Secrets of Forgotten Island

So I finally found a good neighbourhood that I liked, after much searching.  For the last few weeks, I haven’t really had much time to play the Sims 2, but when I did, I was busy playtesting this nice neighbourhood, adding houses, and creating some families and backgrounds.

Obviously I’ve already played a few rounds (although it adds up to less than a week per family), but I think that I’ve found a workable neighbourhood that hopefully this time I’ll finally keep – I’m already attached to it, which makes me happy, and I’ve got some good story elements that seem to be popping up already.

The concept that I’m going to go with is that of slightly dystopian universe, with overcrowding over much of the known areas.  As a result, the Confederacy (government) has decided to populate areas that were previously deemed pointless or worthless.  The original discoverer of Forgotten Island has long been forgotten (surprisingly enough), and the area had not been thought about for years.  Forgotten Island is therefore an area where a few groups of families are being sent to as part of the population crisis.

It will be played similarly to a Prosperity Challenge (with rounds, because hopefully that way I won’t forget to play anyone – I actually don’t mind round based play for that reason…otherwise I end up with people being discordant ages etc), but also have its own economy (and I must give Jade credit for that, as well as pbox).  As part of this, after the first day, people are not allowed to buy things for their houses from the catalogue – they have to buy them off each other (which I’ve been finding difficult as everyone wants to buy ten million copies of the same counter, but not one crib for their babies!).

Here’s a picture of it taken just a few minutes ago:

Anyway, hopefully I’ll be able to play this without it breaking for a while, and also (hopefully) rediscover the creative writing talent I had a few years ago, before embarking on the crazy mindnumbing boringness that is my current life.

Also, I made progress on my calendar… and then went backwards, because I didn’t really implement it ingame.  I’m not too fazed though – there are only four families at the moment, and I have a feeling I’ll mess up their ages a bit so they don’t all age up at the same time.  I think it’s one of the things that I’ll work out as I go along.