Crazy Things That Happen to Lyla Grunt

After successfully resurrecting Lyla Grunt for the first time in the game, I first wanted to take a look at her personality to see what kind of sim that I would be played as. Here’s what I found:

Now I definitely know where Ripp got his sloppiness from. Don’t get me wrong, sloppy sims aren’t that bad, but they can sometimes be a little annoying when they create puddles every time they use the shower or bathtub and how they seem to break appliances and catch themselves on fire more often than other sims. But as long as you keep them away from all stoves and fireplaces and buy them a fire alarm, they’re not too hard to handle.

One thing that I noticed after I resurrected Lyla is that you are only allowed to change her appearance with the mirror once. If you try to “change her appearance” more than once, her face starts to get corrupted. If you want Lyla’s face to stay the same, then your best bet is to not even try to change her hairstyle or makeup in the first place. Also, if you have seasons installed, make sure that Lyla doesn’t get too hot or too cold, or else her face will get corrupted as well.

Another thing that I noticed about Lyla is that when you take her on vacation (with the Bon Voyage expansion pack installed of course), her face shifts to another custom face when you go on different vacation community lots. Here’s what I mean:

Luckily, her face shifted back to the original one when she returned home from her vacation. Now I know never to take her on vacation again, unless I want her face to shift around every time she switches community lots.

Strangely enough, it’s only vacation community lots that cause her face to shift. When I took her to the community lots in Strangetown with the rest of the Grunts, her face remained intact the whole time.

Another strange thing I noticed about Lyla is that she doesn’t have any memories of her family prior to when the game begins. So if you play as the Grunt family and Tank gets an A+ and you resurrect Lyla after, you’ll notice the only memory that she has is Tank getting an A+, she doesn’t remember anything before the player starts playing on the Grunt family lot.

So Lyla has absolutely no memories of meeting her husband, getting married, having her three children, etc. This means that she’s never had her first kiss, so you could technically obtain the “first kiss” video from her if you interact her to kiss someone for the first time. You’ll also get special event videos if you make her do anything with General Buzz, even though he has memories of those things happening before. Well isn’t that nice to know?

Since I could go on writing about the many unique things about Lyla Grunt and all of the crazy things that happened when I moved her back in with the Grunts forever, I’ll post more entries about her later (so I don’t get too far off the topic of premade resurrections). Don’t worry you haven’t seen the last of Strangetown and this interesting sim!

Next time I’ll be continuing on with resurrecting random premades in other neighborhoods. Our next stop is Veronaville, a place filled with Romeos. You know you don’t want to miss this!

Resurrecting Random Premades Part 2

It’s time to discuss how to resurrect premades in my favorite neighborhood…Strangetown! There are a total of nineteen sims that you can resurrect in this neighborhood, and all of them are located in Olive Specter’s garden. Even though you can legally resurrect all nineteen of them, only certain sims can be safely resurrected (as in, they will not corrupt your game if you do). I only know of two sims that are safe to resurrect: Creon Nigmos and Lyla Grunt, although I have only resurrected one of them in the game so far. Of course, I am talking about the latter, Lyla Grunt, who is the mother of Tank, Ripp and Buck Grunt from 51 Road to Nowhere.

For years, I had been trying to resurrect her and for a while, nothing I tried worked. I tried the Tombstone of L & D method, but she only disappeared after I added her and I even tried resurrecting her using the Resurrect-o-Nomitron, but every time I had one of her sons call the Grim Reaper would tell them they didn’t know anyone that had died. After several attempts, I finally came across a method that worked; the move grave method which I mentioned in my previous entry.

The move grave method was a lot easier than I thought it would be and it only required me to have two Sims expansion packs to do it: Sims 2 University and Sims 2 Nightlife. Here’s how it works:

1. First I went into the Specter’s lot and found Lyla’s grave (it was located in the front of the garden).

2. Next, I clicked on her grave and selected the option “move this grave.” Under the menu for which community lot to send it I selected downtown (which you have to add in from neighborhood view) and “Gothier Green Lawns.”

3. Lyla’s grave then disappeared and her ghost appeared to wave goodbye:

4. I then entered the Grunt lot and obtained a Grim Reaper phone by pressed CTRL + SHIFT + C and entering “unlockCareerRewards” into the cheat box and pressing enter. After that, all of the selected family member’s Career Rewards (which in this case was Ripp’s), were unlocked.

5. Next, I grabbed the Resurrect-o-Nomitron and had Ripp call the Grim Reaper. Sure enough, Lyla was now listed under dead sims that he knew and after I paid the Grim Reaper $10,000 dollars (courtesy of the “motherlode” cheat), she was back and playable. Crazy huh?

Looking back, I understood why the previous two methods that I originally tried didn’t work. The reason why I couldn’t resurrect Lyla with the Tombstone of L & D or with just the Grim Reaper phone alone was because no one in her family had a memory of her dying. So in order to be able to resurrect her successfully, her grave had to be moved, so that her children (Tank, Ripp & Buck) could resurrect her with the Resurrect-o-Nomitron. See? Here she is: 

Next Time: The weird things that happen to the premade deceased townies in Strangetown after you resurrect them. Don’t miss it!

If you want to see a video of the “move this grave” method step-by-step click here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cSV-rfO78BA

If you want to see Lyla successfully resurrected by Ripp click here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jxuOqR-Xuvw&feature=channel_video_title

Resurrecting Random Premades Part 1

Every Sims 2 game comes with premade neighborhoods with residential lots filled with sims that you can play as. After owning the game for quite some time, I can honestly say that I have played with every premade family at least once and messed up their lives in one way or another. I hardly ever do what the family story tells me to do and I usually wind up making the family crazy somehow. One of my most favorite things to do to mess up the storylines is to resurrect as many random relatives that I can that have died some way or another prior to when the game began. First stop, Pleasantview!

There are only three pre-deceased sims in Pleasantview that you can resurrect (as in they actually have character data in the game): Darleen Dreamer (the wife of Darren Dreamer, mother of Dirk Dreamer), Skip Broke (husband of Brandi Broke) and Michael Bachelor (Bella Goth’s older brother).

Resurrecting Darleen is quite easy, first you need to enter the Dreamer lot, and then all you need is a Grim Reaper phone (which you can get by obtaining a job in the Paranormal career and getting to a high enough level to unlock it). Of course, you need the Sims 2 University to get the Resurrect-o-Nomitron, but your sims don’t necessarily have to graduate from college to get it (you can always cheat by pressing CTRL + SHIFT + C and entering “boolprop testingcheatsenabled true” into the cheatbox and SHIFT + right clicking on the newspaper, then selecting paranormal under the “get adult jobs for” category. You can also change the level of the job by pressing the “Select Job Level to…” opinion, with one being the entry level job and 10 being the highest job in the given career track). Then all you have to do is have Darren or Dirk call the Grim Reaper and pay a decent amount of money so that Darleen doesn’t come back as a zombie. The closer to $10,000 you pay the Grim Reaper, the more complete Darleen’s resurrection will be.

Since the Calientes kind of bored me (and I had no clue what to do with him), I haven’t resurrected Michael Bachelor yet. But his resurrection requires the “move grave” method, which I will be discussing in more detail in my next entry.

Skip Broke can only be resurrected using the Resurrect-o-Nomitron or the Tombstone of L & D if only the Sims 2 and Sims 2 University are installed. If any expansion packs are installed that are Nightlife or later, Skip Broke will not be able to be resurrected without the use of a third program known as SimsPE. Poor Skip.

This concludes my entry about legal resurrections in Pleasantview. Next time I will be trying to tackle resurrections in the next neighborhood, Strangetown (and trust me, there are a lot of dead premades roaming around Olive’s garden).

Weird Glitches in the Sims 2

Not too long ago, I was asked on another website to identify some of the weirdest things that have happened to me while playing the Sims 2. Truth be told, I had never realized how many strange glitches have occurred while playing the game until I sat down and thought about it. Sure, I have been playing the game for quite some time now (at least three years) and I own all of the expansion packs, but I never thought that so many strange things could've happened in the game. Here's a list of some weird glitches that have occurred:

1. Perhaps one of the strangest things that has ever happened in the game, occurred just a few days ago. One of my teenaged girl sims (you probably know her as Sharla Ottomas), was asked out on a date over the phone by her boyfriend. Now that sounds pretty normal right? Well, the thing is, her boyfriend went to college a few days earlier and was now a young adult, so when I took her downtown to go on the date, they were in completely different life stages. I always thought that it wasn't possibly for a teenager and a young adult to date, but apparently if one of the teenagers ages before the other one they can. Of course, they couldn't do any romantic interactions while on the date (which made it super hard to get the date meter up to dream date), but they did "tender kiss" at the end of it. (They couldn't reach each other though, which was actually quite hilarious).

2. Another time, I was looking through one of my sims' memories (her name is Alicia) and I noticed that she had a memory of kissing someone besides her husband. Interested, since I hadn't remembered this happening in the game, I clicked on the memory. Next to the description "Alright, it's such a thrill to kiss someone new!" was a picture of herself! So apparently sims can kiss themselves and get a memory of it? How strange!

3. When you install the Sims 2 Pets expansion pack (which is a great one by the way), many new animals are available in the game. One of them that you often see wandering on a lot is a skunk named Stinky Skunk. Sims on the lot can either watch him, pet him or choose to ignore him. One time, while I was playing as one of my sims couples, the wife was about to pet it. (Fortunately, I exited out of that interaction before she got sprayed). Now, I could understand sims wanting to pet skunks I guess, but a few seconds later her wants randomly changed. Sunny now wanted four of her aquintances to get sprayed by Stinky Skunk, I have no idea why. Now that girl has problems.

4. I love creating new neighborhoods for the Sims 2. I have this one neighborhood that I created about a year ago in my game and it has a pretty decent size population of premade sims in it. Recently, four of my sims graduated from college and returned to the neighborhood to get married and have families. Everything was going great (as in, there weren't any major glitches), until a few of my sims started having children. The babies looked completely normal, but their pictures were all messed up. Here's what I mean:

Now, I'm not sure what that thing is exactly, but it's DEFINITELY not a baby sim. Luckily, the baby's picture turned back to normal when she aged into a toddler. Thank goodness!

A lot of crazy glitches have occurred while playing the Sims 2, but these were some of my favorite (and weirdest ones). Who knows what other strange things will happen the next time I decide to play the game.