Hee, it is kind of fun seeing a pregnant man.

Why does the Ottomas family need punishing? I've played them a few times. So long as you are patched before the game put them in a hood they are fine. Some interesting genetics.

I haven't played them so I dunno why they have to be punished but should I have to, i guess I'll play their family, turn free will off, queue and endless "Play... Tickle" till they die on a funny death.

Or turn on testingcheats and pause the game, drag everyone's bladder down, resume the game and watch as the final episode of amazing race begins. Rinse and repeat. :D

I believe if you go way back to the beginning of the thread, it dates from the time before the Seasons patch, and people were punishing them for breaking the neighborhood, which wasn't their fault; or for being difficult to play which, again, is not their fault; or for being homely, which is a) a matter of taste and b) not a punishable offense unless you're an insufferable creep.

Peni, I can't remember if I patched before I started my main hood, I haven't added them to the hood yet but am sorely tempted to because they keep coming home with my sims from work/school & I don't think they look that bad. Would it be safer to just end Samantha's pregnancy & give her another set of twins instead of risking borking?

If you use a mod like the Simblender you can check the pregnancy and find out who the father is. If the father's Peter Ottomas you're fine, if it's anyone else then terminating the pregnancy is the way to go.

I actually like the Ottomases so much I just remade them in CAS (using downloaded sim bin templates of them, and getting their stats by looking at them in Tarlia's Viper Canyon) because I wanted to add them to Widespot! So I won't be punishing them at all - I rather like them. Sharla is a bit unfortunate looking, especially as an adult, but she rolled as completely infertile in my game anyway. I'm kind of disappointed - I wanted to see how her kids would turn out! I'll be starting them in Widespot just after the twins become toddlers, so I created the twins in CAS as well. They're a fun family to play :-)

Yeah, like lauratje said, check the father with some sort of pregnancy scanner. If it's Pete, all's fine. If it's not, you can terminate, or you can fix it in SimPE. It's not too tricky to do, you'll need to look at the pregnancy token in Samantha's memory and change the father to Peter. But if Samantha's broken, be aware that Sarah Crittur's puppies will also probably be broken. People often seen to forget that there's more than one broken pregnancy in Seasons!

I haven't played them purely because I'm scared that my neighbourhood will get borked even though I've patched, well I think I've patched my game.

Thank you Laura & Sushi for letting me know that's bit of a relief

Yikes I had no idea about all this Ottomas drama! I have played them at least twice and never had any issues o.O

Oh no!! I have Sarah and her puppies in my Veronaville game. I have downloaded a patch for each EP that I have. Please tell me that those doggone puppies won't ruin my game!

As far as the Ottomas family, the most fun I've had with them is to just let them go and only direct them to go to work/school and pay bills. They actually survive!!!! What a shock!

You need to apply the patch before the game creates the bin famailies. So any new hood you create after patching will be fine, but if you placed the dogs into your hood and then patched, they will be borked. Actually I think they may affect the hood even if left in the bin. I'm not sure how serious a problem the dogs are.

I always patch before I play a new EP. I hope that worked. Who should the puppies be linked to? Is David Ottomas their father???

The Critturs family consists of two dogs, a male and a pregnant bitch. The male, Danny, is the correct father for the puppies.

As I understand it, the problem is identical with the Ottomas and Crittur families and has to do with them starting the game pregnant and in the Family bin. The game didn't assign the father's ID correctly in that situation before the patch. Many people have played long and happy unpatched neighborhoods with these two families perpetually in the bin; it's only that they come out that the pregnancy controller screws up the father's ID.

Could be! Anyone can be assigned as the father. When I first played the Ottamas family before the patch was even released I did have a dog pictured as the father of the twins on their family tree. So maybe it was Danny...

I killed them all for a story thing.

Oh, I should make this absolutely clear - if you're uncertain whether you patched your game before loading a particular neighborhood, looking at the Ottomases while they sit in the family bin won't necessarily prove anything. I found when I was testing that the pregnancy controller reset properly for Widespot when changed to a subhood that the assignment was done on opening the household. Since a neighborhood with borked pregnant families doesn't have a problem while the family is in the bin, it's probable that the breakage occurs during some operation at that time. To do the check and be certain, you should back up your game sans Ottomai and Critturs, load it, put the family you want into the neighborhood, open the household, save, quit, and then check in SimPE. If the father's misassigned, you can decide at that point whether you want to fix the father's assignment manually (I know of no reason why this wouldn't work), terminate the pregnancy, or restore the backup and return to your original status quo.

I killed off Dora, Peter and Samantha right away. Aged David up to and adult, Sharla to a teen and Tommy to a child. David, is their caregiver. He's currently trying to find a way to get a better job...so that he can move them all from the crappy side of town they live on...and out of the tiny dump of an apartment their in.

Having a ton of game mods that makes life more challenging for even Sims with wealth and higher education, things are really tough for this family...as they have neither of those things.

You guys are so mean. Killing people off just because they're ugly. I have an NPC in my game with the blowfish lips and my Romance sim is actually dating him (and several others).

I agree with you on that one.

Sims in my game are never killed off because of their looks. In fact, one of my favorite Sims to play is Chester Gieke...who to some, is seen as quite unattractive.

Sims are only killed off for storytelling, family reasons, or neighborhood progression purposes.

Honestly, I don't ever enter the Ottomas house with the intention of making everyone miserable, but what does happen is that I play them for a while and then get frustrated at how needy they are. Oddly, I don't ever get this frustrated with the Newsons; the only explanations I can think of are that the lack of pregnancies draining needs and the fact that they're fed by the school makes the Newsons bearable to play, or I just can't bring myself to neglect a bunch of orphans.

The first time I played the Ottomas family, I ended up so sick of them that I set the whole house on fire, killing everyone but Tommy and his younger siblings. This is also the first time I discovered that there's a special dialogue when the Social Worker shows up because all the adults/teens on the lot died (it's similar to the Reaper's message on an empty lot, except it's about the unfortunate orphans). I didn't save after this, but that's kind of moot because I never intended to keep that version of their neighborhood in the first place and have since deleted it.

I didn't pick them up again until I started a megahood, and right off the bat everyone kept standing in narrow hallways and camping the computer and bathrooms. In fact, I had to keep the computer in the backyard because every indoor room either was a bathroom or had a bed in it. (Now that I think of it, though, I could have utilized the garage...)

Samantha hands-down got the worst of it; she came pretty close to starving to death, which would have been extremely bad because this was a twin-based megahood and the only reason I gave a hoot about the family was because Samantha had twins on the way. Thankfully I did manage to get her to eat, at the cost of sacrificing her dignity by letting her pass out on the floor, wake up, and rush to the bathroom just to pee herself two feet away from the toilet. Twice. Thankfully with the addition of two more kids she seems to have no interest in getting more, and if she does roll something, I'll probably adopt.

Under my direction Dora initially ignored everyone in favor of making paintings, but said paintings never sold well despite her high Creativity skill – would I be correct in assuming that the hidden painting skill is what affects the value? I didn't want her working herself to exhaustion over the grandkids, and I didn't download an anti-elder-discrimination hack so she was stuck at her crappy job (I'm definitely gonna get that hack for other hoods now), but when painting turned out to be a bad choice with her limited time, I eventually did get her to work on teaching toddler skills so that she could die with Platinum.

Peter just wasn't a great father. I mean, to his credit he's still a notch above Daniel Pleasant who in this neighborhood had hit Lilith at least twice and is one of the key members in a roving pack of Romance Sims despite his wife still being totally clueless (even trying to court Samantha Cordial, an expy of Angela! And now you know the real reason the neighborhoods weren't meant to be merged).

But Peter hasn't exactly endeared himself to me, rolling wants about WooHoo (with or without Samantha) while his wife was passed out on the kitchen floor, and finding his half-full Hygiene need so urgent that he needed to rush into the downstairs bathroom before his youngest daughter, with a nearly-depleted Bladder, could enter, nearly causing her to pee herself on her birthday. He's also probably never going to get a promotion as his skills are seriously sub-par for his current job, much less the next level.

David and Sharla just sort of fell to the sidelines. Due to self-imposed rules David didn't get to go to college, so he's been depressed about that, and neither him nor Sharla have any friends last I checked. Tommy's been even less notable, although at least he befriended some of the Newson kids.

The twins were born as a healthy boy and girl pair, Louis and Sophia. Sophia got hit hard with Ottomas genes and had a small, piglike nose as a toddler, but it turned downwards as she got older and it's actually kind of cute. On the other hand, Louis gained a pretty weird facial profile with a birdlike nose and very prominent thin lips, but from the front his face looks great. They spent some time being totally miserable due to not learning any essential toddler skills and due to Dora dying, but they're getting better and are also befriending Newsons.

...At least, they were getting better. But just now I went into the game to verify that I had the twins' names right, and I discovered that somewhere within the span of the Pleasant sisters' university year, the twins were heavily corrupted despite never making contact with anyone during the Pleasant round. They've been removed from the Ottomas household, had everything about them wiped except for their family and friends' memories of them (but their own memories and the actual relationships are gone), and are set as adults with hovering child bodies. Thankfully the game didn't crash when I summoned them with InSim, so they aren't as badly corrupted as some of my Sims have been in the past. I could probably reconstruct them based on earlier backups, but given that I don't know who else is borked it's probably safer to revert to those backups entirely, even if it means rolling back the entirety of Pleasant Round 2 and possibly even Newson Round 1.

Sigh.

But despite the things I say about Peter and the older kids, I do actually enjoy the family. It's frustrating in a refreshing way, because most other families manage to carve out a good little life for themselves, pair up into perfect couples, and raise perfect little angels as kids. And then there's the Ottomas family. Plus, Dora sort of reminds me of my own grandmother who also moved in with her son to help raise me (the only grandchild, mind you!).

On an unrelated note, is the pregnancy glitch exclusive to Seasons, or does it happen in all the previous games and just wasn't widely known until Samantha was introduced?

It wasn't noticed till they started creating families with pregnancies to put into the family bin. The code hadn't been written with that in mind and when someone did it apparently the proper testing wasn't done.

I got very angry at the incompetence of the Ottomai my first day in the house, but I soon realized it was because the poor things were never played or trained and, despite having three kids already, none of the people old enough to mind kids in the house had ever done it before! The code that makes people respond to the presence of two cribs by constantly switching tired babies was the worst. Once I got a handle on that, and realized they needed to be ridden hard and micromanaged a bit at first, I came to love them.

Since Sports Columnist makes decent money, I never tried to get Peter promoted. His time is much better spent dating Samantha's mood up and kid-wrangling! I'm having Military Peter Ottomas work on his skills so he'll be ready to take over as General when Buzz retires, though.

Hmm. This happened in my game a while ago and I couldn't figure out why. I'm sorry your game's a bit borked, but kind of glad it's not just me! Anyway, I decided to try and fix the sims in SipPE and carry on and so far, so good. But I do wonder why it happened. Game crash maybe?

Possibly. During my run through the Pleasants' house the game crashed several times due to some CC that I ended up having to remove (I believe one was for buyable books and the other was for buyable grocery baskets). I haven't gone through my backups yet to see if I can pinpoint a time period where the corruption might have happened, but that's the only thing I can recall happening after I finished Newsons Round 1 (since both twins seemed perfectly fine when they visited the Newsons).

For the other thing that happened, I can't remember whose household I was playing at the time (I want to say it was the Cordials even though they went before the Newsons), but for some reason when Johnny Smith spoke to Chloe Curious on a community lot, he'd have a symbol appear over his head as if he was improving his grades in the Undeclared major -- and he's still a teenager. I didn't see anything odd about him when I checked him and his household, so I kind of forgot about it until today. I don't know if there's a connection or not, either.

I played them for the first time, and I had the child support mod. When I first moved them in the dad was furious at the mom and I couldn't figure out why. Next thing I know, she receives child support from Brandi Broke. I check the family tree and she's nowhere on it...that's when I realised that Brandi Broke was the mother...or father of the twins.. (I googled it a bit and found out that the twins can mess up your game something fierce so I aborted them and re-impregnated her with the insimenator and her husband this time but I wander what would've happened if I made Brandi Broke as the dad... would I get the same twins? Would I get different ones? And would that break my game?)

Patch your game, honey. Now. And reset every neighborhood you haven't played. You will then be able to play the Ottomai with no problem.

Well, no neighborhood-busting problems.