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I love video games that offer a choice between playing as a hero or a villain. It offers endless replayability because no two people are alike, so every playthrough will involve different choices and different outcomes. The game then becomes true to real life, where people aren't pure paragons of virtue or homicidal maniacs.

Then I remember that the game incentivies players to play to one extreme (i.e., light-side powers cost less if you max out your light-side points; certain persuasion skills can only be maxed out by pure paragons or renegades, etc.), so every playthrough ends up being either a paragon of virtue or homicidal maniac playthrough.
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Unless you just take the L and spend the little extra to play more in the grey area c:
I'm in the process of trying to reinstall The Sims 2 and all the expansion packs from CD to help me develop story ideas. The base game installed just fine, but when I tried to install University, the installation would always fail after trying to determine whether the base game has the necessary patches. My guess is that the installer is making a call to some server that's no longer running, so the installer gets confused and refuses to install University.

No matter. I have the Fun with Pets collection, which comes with the Store Edition launcher, which, if installed, will allow University to install. However, I can't install Fun with Pets because Windows 10 blocked the installer. After a literal hour of trying to fiddle with security settings Windows wouldn't let me mess with because I have the home edition, I realized I would need to make some group policy settings. I can't do that, though, because the home editions don't come with the group policy editor. Except they do, but I had to enter a couple of hidden commands in Command Prompt to flat-out disable User Account Control, which the home editions don't allow you to do.

Now that I resolved that issue, I can resume waiting another two hours for all the expansion packs to finish installing.
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I still have lots of The Sims editions and expansions. Unfortunately, they're all for WIndows, and I've moved on to having Apples computers.

Good luck.
Did your adventures in trying to install this help you come up with any story ideas? lol I think you could have spent those hours surfing the internet coming up with story ideas. Hahaha!

I come up with a lot of my story ideas from the forums in the Adoption Society areas of www.NaNoWriMo.org. People can "drop off" ideas they don't want to use. They have all sorts of threads -- Adopt a Plot, Adopt a Subplot, Adopt a Comedic Scene, Adopt a Tearjerker Scene, Adopt a Fantasy Plot, etc. There's hundreds and hundreds of ideas. And even if you write fantasy, you can look through Adopt a Plot and just plug in fantasy characters into a regular Adopt a Plot idea you love. Unlimited people can adopt the same plot (everyone will use it differently and most will never publish anyway) and you can adopt unlimited plots (same reasons as just stated). I love that area of NaNo! It's my favorite section!!!

You might also get some ideas by browsing "The Prompt Me Contest/CLOSED till Spring" Open in new Window.. Good luck with getting story ideas! And it sounds like even more luck is needed with getting The Sims 2 up and running! lol
I meant to browse the forum for people's entries in "The Prompt Me Contest/CLOSED till Spring" Open in new Window. for possible story ideas, in case I wasn't clear. lol
I wanted to play Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, but my old Windows 7 computer bit the dust a couple of years ago, so I had to spend two hours trying to get the game to work on my Windows 10 computer. Then I had to spend another hour downloading more mods because the game would crash when I walked up to this one Hutt character and talked to him, but the game wouldn't crash when I talked to the Hutt character and walked up to him, but either way it would crash when the conversation finished and the game transitioned to a different in-game cutscene. I still don't understand how I actually fixed it.

I could have just played my Xbox copy of the game instead.
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The fact you actually even attempted a fix shows you know way more about computers than I do (indeed, more than many of the folks I've come across working at a computer store).
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With a quick upward flick of his wrist, the tumbler snaps into place. Galen Koral watches the door swing open. Then he hears the snap of a different kind of metal.

"You picked the wrong house to rob, boy," said the occupant.

"Don't shoot," said Galen as he lifted his hands up. "I just wanted the XP for picking that lock. I'll be going now."
Saving the game every two minutes.

Console gamers call it "cheating."

PC gamers call it "the game crashes every three minutes."
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I am a console player and I still do it. I don’t care if it’s considered cheating. I was replaying Skyrim the other day doing the Bleak Falls Barrow quest and I saved that thing like 37 times because I was too scared to replay any part of it. *Facepalm* I like to stay above ground.
If The Hunchback of Notre Dame were written today:

Frollo: You are an ugly monster and everyone will hate you, so for your own protection, you must stay locked up in this tower for the rest of your life and never expose yourself to anyone else's presence.

Quasi-Modo: So what's the wifi password?
So I can either spend my time writing summaries of plaintiffs' medical conditions, which is boring, lifeless, and soul-draining. Or I could work on writing my fiction stories, which is entertaining, fulfilling, purposeful, cathartic, and helps me work through my physical limitations and mental-health struggles.

I get paid to do the first thing. Guess what I'm choosing.
You cannot kill my self esteem, for what has never existed cannot die.
If I owned a baseball team I would totally cut my best players so I can pocket their salaries as "profits," and then complain about how the owners who don't do this are ruining baseball.
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Sneaky
I have a story where one of the characters gets bullied. In my first draft, I didn't really give the bullies a reason to make fun of her, so the bullying dialogue seemed artificial. But now I can create realistic dialogue by using the people who laugh at me and call me names at church as an example.

I can't stop people from making fun of me, but one day I'll finish this novel and make money off of them.
So I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that I got a CT scan due to my history of cancer, and that I forgot I had a paperclip in my vest pocket.

Well, I saw my oncologist, and we couldn't find the paperclip on the scans. We looked through all the scans for a couple of minutes, but the paperclip didn't show up.

I mean, I don't have cancer, which...fine. But I wanted to see the paperclip :(
I'm going to start keeping a journal of all the times people make fun of me so I can turn those people into villains in my stories. I fully intend to shatter the line between "creative" and "petty."
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Don't knock it. The second person killed in Sins Of The Fathers was completely based on a former friend of mine who dumped on me after 30+ years of friendship.

It's not "petty"... because it sure beats belting him over the head with a hammer in real life...
Well, I'm faced with another bout of mental health struggles. Time to create a new character, dump all of my problems on him, and watch him figure it out.

I am a bitter god who puts his subjects in unfair situations - but never unwinnable situations.
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And when they finally die a horrible death, your real life problems are finally solved. Sweet.
If I took all the time I spent studying for high school tests (not including the five minutes of studying as the tests are being handed out), and added all that time up, it would be less than the time I am currently spending preparing for the NFL Draft in a 14-year-old video game I'm playing. Staring at spreadsheets should not be this much fun.
So I had to get another quarterly CT scan earlier today, due to my history of cancer (2018, 2024), and they found something on the scan.

I had a paper clip in my vest pocket. I forgot about the paper clip, so I didn't take my vest off before the scan.

Oh yeah, and it's a new year so I need to meet my out-of-pocket maximum again. Hooray!
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Of all questions I'm gonna ask, it's gonna be this: People still use paper clips? *Laugh*

That's great news, buddy!
Elycia Lee ☮ Reviewing Author Icon - Paper clips and binder clips are treasured commodities at the office. We hoard those things like they're gold, and defend our stashes with our lives.
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