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Turning On, Having Fun
Turn On, Turn Off

When you create a sim, you have a choice to make. As well as your aspiration and personality to decide on, you also have to decide on your two turn-ons and one turn-off (TO/Os). If your sim is already created and you don't like their TO/Os, you can go into their inventory, take the blue bottle which is ReNuYuSenso Porta-Chug, which is free and it allows you change them to something you think fits more with their personality. You have a choice of nineteen turn TO/Os, which in my opinion is not enough.

Blonde, Red, Brown, Black, Grey and Custom hair colours are six of the choices for TO/Os. Type of clothes - i.e. PJs, undies, formal - take up another three. Fatness and fitness, cologne and stinking, makeup, full facial makeup, facial hair, hats, vampirism and glasses complete the set.

"I love the fact you smell like an overturned garbage can and have a spare truck tire around your midriff but that blonde hair has to go. It just makes me sick to the stomach. You can have it any other colour. Red, brown, black ... even green. Just not blonde."
"The hair stays. And if we do become more acquainted, I expect to see more of you in your PJs and not your undies. Also, get yourself a hat."

This does make up for some interesting combinations but does make our sims sound quite "hairist". I can see that if skin colours being included in the mix could sound racist, but in my opinion, this is too politically correct if that is the case. Personally, I would like to see skin colours or even eye colours included as turn ons/offs, but as these parts of your sim's genetics cannot be changed (yet), it would make any change in TO/Os to be pointless.

Despite these criticisms, these go some way towards the chemistry of a relationship and are a contributory factor towards how well people get on when dating. I'll be talking about dating and relationship chemistry in detail later.

For now, let's just have fun.

Pleasure and Cheese

Tired of the five basic aspirations? Then there may be something else in this EP for you. You know have a sixth aspiration that you can choose during character creation. There is another aspiration as well but meanie that I am, I won't tell you about that right now.

When creating a sim, you can now choose to follow the "Pleasure Seeker" aspiration. Sims that take this path will want to do different things. They may want to juggle, try out the electrodance sphere or even - bizarrely - just change into their PJs. It also has associated fears, for example falling out of the sphere. "What sphere?" I hear you ask. I'll be coming to that later in this review.

With Aspiration points come rewards and this EP has given a new reward object. The ReNuYuSenso Orb costs 6,250 points and provides you with what looks like a very hi-tech cement mixer. Used under the right conditions, being the familiar gold or platinum aspiration meter, this allows you to change your aspiration and your TO/Os. When using the ReNuYo Orb to change your aspiration, it does make it look like you are putting your head in a newfangled cement mixer.

If it succeeds, you will be able to change your aspiration and your turn-ons and your turn-off. If you just want to change your turn-ons and offs, check your inventory to see if you still have your free ReNuYuSenso Chugger. This will be an automatic success against taking your chance with the Orb.

If it backfires from using it at less than gold aspiration, instead of getting some swanky concrete headgear, you will end up with the new "Grilled Cheese" aspiration. Yummy. Mortimer Goth has kindly volunteered to see what his life will become. After all, he is a retired mad scientist. All Mortimer can now think of is grilled cheese sandwiches - that is cheese toasties for us Brits. He wants to eat them, he wants his friends to eat it as well, he wants to influence other people to make it for him, he wants to talk about it and is afraid of burning them or eating any grilled cheese sandwiches that have gone bad. In fact, his entire life now revolves around this delicacy. You can in fact become quite boring unless you are around people with the same aspiration. Perhaps he could set up a self-help group and they could go out on social events together. Instead of having a cheese bowl, he would instead have the Grilled Cheese Bowlers. I know. Very bad pun, but not too bad an idea.

For those of you who also have the University expansion where you get a Life Goal, someone with the Grilled Cheese Aspiration has the long term goal of eating 200 grilled cheese sandwiches for that permanent platinum setting. That can take quite a lot of time.

Personally, I like these new additions, especially the ability to change your aspiration. Although sticking my head in a cement mixer is something I don't recall having done, I feel that my aspiration has changed the older I have become. I daresay that is true of most people.

So now we've got our created sim and seen how sims can become dangerously addicted to toasties, let us look at what our sims can put in their back pockets or their pocketbook.

Written at 04:38 on Saturday 24 September 2005 by Andy.

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