6 Awful Life Lessons From The Sims
- Getting a job is easy. Want to become a doctor without a college degree? No problem, just walk outside and read the newspaper for a few minutes, and you can choose any position you want from the ones that are open. If none of them suit your fancy, the newspaper tomorrow will have three new positions to choose from. What are all of these unemployed college grads complaining about?
- You can increase your charisma by talking to yourself in the mirror. Need to better your chances for friendship or romance? Spend an afternoon performing soliloquies in the mirror, and watch your social skills blossom almost overnight. Of course, there’s no need to worry too much about finding a relationship, because…
- If you flirt with someone repeatedly, they will develop a crush on you regardless of attraction. Of course, this isn’t true for The Sims 3, where repeated actions cause your conversational partner to become bored or annoyed. But in previous games, repeated flirting or other romantic actions would slowly raise your relationship with the sim in question, provided that they knew you well enough not to reject your advances.
- Refrigerators come pre-stocked with enough food for at least a weeks’ worth of meals. If you open your refrigerator one day to find that it is completely empty, it is a viable option to buy a new one instead of just shopping for groceries. I can’t be the only one who did this in The Sims 2. Calling for groceries and trying to herd your sims to the door to accept the delivery — or worse, going to a community lot and having to sit through 2-3 loading screens each time — was way too much work.
- You can become a professional athlete by starting out as a team mascot. Actually, the whole system of career advancement (at least before The Sims 3) is ridiculous. Play a lot of chess, and you will amass enough logic skill points to go from a test subject to a mad scientist. On the flip side, one thing about career progression that the game did get right was that having a certain number of friends is a requirement for promotion. Anyone who has ever attended a tedious college seminar about “networking” can tell you how much of a sad truth that is.
- The only way to completely end a relationship is to get caught cheating. For some reason, before the release of The Sims 3 (are you noticing a pattern?) there was no way to ask to be “just friends” with another sim after you’ve already begun pursuing that sim romantically. Aside from gradually lowering the relationship score over time until they are no longer in love with your sim, the only way to destroy the entire relationship in one fell swoop was to perform romantic actions with another sim and get caught. We can only count our lucky stars that this isn’t a widely-accepted practice in real life…at least, for most of us.