the sims 2 playthrough so far

my sims 2 playthrough so far

i've been playing the sims 2, specifically with my favorite families, the brokes & the pleasants (with some guest appearances from the goths and the dreamers). strap in, here's a run down of what's gone on in my game so far.

the broke family - setup

the broke family is kind of "hard mode" for a townie family. from their bio:

when you load up their family, they have $929. brandi, the single mom, is unemployed and the household income is $929. dustin, the teenage rebel, is employed part-time in the criminal career and failing school. he's also dating angela pleasant, which we'll talk about in a bit. beau, the toddler, is about to age up and is at risk of "aging up badly" due to not being potty trained, taught to talk or walk. oh, and brandi is pregnant with a third.

i love playing the broke family for a few reasons. 1 - brandi is the daughter of betty & bob newbie, the tutorial family from the sims 1. i feel like the difficulty level of playing as the broke family kind of evokes the difficulty level of the sims 1 in a fun way. i also have a fondness for struggling single mom of sons trying to make things work (a dynamic i have in my own stories). there's a lot of ample opportunity to just keep fucking up their lives, but i find it more rewarding to try to make things work for them.

the broke family - skyler is born!

i didn't make brandi get a job because i knew she would be pregnant again and i wanted her to focus on raising beau and the new baby. i had her grind beau's potty training and i think talking and he aged up well! i tried to get dustin's grades up with mixed success. he snuck out with angela and they had a fun lil date, but got caught by the cops and sent home. brandi didn't seem to give a fuck, since she was busy with beau. not sure if she even noticed. honestly, nothing too salacious happened with the brokes as i tried to get them back on their feet. dustin lost his hawker job because i tried to get him to start a turf war, so i immediately had him join the music career as a record store boy, which i thought was fitting. maybe he was going to turn things around? maybe angela was a good influence on him, instead of him being a bad influence on her.

skyler broke, another boy, was born. since he was skip broke's last kid, i wanted his name to be similar but not the same, so i went with skyler. brandi got into writing trashy monster fucker romance novels with a pregnancy theme (i really like the novel writing system in the sims where you can choose little icons to represent plot points, super fun). she was still unemployed so i thought it may be a good way for her to "work" from home, though her novel was a bust and it made her sad. i wanted to ultimately get her back in the cooking career since that used to be her job before skip died and her skill points were high, but i didn't want skyler to grow up badly! 

then i noticed it - brandi's wants indicated that she wanted another baby. i was open to that - even though it wouldn't be a smart decision, if she wanted to be messy, i could make her messy. especially since she was only about 10 days from being an elder! AHHH aging in the sims 2 is so fast!!! there was just one problem - i was so focused on her being super mom that she didn't know any suitable sperm donors. i tried taking her out to a bar (with the kids of course! super mom!) to score, but she wasn't clicking with anyone. the sims 2 chemistry system is finnicky!

the broke family - meet ocean

the second time i took brandi out to a bar, she met ocean. ocean is a randomized homeless townie who she clicked with immediately. i brought him back home and planned to have them try for baby right away. but the stupid bedside table was in the way and then he left. anticlimactic. 

beau became a teen and was doing well in school. dustin got his grades up a good bit but missed work due to taking care of skyler after brandi came home late and was fired. i had him get the first job he saw, which was a fish chummer in the oceanography career. beau got a job too in the journalism track, since his lifetime want was to become a media magnate. skyler became a kid who wears a dragon costume all the time and doesn't do any homework. his playfulness was up ALL the way which is annoying af because he is impossible to keep entertained and impossible to make him finish any homework. classic ADHD kid.

dustin had been busy with work & getting his grades up, so he hadn't seen angela in a while. i tried to send them on a date, but angela got pissed off at dustin because it had the CLASSIC glitch of immediately getting the "hey! you stood me up!" before the taxi even came... cool. she started coming over and stealing the newspapers as retaliation. she got over it eventually but damn. 

now that skyler was aged up to a kid, i wanted to get brandi back in the workforce, but she wouldn't settle for anything that wasn't the cooking career, so it took a few days before something opened up. brandi was having ocean over more and more. i hadn't actually realized the bedside table was the issue for them woohooing, so i got frustrated with brandi's biological clock running out and asked him to move in. he agreed immediately and moved in with $20,000... again, a little anticlimactic since i wasn't trying to make brandi a gold digger or take the easy way out by marrying a rich sim, but oh well. they had a great connection and were quickly building it more and more. they fell in love and i realized the bedside table needed to be moved and they tried for baby.

the broke family - where we stand

dustin aged up into an adult - i didn't choose to send him to college because his grades never got great and i didn't wanna spend the money. when he aged up, he picked a cream colored suit to wear as his everyday, which i thought was... an interesting choice. i had him move out on his own in one of the neighboring trailers. his lifetime want was to reach the top of the intelligence career, so i had him quit his fish chummer job and get into the investigation career. 

with a potential baby on the way and newfound funds in the house with ocean's lucrative career, i decided to take the plunge and move brandi, ocean, beau and skyler to a new, bigger home. moving up in the world finally! if ocean was just going to stay a sperm donor, i wouldn't have bothered, but brandi introduced him to her kids and he was building connection with them. he helped skyler with his homework (one of the only times skyler ever did homework) and he and brandi were maxed out on connection without me even trying. 

i wasn't sure if the game kept my try for baby history with the move, so just to be safe, i had them try again. and again. and again. no baby yet, and brandi is about 5 days from aging up... let's cross our fingers!

the pleasant family - setup

i took a break from the brokes since i realized that angela was still a teen and no longer dating dustin oops. the pleasant family, on the other hand, is a nice, easy, middle class townie family. from their bio: 

i appreciate how the sims 2 sets up interesting scenarios for you to play with. when you load into the game, the girls, good girl angela (dating aforementioned bad boy dustin broke), and bad girl lilith (dating dirk dreamer, who admittedly i didn't play with at all) are headed off to school and "boring wife" mary-sue is headed off to work. the maid, kaylynn langerak (iconic queen) comes over to clean the house. hound dog daniel is left at home with kaylynn all alone... unless if you're me and lilith misses the bus to school. 

the pleasant family - daniel takes the bait

i had daniel take the bait and fuck kaylynn. i was curious to see how it would affect his relationship with lilith if she walked in on them and i was not disappointed. sims 2 has complex relationship dynamics (almost too complex sometimes, we'll talk about that later). i appreciated that lilith recognized that her dad cheated on her mom, and therefore, she got furious with him. meanwhile, angela came home from school and also walked in on them... to show her dad her A+ report card while jumping up and down, completely ignoring the maid in his bed with him. i know she probably would have gotten mad too if the whole showing off her grades thing didn't override that, but i like her being kind of naive about it as a character trait. 

i tried to get lilith to talk to angela about her dad's cheating, but man it's hard to repair their relationship with one another at the load-in. they HATE hate each other. everyone in this family fucking hates lilith and for WHAT! it's so sad. i love lilith... obviously. mary-sue didn't believe lilith either until she saw it with her own eyes. girl was pissed. i don't blame her - she was obviously painted as the bland wife who isn't satisfying daniel, but i also thought it was interesting they had a strong relationship before the cheating was discovered. i wanted daniel to suffer.

i had mary-sue get a makeover. she dyed her hair, got a trendy cut, and bought a new, hotter outfit. she locked daniel out of their bedroom, making him sleep on the couch. i didn't want them to divorce... quite yet. i wanted to see how she would play this out. 

quick detour - the goths

i took a quick detour over to the goth family. i did the whole, cassandra gets left at the altar by don lothario side quest and noticed that she was besties with mary-sue. how interesting! two women who were wronged by their lovers... what will happen i wonder. i thought about giving cassandra a makeover too, but i decided she isn't the type. instead, she called her bestie mary-sue over to bond over their failed romantic endeavors. they quickly and easily took things to the next level, despite no inherent attraction between them. an interesting development for sure!

the pleasant family - the breakdown of a marriage

daniel was still locked out of the bedroom, only getting a bit of sleep here and there on the couch between work. mary-sue was inviting cassandra over and getting a bit flirty in front of him, but he didn't seem to care. he seemed to want to make up with mary-sue while keeping things hot and heavy with kaylynn. lilith was trying to repair her relationship with her mom, who still saw her as nothing but a bad kid despite her improved grades. angela was still doing pretty well in school and the only one in the house who didn't completely hate her dad. she still seemed to believe he and mary-sue would reconcile and put this whole "cheating with the maid" thing behind them... sweet angela.

while mary-sue was away at work (and promoted! slay queen!) and the girls were at school, daniel of course, gave into temptation again and invited kaylynn over. he was no longer actively fighting with mary-sue and on the path to repairing their marriage, but he was in aspiration failure due to not being able to woohoo with her. he HAD to call kaylynn you don't understand he was gonna DIE if he didn't get any pussy! unfortunately, he didn't time it quite right and had her over right as everyone was getting home.

mary-sue was fuming, furious with him yet again pulling this shit, thinking they were finally out of the woods. angela finally woke up and saw her dad for the piece of shit he is. i think seeing angela heartbroken was the final straw for mary-sue. she and the girls pretty much yelled him out of the house and just as he aged up into an elder, he moved out with kaylynn into brandi broke's old house.

the pleasant family - lilith & angela

we know who angela was dating, but what about dirk, lilith's love interest? well, i invited him over one day, but the timing wasn't good for lilith and she ended up being too tired to hang out. angela was pretty keen on seeing him though. she didn't seem to have an immediate romantic draw to him or anything but it was interesting that they talked for hours and dirk didn't even seem to try to see lilith at all. hmm. we'll bookmark this for later. whenever dustin was around, lilith liked to hang out with him too. neither girl was really crossing the line with anything, but you know - something to bookmark for later.

god, their relationship was impossible to repair though while they were teens. they just kept fucking fighting. it really do be like that.

the pleasant family - where we stand

kaylynn was looking forward to starting a life with daniel after he proved his love to her by leaving mary-sue... unfortunately, that's not really what happened. daniel would not have left mary-sue if he wasn't literally chased out of the house by his wife and daughters. now an elder and faced with his new life in the trailer park with his wife who suddenly looked less appealing now that she wasn't wearing a sexy maid uniform 24/7, he realized that he had fucked up. suffer! suffer! suffer! though i do feel bad for kaylynn so i had her call over her buddy don lothario after daniel was a dick to her. she and don had some fun right in front of daniel. suffer! suffer! suffer!

mary-sue has also aged up into an elder and retired from her political career. she doesn't see cassandra anymore romantically, but they're still good friends. she's still in that big house, but maybe she'll move to a move manageable space with the girls out of the house.

lilith and angela decided to go to college. funnily enough, lilith graduated high school with higher grades than her sister, who was pretty crushed by her dad's infidelity and let her grades slip to a C. 

the next chapter - college life

with lilith and angela entering college, i decided to also send two others with them - dirk dreamer and beau broke. what antics will they get up to i wonder? (i've played through freshman & sophomore year so i know and it's actually why i wanted to write this but this is already so long and i'm at work as per usual so i'll save the college years for another entry when i've played through all of them lol)