zwolanerd

Here’s Honkus Pants again.

You might recall a while back that I stopped playing The Sims Freeplay because they added an aging component and I didn’t want my Sims to die. A couple of weeks ago a friend started playing, and she needed a neighbor to have a loungechair by the pool so she could finish a quest. I was loathe to go back in, but I was also loathe to be continually harangued, so I caved. Once I caved, I was back in, it seems.  There are all sorts of questlines for me to catch up on, and I’ve been enjoying the new mall, the horses, and the wizards.

I still don’t want Honkus to die, though, so I’ve been trying to understand the aging process a little better. There are six stages of life:

• Baby
• Toddler
• Pre-teen
• Teen
• Adult
• Senior

If you add a Sim to the town, it is an adult. To add a baby, you must have a married couple. A Sim moves from whatever stage of life on through the next ones. A Sim ages by doing stuff. Really. Any task you have them do uses up their available time, and when they’ve used up the time in that life stage, they advance to the next one. Once they’ve used up all their time in the Senior stage, they die.

A few updates back, they added a Life Orb mechanic. You give a new Sim a personality, and that personality dictates what kinds of tasks he likes to do. Doing those tasks fills up the Life Orb, and when that Sim dies, that Life Orb can be passed on to a new Sim, who can then level up the orb some more. It’s all very “Vulcan katra.” Life Orbs can be bronze, silver, or gold, and it seems to be that gold orbs require a few lives.

When a Sim reaches the end of a particular life stage, there are three options:

1. Age the Sim
2. Reset the Sim to the beginning of that life stage (this requires using Life Points, the premium currency in the game)
3. Pause the Sim’s age using an available Life Orb. Different levels pause for different amounts of time – a bronze Orb will pause a Sim from aging for three days, for instance.

When a Sim nears the end of the Senior lifestage, the Grim (Sim?) Reaper shows up and hangs around. He floats around, looks at things, and occasionally even grills up a steak:

It’s… surreal. There’s a constant visual reminder that Death is near, yet everyone just carries on doing what they’re doing. When a Sim’s time is up, an exclamation mark appears over their head and you can’t do anything except let them die or extend their life. Here’s what the end of a Sim’s life looks like:

And just like that, the Sim is gone.

One thing I’ve found is that a Sim can use an Orb from another Sim even if that Sim hasn’t died. The process does kill that Sim, however.

It’s come down to this, then: if I want Honkus to live, I have to start harvesting other Sims. I can currently have 30 Sims in my town, and I need to be filling their Life Orbs so I can pause Honkus’s aging. If I time it correctly and don’t use Orbs for any other Sim, I think I can keep Honkus alive indefinitely.

But what does this make him? At best, he’s some sort of vampire. At worst, he’s a demented farmer. Either of those means that the actual vampire/farmer is me, though, right? I create Sims specifically to keep Honkus alive. Meanwhile, as he doesn’t age, the people around him do. He’s already had to say goodbye to so many that he’s known for so long. The town is now full of new people, people he barely knows – and, for his sanity’s sake, it’s probably best that he not get to know them! Unless he’s a sociopath, befriending those whose ultimate purpose is to keep him alive is a terrible path.

And what do I do about his loving wife, Bluernia? I have reset both Honkus and her once apiece so far, but Life Points are expensive and I won’t be able to keep up that way. But if I start using Orbs for her, there might not be any available for Honkus when I need them. But letting her die…? I can’t make these choices. At least when I wasn’t playing, it was easy to imagine they were carrying on with their lives, oblivious and happy.

I imagine this is how Wolverine feels. He barely ages while he has to watch his loved ones grow old and die around him. It’s easy to see how this would cause a person to withdraw from human contact and become surly.

What kind of life have I doomed Honkus to? Yet, I cannot let him pass. Pity poor Honkus.

 

 

Tags: Sims

Written by: Mark