I REALLY like Strangerville. It’s become my all-time favorite Sims neighborhood. (And by “all-time” I mean all 19 years. I bought The Sims on launch day in 2000.)
So many Sims neighborhoods feel blandly middle-class-generic. Strangerville is a perfect little down-at-the-heels desert town.
Just look at this low-slung, fenced-off, out-of-business motel. A few of the windows are broken. Some of them are boarded up, some aren’t. The motel’s sign is broken. Across the street, a kitschy gas station. In the distance, a strip of greenspace and trees along the road separates town from the endless expanse of desert, dotted with pumpjacks.
LOVE. IT.
You know what else I love? The Sims. No, really. They released a free content update with Pride flags and t-shirts in collaboration with the It Gets Better project. To celebrate, I updated Cordelia’s hot weather outfit with an It Gets Better t-shirt, and a cute skirt and… wedges? Sandals? I don’t know what are shoes.
Here she is, looking fly as hell, scanning the agave plant in her front yard for spores.
Speaking of spores, the weather just keeps getting weirder. That swirling cloud above the mysterious lab is looking more ominous by the day.
Cordelia is working on crafting a vaccine against this strange spore infection.
First, she has to build a hazmat suit so that she can get into the basement of the secret lab. With science!
She had to cajole a scientist into giving her the special air filter she will need to filter out the spores.
The scientist seemed dubious, but grudgingly handed over the filter.
Then we were interrupted again for a few hours when Cordelia was possessed by the spores again. This time I noticed that when I clicked on one of the banana trees she planted, she had the option to “liberate” it. I tried this and… the tree disappeared.
I… hope it’s happy? Wherever it went? Sometimes I don’t understand this game at all.