviously they need to keep their homework done enough to prevent the Social Worker from showing up. Focus on having your child Sim do just enough homework to maintain a C or B grade. This will leave them with enough free time to engage in skilling.

I find that trying to get child Sims to boost any skill other than Creativity is often an exercise in frustration for both of you. Plant them at a musical instrument or painting easel and let them Creativity the hours away. Some child Sims may enjoy boosting their Logic skill by playing chess or looking through the telescope. If your child Sim protests or gives up on these activities, don’t push it. You’ll have plenty of time to skill them up later in life.

The same essential strategy holds true for the Teen years. Except that teenage Sims seem to be more willing to boost their Charisma by practicing their speech in front of a mirror. (As long as they’re there, you may as well have them use some acne cream.) Teen Sims can also benefit from using the telescope to search for alien life. If they get abducted, it makes them eligible for a college scholarship - bonus!

By the time your Sim gets to college (if you have the University expansion pack) they should be at level 3 or 4 for most of their skills. At this point, you will want to start focusing on the skills you know they will need for their chosen career. For example, if you intend to put them through the Culinary track, you will want to have them focus on studying Cooking. For the Athletics career track, put them on the exercise equipment and max out their Body skill.

There are several ways to increase the speed at which your Sim levels up their skills. The most notorious of these is the Thinking Cap, which is an aspiration award. Unfortunately, if your Sim dons the Thinking Cap while their current aspiration level is less than gold, the Thinking Cap can malfunction and deduct a skill point.

Each career track has a career reward associated with it. If you get high enough in the Business career track, you can get a mini-golf putting green. The Athletics career track nets you a punching bag, and so forth. When your Sims use these career rewards, the associated skill is boosted more quickly than it normally would be. This can be very helpful if you are running a legacy family, since each family member can climb their career ladder and essentially donate a career reward to their heirs.

The speed at which your Sim learns new skills is also partly determined by their personality. Sims with a high Neatness score will pick up Cleaning quickly, while Sims who are slovenly will protest your request. I once had a Sim whose meter was pegged on the sloppy side - whenever I told her to study Cleaning, she walked over to the shelf, picked up the book, then self-canceled the action and put the book back. I was never able to get her past Level 1 in Cleaning. Some Sims just don’t have what it takes!

When you install the Sims 2 Seasons expansion packs, one of the random bits of silliness that comes with it is the penguin.

Typically, your Sims have only two actions for the penguin: greet, or shoo. Although occasionally your Sim will have the option to “talk to” the Penguin. I have only had this happen once, but it was pretty funny!

PENGUINS LIKE FISH

(Duh!) If your Sims are into fishing, you can take one of their catches out of their inventory and either set it on the floor, or mount it on the wall. The penguin will eat a fish which has been left on the floor. It will attempt to eat a fish which is mounted on the wall. It’s pretty funny to watch the penguin try to reach a fish mounted on the wall - it will hop up and down, and flap its little wings.

Some people have reported that if you feed the penguin a lot of fish, it will leave pee puddles all over your house. So keep that in mind, if you want to feed him.

PENGUINS ALSO LIKE SNOWMEN

If your Sims build a snowman, the penguin may stop by to chat with it. (This is of course a rather one-sided conversation.) My penguins spend a lot of time talking about crime. Apparently this is not uncommon.

PENGUINS NEVER STAY

Alas, the penguin soon decides it’s time to leave your lot. Several people have tried trapping the penguin by building a fence around him. After a set time, the penguin simply disappears.

The first time my Sims sat down to a dinner of sparkling food, I didn’t think anything of it. They were eating a dish of blackened Cajun catfish, and I thought it was just a sparkling dish. With the Cajun spices and all. I took note, but didn’t bother to snap a picture.

The next night, they sat down to eat a dish of sparkly macaroni and cheese. This time, I sat up and took notice. Macaroni and cheese does not sparkle. I knew this for a fact, deep in my bones.

Sparkly food can be confusing to the new player, because it occurs at a great remove from its root cause: the installation of the Seasons expansion pack. With Seasons, your Sims have the opportunity to garden and go fishing. Many players don’t set up a garden or a fishing hole right away, and furthermore it takes a while for your Sims’ gardening and fishing activities to pay off in the form of fresh food in their personal inventories.

Once the food (either fish or fresh garden veggies) is in your Sims inventory, you next have to add it to the fridge. While controlling the Sim in question, click the fridge and choose “Stock.” The game will have you pick food from your Sim’s inventory to stock the fridge.

Next, the meal itself has to be prepared and eaten. A sparkling meal will also fill your Sim’s hunger meter faster (this is how the developers interpreted the greater nutrition of fresh food).

The Sims was released back in 2000 and quickly proved to be a fantastically popular game. Star designer Will Wright developed the title at Maxis and many people were sceptical about the appeal. However Wright had already proved himself with SimCity which was another innovative game with unique game-play. Luckily they took a chance on The Sims and it was published by EA and has been a license for them to print money ever since.

There were expansion packs galore and then a sequel which promised to be even bigger and better with yet another slew of expansion packs. This year will see the cycle begin again with the release of The Sims 3 which was originally due this month but has been delayed until the summer. Now I may be in the minority here but for me the original game was the best. Let me explain myself, the first Sims game was fresh and unique. The new concept was an absolute revelation in gaming and it could appeal to anyone. I was completely hooked and played the game for days on end creating bizarre families and constructing huge houses for them to live in.

One of the best things about the original Sims game was the community that grew up around it. There were several websites where amateur modders created skins and even models for the game. They added new textures and characters and the wealth of options kept the content fresh and interesting. Something I have always found with Sim games is that once you have seen and used every bit of content they start to get a bit dull so having a fresh supply was great. The creativity and freedom in the game was awesome and later iterations have curtailed that open spirit and squeezed gamers for more and more cash.

My first neighbourhood in the original Sims game had a variety of households. There was Sean Connery as Professor Jones from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade who lived in a castle with his harem of young beautiful wives. Sadly Sean passed away changing a light bulb because he had no mechanical skill. Death was common and fickle in the original game. Having spent so long building his castle I just made another Sean but somehow he was never quite the same.

The house across the road was like a spaceship and it was home to Darth Vader and his two gay Stormtrooper pals. It was kitted out with all sorts of user created sci-fi objects and an Imperial interior which included Darth’s sanctuary. He looked very odd when he went swimming discarding his cloak and body suit to reveal a chubby pink body in trunks but he never removed his helmet.

My favourite house of all was the serial killer haven. This creepy horror construction had Freddy Krueger, Michael Myers and Jason Voorhees all rooming together and they were kept busy with a steady supply of victims. In the original game you could torture and kill your Sims. You could let them go swimming in the pool and remove the ladder watching them get more and more tired before drowning or you could wall them up in the body of the house and watch them soil themselves and scream until they starved. The great thing was when they died they would leave behind a tombstone or urn and their ghosts would haunt the inhabitants of the house at night time. Ok a bit sick I know but they aren’t real.

The later games have introduced more complexity to the characters but the game-play has never been improved and the amount of expansion packs you are expected to fork out, for just for a minimal amount of new content, is bordering on the criminal. The freely distributed user created content community has shrunk, everyone wants to charge money for their creations and the spirit has been lost.

Now The Sims 2 is still an enjoyable game and I had fun with it for a while. The ability to develop generations and the more developed personalities for your Sims were a step in the right direction but I was also disappointed by the changes they had failed to make. The discrepancy over the time it takes for Sims to do things and the time it takes in real life is admittedly a tough one to solve but they never even tried. They can spend half a day showering, using the toilet and making their way to the front door. The path-finding is still pretty awful and they often can’t work out the best route to take. I would have sooner seen these things fixed than the addition of a random desires meter or the ability to visit an empty shop.

Relationships always bothered me too. The Sims are so shallow you can basically make anyone fall in love with anyone. If you make them talk together or engage in activities for long enough they’ll be happy to jump into bed together even if their wife or husband is sitting in the same room. It would be nice to see some attempt to change these elements.

The Sims 3 will be a success because the series has loyal fans. By the sounds of it the main additions are continuous aging and large seamless neighbourhoods. I know fans will disagree but I feel the creativity and innovation that made the original game so good has been swept aside in favour of making money and that’s a sad development.

If you have the Pets expansion pack for The Sims 2, parrots are one of the available options. Frankly, I recommend them. It’s fun to have a dog or cat, but if you’re running a busy family, it can be challenging to keep up with the mammal pets too. To get a parrot, go to the Pets menu in Buy Mode, and buy a cage. Put the cage in your Sims’ house, then click on the cage and choose “stock cage.” You have the choice of six different birds, five of which are parrots. (I believe the sixth is a falcon, but I’m not 100% sure about that.) Your Sims can teach your parrot to talk. I haven’t yet determined whether the parrot’s future conversations are based on the interests of the Sim who taught them to talk, or the Sim to whom they are speaking at the moment. Meet Cupcake. Cupcake enjoys talking about finances and the environment. Once your parrot learns to talk, you can command your Sims to talk to the parrot. This is great because it fulfils their Social and Fun needs, while boosting their Charisma stats. In fact, a parrot is almost a necessity for single Sims. The parrot’s dish can be filled for $20. Parrots seem to eat about $8 of food per day. You can check the food level at any time by right-clicking on the cage and seeing how much it will cost to refill the dish. It’s best to refill the dish once every other day or so. Don’t let it get too low, or your parrot will get hungry. Grotesquely, a hungry parrot complains with the same thought bubble as your human Sims. Which happens to feature a chicken leg. Oops. Meet Dolly. Dolly enjoys riding around on Connor’s shoulder. To get your Sim to carry the parrot around, choose the interaction “Carry X” (where “X” is your parrot’s own name). I have yet to see a parrot die of old age, but they do seem to live quite a long time. (Until you accidentally forget to feed them.) Since the parrot isn’t a full-fledged family member like a dog or cat, they don’t have a controllable panel, and you can’t see exactly how old they are. However, Cupcake was purchased when Connor was a baby, and lasted until Connor became an elder. 20 Sim days, give or take? Aside from feeding, the only other maintenance is the occasional cleaning of the cage. A green “stink cloud” will alert you to this fact. If your Sim leaves the cage door open, your parrot will periodically escape and fly around the house. This doesn’t seem to cause any harm - I have yet to see a parrot die in such an escapade, nor have droppings ever appeared on the sofa. If you have the Seasons expansion pack installed, you might be concerned when your tropical parrot flies around outside in the middle of winter. I haven’t seen a parrot freeze to death, but I suppose it is a possibility. I’ll keep you posted on that one.

In a move which surprised no one, EA has officially pushed back the Sims 3 release date to June 2

The push-back on the Sims 3 release date came in conjunction with a series of published delays in the release dates of several other EA games.  Network World called the flurry of announced delays “puzzling,” particularly since at least one of the games delayed (The Godfather II) was, by all accounts, almost completely finished.

Coincidentally, EA dropped the news on the release date delays hot on the heels of the press conference call in which reported “disappointing” results for third quarter profits, and “announced plans to chop its workforce by 11%, or 1,100 people, while closing 12 facilities.”  Many people, includingSteve Spohn of Able Gamers, are speculating that EA is deliberately pushing back its release date in the hopes that the economy - and consumers’ willingness to spend money on video games - will have improved by then.

Rumors of bugs in the game and problems in Developer Land have been rampant ever since the Creator Camp invitees began publishing their experiences.  Although many contended to that the game they played at Creator Camp was an older, less polished version of the game which was to be shipped, few believed it.  For the last few months, confidence in the release date has been dropping steadily.

The new “four months from now” release date for The Sims 3 is eerily reminiscent of its sister game Spore’s release track. Although Spore had an entirely separate development track, one can’t help but make comparisons.  Spore’s release date was “four months from now” for about three years.  It even made #2 on Wired’s Vaporware 2007 list

The official press release quotes Russel Arons, Vice President of Marketing for EA, as lauding the delay for providing them with “the perfect runway to create awareness for The Sims 3.”  Although this is clearly a case of “when life hands you lemons,” it’s still pretty funny that the VP of Marketing is concerned about awareness for the successor to one of the most popular PC games of all time.

The Sims 2 has been a consistent bestseller ever since it was released in 2004, and hit the “100 million copies sold” mark in April of 2008.  It was the #1 bestselling game in the year of its release, and its ranking only slipped to #7 for 2008, four years later.  Two of its expansion packs, Free Time and Apartment Life, also hit the list in 2008, coming in at #12 and #16, respectively.

Since word on the street is that you will NOT be able to import your Sims into The Sims 3, this release date does give Sims 2 players a chance to play their beloved Sims for a little while longer.  If you are missing any of the expansion packs, keep an eye on retailers’ sales!  For the last few months, the expansion packs have always been on sale somewhere.  Amazon has offered some of the best bargains, with stuff packs at one point priced as low as $9.99 apiece.

Rumors of a delay in the Sims 3 release date are gaining more credence. Snooty Sims reports that Electronic Arts is quoted as saying “We are evaluating the launch window” in an article at the Eurogamer website.

European stores are being told that the game will be released in “the first half of 2009,” which could mean as late as June. Will the game hit the U.S. before being released in Europe? Doubtful. EA has said they will issue a definitive statement regarding the release date on Tuesday, February 3rd, so stay tuned!

In the mean time, more delicious videos and articles are being released every day. MSN’s French site has a video following a group of French Sims bloggers as they visit Sims 3 headquarters and get a tour. Although the voice over is in French (obvy) there is still a lot of great gameplay video, illustrating many of the points I had heard before, but had not yet seen.

I also enjoyed seeing the Sims 3 developer office environment. What are those big green leaf thingies? Are they to help filter the overhead fluorescent lights? Very cool! And their Sims mega wallpaper is the awesomest!

The official Sims 3 blog has seen a few updates, including one which is “VIP Access Only,” by game designer Eric Holmberg-Weidler. To read the VIP blog you have to sign up for Sims 3 updates, but trust me, it’s worth it! Holmberg-Weidler breaks some nitty-gritty news about game play features which you will not want to miss. (I had promised myself I wouldn’t use the word “revolutionary” in this post. Oops!)

Once you have successfully impregnated your female Sim, you will want to watch her carefully until she gives birth. I have had female Sims nearly die of hunger on me before, because I wasn’t paying enough attention. (And by the way, elder female Sims cannot get pregnant. However, elder male Sims are still fertile, and can impregnate younger female Sims.) As a rule of thumb, I now make my pregnant female Sims eat before sleeping if their Hunger need is less than half full. If they get hungry while they are asleep, I will wake them up and make them eat. It takes a long time for a Sim to die of exhaustion (mostly because they will pass out involuntarily). However, a Sim can die of hunger relatively quickly. So learn from my experience, and feed ‘em up! Once your Sim has entered pregnancy, if she has a job, she will be granted three days of maternity leave. The maternity leave is granted based on when the Sim was impregnated. Linda Shin (the one who nearly starved to death) got pregnant right before her carpool arrived, so she actually worked on the first day of her pregnancy. Each of the three Sim Days corresponds to one of the three trimesters of human pregnancy. Every day when your Sim awakes, there will be a mini-cut scene and a “bwooing!” noise, as her belly magically expands. After the first such incident, she will also change into maternity clothes. Most Sims are struck by morning sickness at least once during pregnancy. When this happens, your Sim will race to the bathroom and vomit into the toilet. (Note: you will want to have someone clean that toilet right quick after this happens!) Some Sims spend their entire pregnancy vomiting; others only vomit once or twice. After a morning sickness incident, I usually have my Sim take a bubble bath. This helps boost their Hygeine and Comfort needs, plus - I mean, wouldn’t YOU want a bubble bath after something like that? One clothing quirk: after I installed the Seasons expansion pack, I found that my pregnant female Sim could not “change into outerwear.” It was winter at the time, so I had to watch to make sure she didn’t go outside for the next three days. I’m not sure if this is a glitch in the game, or if Seasons simply didn’t include maternity outerwear. (Honestly, she was small enough at the time, she could have fit into one of those parkas, if you ask me.) In the case of another female Sim, the fourth-generation Kana Alphabetti changed her hair style on her second day of pregnancy. I actually quite liked her “pregnant hair,” which was much cuter than her previous hair style. After she gave birth, her hair returned to her usual long braids. I haven’t seen this happen with any other female Sims, so I’m not sure how common this is. Since all of your female Sim’s needs will be dropping fast, you will have to prioritize. I generally ignore the Fun need altogether, since no one ever died of insufficient fun. When you need to bump up the Fun need, I suggest sedentary activities like watching television, reading a book, or playing a video game. Active Sims can engage in strenuous activities without hurting the baby, but since playing basketball and bowling both cut into your Sim’s energy, why make things harder on yourself? At the end of the third day, your Sim baby will be born! Stay tuned for the next installment, All About Babies.

Female Pregnancy

Sim fertility has been a big topic of mine recently, since I’m doing a generational challenge (follow a line of Sims through 26 generations, one for each letter of the alphabet). The basic facts of Sim life are simple: when two romantically involved Sims are together on a property with a double bed, click on the bed and tell your Sim to “Relax.” If you are in control of both Sims, tell them both to Relax. If you are only in control of one Sims, have it relax on the bed, and most likely the other will follow.

Once they are in place on the bed, click on the other Sim and choose the menu option “Try For Baby.” If “Try For Baby” is successful, you will hear a little lullaby sound effect play after your Sims have finished their, err, exertions.

A Sim has to be older than teen to get the bed options. If you have the University expansion pack, your Sims can engage in hanky panky while they are at college. (Once you have upgraded them to a double bed, of course.) Sims have to have fallen in love before they will engage in either “Woo Hoo” or “Try For Baby.”

I have read that the “Woo Hoo” option does NOT include a risk for pregnancy. Can anyone confirm or deny this? At any rate, “Try For Baby” is not 100% guaranteed. Interestingly enough, I have found that the odds for “Try For Baby” seem to vary by couple. Out of the three couples I have set to generating heirs, three had 100% success with “Try For Baby” each time. (I’m having each heir give birth to three babies: an heir, a spare heir, and a spare spare heir.)

The third couple, Connor and Kana, have a little more trouble getting pregnant. I have had them “Try For Baby” seven times, with three resulting pregnancies. This means that “Try For Baby” is only 42% effective for this particular couple. I’m not sure if that is a glitch in the game, a quirk of the random generator, or if some Sims are just less fertile than others.

Naturally, a double bed is not the only place that your Sims can “Try For Baby.” The option will also appear in the photo booth, the car (if you buy one for your family), the hot tub, and changing rooms at clothing stores. (Naughty!)

Same sex Sim couples will not get the “Try For Baby” option. If you wish to obtain a baby for your same sex Sims, have them phone the adoption agency and request an adoption. Note that your Sims will need to be financially solvent in order to be approved for an adoption! (I have had Sims turned down for adoption in the past.)

Male Pregnancy

Yes, male Sims can get pregnant! But the odds are very low. If a male Sim is abducted by aliens, there is a small chance that they will return home having been impregnated by the alien Pollination Technician. After three Sim days, the male Sim will give birth to an alien baby.