SWTOR - The Latest Adventures with NikkeiSimmer's Claria Redsun.

Claria has been the main Pub-side protagonist (Jedi Consular - Shadow). Wielding a double-bladed lightsaber she has ascended the ranks of the Jedi from Padawan to Master and having learned the art of shielding against the Dark Side, she has become the Barsen'thor of the Jedi Order.

Many have fallen for her red tresses and striking green eyes, but she remains faithful that she can bring her love, Keron Yun, back from the clutches of the Dark Side. But he is a fearsome Dark Lord who has ascended the ranks of the Sith to the Dark Council and is now monikered as Darth Nox.

Even if Claria is successful at swaying her love from the Dark, it will still be a long and arduous road for Keron back to the Light Side.

What the Hell is Going On with Sims 3 Store?

Going back in to try to get CAW back, I run into this problem.

Evidently something's gone hinky with the store...because CAP (Create-A-Pattern) is still available, but the Error 404 on the Sims 3 Store with regards to CAW (Create-A-World) is annoying.

My friends are probably nervous when I start creating them in Sims 3

I have a tendency to make old schoolfriends for shits and giggles.

Of course, like his RL namesake...he's up to shenanigans.

...like scaring the shit out of Phil.

While I'm trying to rebuild my game, I'm basically trying to test everything that I put in. I have very few cc right at the moment, since my entire collection of cc got borked at the same time that my HDD drive bit the dust. I'm not happy about that, but I have one other HDD drive that I MIGHT be able to recover.

At least I don't have to listen to someone going, "You shoulda bought a Mac..." Yeah, shaddup, Noel..."

Found out that I'm going to have to redo all my Sims...

...mainly because the HDD drive is a) missing a cord that I need (it's busted), b) all my other stuff is on a 3.25" HDD on my laptop which I'm going to have to get another case for and turn that into an external. Otherwise...if I don't want to wait, I'm going to have to re-make ALL my sims all over again.

Joy of joys. Oh, well, it's gonna give me some time to get some stuff done in terms of remaking all the CC I had before, but hopefully, I won't go so crazy on it this time around...except for the hairs and all that.

Here's a few more pictures from the game that I'm using as a test-bed for what I plan to do with the Selfacy when I get it back to where I want it to be.

Given the right makeup, River's still pretty.

Added in some cc

Welcome, Tiny.

Meet Tiny our newest member of our digital family. And she is TINY

She’s a Dell Optiplex 3050 i5 6500T 2.5 GHz -3.1 GHz with turboboost. So she’ll be able to play Sims 3 and SWTOR. She is a stop-gap system till I make my gaming system. But it’s impossible not to fall in love with how cutely tiny she is. It’s a desktop computer you can move easily.

To give you an idea of just how tiny she is…. Well here’s my hand and that’s her, right under it. 🤣 Adorbs right?

Well she’s got 16 GBs of DDR4 RAM and a 1TB SSD under the hood. 😁 so for that little frame, she’s got a lot of punching power. 😁

Now, I’ll be setting her up tonight and downloading SWTOR then Sims 3. I’ll also be setting up Photoshop and Premiere Elements. Then linking up my USB external drive. Gotta pick up a powerbar tonight too.

Looking at a Gaming Laptop

Been looking through ads on FB Marketplace and I’m seeing plenty of gaming laptops available for $500.00 which I’ve set as my ceiling that I’m willing to pay. There’s a lot of good laptops that fit the bill for what I need without having to break the bank to buy it.

What I need is a dedicated graphics card, at least 16GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD along with at minimum a 1TB HDD; 2TB would be better but well, can’t be too choosy and if I have the extra slot, I can always upgrade later but the SSD is a must for quicker boot times.

.

The two main games, I’ll be playing on this machine are Sims 3 and SWTOR - this is the machine that’s going to be my portable gaming PC. Then eventually down the road, I will get a gaming desktop which will be my main at-home machine which will run the other games that I use, such as FSX, DCS World, Two Point Hospital, Cities:Skylines, Star Wars Battlefront and Battlefront 2. And that will have a 1TB SSD and a 4GB HDD drive.

On top of that, the computer will have second 4GB HDD exclusively for my photography, so that I can have my photography easily accessible.

With games taking up more space on the hard drive and competing with the OS and other applications, I want to streamline my games as much as possible so that I’m not constantly using the SSD. The way I want my SSD C-drive to work is essentially to boot the application while I do all my work on D-drive (reading and writing my workflow on D: ) instead of putting extra read/write workload onto the SSD which would shorten the SSD’s life.

This is going to entail a lot of reading up so I don’t cark up the file system on the computer. But looking forward to playing Sims 3 and SWTOR is going to be worth it.

Update September 14, 2022: something MAY be happening tomorrow

Nikkei_Simmer Reviews: iOS games - City Island 4

One of the problems with having no access to a personal PC is the dearth of games to play on a phone. Some may like FPS on iPhone or Android but if I’m playing a FPS, I want a controller in my hand or a keyboard in easy access.

…thus I stick to city-builders and slow sedate games like simulators that allow me to think with whatever “diminished capacity” I have for cognitive processes.

One of these city-builders that I’m looking at a fresh start with is called City Island 4. I haven’t played the three previous games from Sparkling Society Games B.V. so I have absolutely bumsquat to go on in terms of experience with this game. Judging by the rating on the Apple App Store.which is a 4.6 out of a possible 5, evidently it’s rated pretty highly. And there a quite a number of five star reviews in any case which means that customer expectations have been met insofar as “interesting gameplay”.

Now this post will be an ongoing post as I play and review this game as a brand new city builder that if I like it, it’s ease of controls and functional UI, I may even put it on the PC that I replace. But for now, I’m going to take a trial run through it and see if it’s something that I can make a series of reviews about as I set about building this city from the ground up.

We start off on the main island of Pleasant Plains, a nice little wooded island in which to start our city. From here as we build up our city we can expand out to these other islands as we “find”…er…unlock them.

The UI is relatively easy to navigate and simple to get an idea of what you need to do to get into the game quickly. It has a handy tutorial which will guide you through the process of getting acquainted with what you need to do. Watch out for the houses that are built using gold. I wasn’t aware of which one I was selecting (user error) and blew through most of my gold so just be careful of which buildings you select. The firehall requires gold to build and luckily I had enough to build it. I dug myself a hole, but fortunately this is a straight, simple city builder with the player only having to mind the employment level and citizen happiness in the game. Make sure you have enough jobs to go around, decorations to look at and entertainment and your citizens will be blissfully happy nearly all the time.

It is however,really tricky to maintain a completely happy citizenry as certain things are going to end up taking some time to unlock and shifting resources where they can affect the most people is clearly something that will take some fiddling with to get the right balance.

Over all the limitations of the iOS framework does show through in the fact that this is not a full-featured game. It’s for the person who wants that little bit of a kick in the morning to get his brain working after waking up on the bus commute to work or school or just to relax. For those of us who want something more full-featured, stick with PC games (unless like me, you’re on an enforced hiatus from playing due to a broken down computer).

I give it a solid 4 out of 5 for gameplay.