- October 4, 2022
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- 8 minutes read
The Sims 4: 10 Memes That Sum Up The Sims – Screen Rant
The long-running Sims game franchise is full of signature quirks, leading to often hilarious gameplay and equally hilarious memes.
The original Sims game was released in 2000, and the life simulation game has since spawned three sequels and multiple spin-offs in the two decades since its launch. On the way, the franchise has garnered millions of players around the world, many of which have played multiple incarnations.
The franchise's success is due in large part to its unique gameplay, with its signature style and lovable, funny quirks that appear in every Sims game. With great fandom and common gameplay motifs, memes are sure to follow.
The Sims 4 stuff pack My First Pet Stuff was intended to be an accompanying pack to the Cats & Dogs expansion pack. The pack offers cat and dog accessories and furniture, as well as a handful of clothes and furniture.
The pack was met with backlash from fans, in large part due to the fact the pack charges more money for items that should arguably have come with the Cats & Dogs pack. The poorly designed objects, and their lack thereof, drew more criticism from fans, with many outright refusing to buy the pack, as expressed by this Reddit meme.
The Sims 4 uses moodlet-based gameplay, where negative and positive moods of a sim affect their ability to fulfill tasks and take part in social relationships. Moodlets change rather erratically throughout the day in a life of a sim, and often for the worse.
Sims players often use cheat codes to get rid of certain moodlets that cause their sim to stay in bad moods. This has been especially the case for the new wants and fears system, where a sims' desires and anxieties lead to negative moodlets that often make no sense whatsoever.
The Sims games are well known for their addictive gameplay. The endless options and the unpredictability of the game keeps players glued to the screen for hours or even days at a time.
After a strong Sims gameplay session, many players will burn out from the hours of adventure. This often results in players not picking up the game again for a long, long time.
Unwelcome visitors can be one of the worst aspects of The Sims 4. Vampire or human sims often show up in a player's active household and are notoriously difficult to get rid of.
This is especially true if the sim's household has a computer. As many players have noticed, visiting sims often go straight for the computer and often refuse to stop even when asked.
Moodlets in The Sims 4 are weighted by points, depending on how much they affect the sims' mood, but their points are often too big or too small to be realistic, leading to sims acting in a pretty silly way.
The meme illustrates a perfect example of this. When a sim witnesses the death of a loved one, the moodlet points don't reallytake in the gravity of grief. A good meal and a hot bath, in Sims logic, is enough to put a sim in a great mood after losing a family member.
The Sims fandom frequently refer to NPCs (Non-Player Characters) in the game as "townies". Townies are sims that appear in Sims worlds and often live in unplayed households and are open to interaction with an active sim.
Townies are generated randomly by the game, and the game is constantly spawning new townies to fill its worlds. Due to their randomization, their tastes in fashion and makeup are certainly interesting, to say the least.
When a sim moves into a new home, they are greeted by the "welcome wagon". This consists of neighboring sims that arrive at the home to meet the sim, whether the player wants them to or not.
Usually, at least one sim in the welcome wagon offers the household a gift of fruitcake. The dessert looks pretty unappetizing and sims are often disgusted when they sample the fruitcake, leading to a negative mood.
One major criticism of The Sims 4 is that babies are objects in the game. Because of this, they are restricted to their bassinet and have few interactions, unlike the more interactive babies of The Sims 2 and 3.
For many simmers, babies are pretty annoying and don't have interactions that make for an interesting relationship with their parent sim. Toddlers have much more personality and interactions, so the "age up" option for babies is often highly tempting.
In The Sims 4, deaths can come at the worst of times and can be rather sudden and unexpected. At the same time, the dramatic flair the game has and the frequency of sudden death make a visit from the Grim Reaper pretty silly.
As many players have experienced when their sim is out and about or at a big event, a townie, often an elderly sim, will randomly drop dead. This causes sims at the location to stop in their tracks as Grim takes their soul away, leaving a load of sobbing sims that have abandoned their previous actions.
Patch updates are frequent in The Sims 4, and their results can be rather mixed. On one hand, patch updates are warmly welcomed when they bring bug fixes and new items and interactions to the game.
On the other hand, for Sims players that use mods and custom content, a patch update will often break a lot of downloads. This leads to the frustrating experience of deleting old downloads and waiting for mod-makers to make updates that coordinate with the new patch upgrade.
Bethany Gemmell is a writer from Edinburgh, Scotland. She has been an avid player of the Sims franchise since childhood and enjoys writing about a wide range of media, from Harry Styles to Star Wars.