Oh, and Andrew - the scripted events will play themselves out fairly quickly, and some of them will only play at all if you follow the suggestion in the pop-up when you open the game. It won't take two full days to play past them. I think the one that takes longest is the burglary at the Caliente house, since the burglar can't come till night.

It is the Brokes one that will take the most time for Dustin will come home around 3-4AM.

ADD: Angela will come home with Dustin and you need to have her leave at 5PM or the story will not unfold.

Andrew, Jennifer Burb is Daniel Pleasant's sister.

The Burbs are Daniel Pleasant's family; his sister, brother-in-law and niece respectively

Well, in the end I took the "easy" way in and played my own CAS family, the Spences. As soon as they moved in, Jolie (Mrs Spence) phoned for a taxi, and they all went out to look at this new town they'd moved into. First they went to 290 Main Street, which has Pleasantview's main grocery store. They weren't shopping though, they were really there to see who they could meet. They ran into quite a few townies including Goopy Gilscarbo, who must be the most famous townie of all. David Spence met Daniel Pleasant, and his teenage Romance son Charlie talked for a long time to Daniel. I think Daniel detected a kindred spirit when young Charlie told him he believed in free love with no commitments! Charlie also found time to share a joke with Dustin Broke who showed up briefly.

Then they went on to 330 Main Street where they spent §800 on clothes. Don and Cassandra were also there in the clothes shop: perhaps they were looking at wedding outfits! Cassandra went out to play on the swings, where she beat little Justine Spence to the last free swing! Don disappeared behind the changing booths, and I feared he might be up to something. Then I noticed other Sims going round the back of the booths too, and eventually realised that the stairs up to the toilets were there! The Spences managed to speak to both Don and Cassandra. Young Charlie seemed to get on quite well with Don too -- maybe he hopes the two Casanovas will teach him their techniques. They spent the whole day at the two community lots, but, because of the community lot time warp, it still wasn't 10 a.m. when they got home. Anyway I saved the game and left them there.

Next I moved in both the Burbs and the Oldies to houses near the Pleasants, but didn't play them. I thought it was really time to take the bull by the horns and start playing one of the scripted families. I think I'll leave the Goths till last, because Cassandra seems quite vulnerable, and I think she'll be badly hurt if she gets left at the altar. I don't like to see my Sims getting hurt, so playing all the other lots first at least gives her a chance that she might find out what Don's really like. To actually marry him would be even worse than being jilted! My main interest at present is Dustin and Angela, so I decided to start by playing the Pleasants, as I thought they'd be much easier to play than the Brokes. (Playing a pregnancy in a family with no money doesn't sound like a lot of fun!) And I did enjoy playing the Pleasants! Daniel certainly had plenty of fun, and I think Kaylynn was quite happy about it too! I'm probably not playing it quite the way that Maxis expected. Angela and Lilith patched things up a little before they went to school, so they don't hate each other quite as much as they did. (They're still enemies.) Daniel dutifully hugged Angela and kissed Mary-Sue before they left. He also tried to persuade Lilith to be nicer, but that was probably a total waste of time! Then, when he had the place to himself, he dived into the pool, so he was wearing his swimming trunks when Kaylynn arrived. As far as I could see, she didn't do any work at all, but just announced she was finished, and would he like her to stay on? They went outside and made out beside the swing. Then they went into the pool together so she changed into her bikini. And after that, they retired to the bedroom where, after much kissing and cuddling, they did their stuff. For some reason I connived at this and used the SetHour cheat to give them an extra hour together.

Kaylynn also cooperated by leaving immediately after the woohoo, so there was nothing suspicious to be seen when Angela burst into the bedroom to be congratulated on her A+ grade. By leaving early Kaylynn also avoided seeing the awful underwear that Daniel was wearing; I'll be getting him to the shops to get something more appropriate for a local Casanova! I saved and quit at that point before Mary-Sue came home, but Daniel has a locked want to woohoo with her when she gets back. All told, for him it's turning out to be a perfect day!
~~~~~~~
Finally a question for you old-timers from Sims 1: Which of these families were around in The Sims 1, and which ones were newcomers in The Sims 2? I'm wondering which Sims might recognise Bella Goth if they saw her.

Daniel and Jennifer were the children of Jeff and Diane Pleasant in the family bin of neighborhood 1 in Sims1. John Burb was Johnny Burb, son of fashionista Tiffany Burb and househusband/farmer Brad Burb in Old Town. Mortimer, Bella, and Cassandra Goth were residents of Neighborhood 1. Michael Bachelor was in the family bin in Neighborhood 1. Bob and Betty Newbie were the tutorial family and lived in Neighborhood 1.

Original family bin sims left out of Pleasantview were the Roomies, Chris and Melissa. Chris was blonde, Melissa was black, and they were almost always lesbians when I played them.

I have made Old Town Hood for Sims 2 that includes all the playable Sims that was in Sims1 including all the downloaded family's.
I have it at N99 if you would like to see it, you will need to reg. there to see it though.
http://starlightsims.yuku.com/directory
Now also here at MTS: http://www.modthesims.info/download.php?t=522506

I absolutely love Pleasantview! It is my all time favorite neighborhood...(although right now I have switched things up and am playing Riverblossom Hills) I never followed the scripted events nobody including EA is gonna tell me how their lives will turn out! :-D I always had Cassandra marry Don and she moved in with him and eventually got pregnant. They never last though and I always ended up in CAS to make Cassandra's perfect match! Angela and Dustin got pregnant as teens and Angela moved into their trailer and almost always gave birth to twins and that always made things aggravating and poor Beau never had a moments peace! So I would bring the Oldies in from the bin and Angela and her babies would move in with them until Dustin made enough to buy them their own place. Brandi always went into business with Nina they opened a restaurant funded by Dina who married Mortimer. Beau turns out to be the good seed and goes to college so he can make the big bucks :-D As for Brandi's third child she always miscarries I cannot deal with her 2 babies plus Angela and Dustin's! Nina gets pregnant by Don and has his baby as he is marrying Cassandra (they make gorgeous babies!) and she moves into a trailer close to Brandi. The funniest thing that I have ever seen was Nina showed up to crash Cassandras and Dons wedding and Cassandra paid her to leave!! It was great!! Alot of drama goes on in my Pleasantview but since I haven't played in awhile I haven't done anything else but all that drama is waiting on me to dive back into!!

The Pleasants, the Burbs, and Brandi Broke's parents, the Newbies, were all there. All the other families were new to the game. It's suggested that the Oldies may have come to neighborhood soon after the timeline of the first game begins since Cassie is Mary Sue's BFF. It's also possible that the Lotharios and Calientes came to the neighborhood while Don, Nina and Dina were younger, though some people think they're from out of town and only recently appeared. You know, however you want to play.

Pleasantview is awesome. It's one of the biggest reasons holding me back from trying out and potentially moving on to TS3 (that and the amount of money it would cost).



I do it that way all the time, in megahoods. :P



You forgot a significant, well known one from TS1. Can you guess which one I'm referring to?

I'm certain I'm not forgetting anyone who's still alive.

But she's using Tarlia's hood, and I don't think there are ANY graves/urns.

Tarlia didn't delete any graves. Not only that, Tarlia repaired all the remaining ancestors so that you can respawn their graves. It may very well be safe enough for some purposes to ressurect them, even, though she was not able to repair all the dead to her satisfaction, particularly in Strangetown. I resurrected all the dead in Tarlia's Veronaville just to see them once, though I believe the repairs were offered more as a service to storytellers who might want them and to prevent the dead's data from causing issues than for actual playing.

I use Tarlia's cleaned Pleasantview and other hoods and yes there are graves/urns where I mentioned before even with Tarlia's cleaned Pleasantview.

Gameplay-wise the rest of the afternoon at the Pleasants went wonderfully. Mary-Sue came home to Daniel waiting on the bed for her in his swimming trunks. She accepted his invitation to join him, and they cuddled, kissed, made out and had woohoo together, before falling asleep. Angela spent most of the afternoon cuddling Dustin on the Sofa. In the course of all the cuddling she fell in love with him, and when they got off the sofa, they had their first kiss. Lilith came home with no homework, but sorely in need of some fun. Since she hated all her family no one would play red hands with her. So she phoned Dirk and invited him round. They had a dream date together, and she finished up the happiest of the lot of them! And they fell in love. Running away was about the last thing on her mind. I play Lilith as very physical: when she hugs, she squeezes; when she kisses, she smooches or makes out. I don't believe she's a girl to do things by halves! By early evening Mary-Sue was the only one not in platinum, and even she hadn't exactly had a bad day. She knew nothing of what Daniel had got up to in the morning!

Much more concerning to me was the loss of fear slots by both Angela and Lilith towards the end of the day. This is the same problem that caused me to conclude that my Veronaville was corrupt and started me rebuilding it. But this is a new 'hood based on a clean template. I haven't even played a lot for a full day yet. Surely I haven't done any VBTs in that time! I'm beginning to think that I must have a CC problem, but it could be a real pain trying to track it down, as the problem is intermittent. I think I'll start by looking at the CC I downloaded just before the lost wants and fears started. By all accounts it's an unusual problem, but I have it in 2 'hoods. My Sims Program Files are all read-only and have been for months.

Andrew, you've checked that your objects package for the game in your program files didn't get modified before you set it to read-only, right?

I could see Angela and Lilith not having enough history to generate all their wants and fears. But yes, I think you must have a cc problem. So sorry you have to search it out. Last cc problem I had, I got super lucky and Gummilutt had the exact same problem, and we had half a dozen people trying to help us figure it out and it still took a week or so, and that was with knowing it had to be one of less than a dozen mods we had in common! Most cc is really solid that is still out here these days, but some is not.

The Goths? They were from TS1. You made a reference to Cassie, but didn't list the Goths as being from TS1. I think everybody knows they're from TS1, so I suppose it doesn't really matter.



The Pleasants are awesome, I love the story potential with the twins!

Oh, right, them. I guess I just thought that went without saying.

Your Sims 2 story is similar to mine then, however I was content with playing the game vanilla for over a year, thinking no online resources would be available anywhere, until I found MTS.

Yes, I've read through the thread and will agree that we all have our own Pleasantview stories. Don't be afraid to totally blow off the Maxis story line, I did in several places and it was still rewarding.

My first piece of advice: as inticing as it seems to turn off aging, I recommend leaving it on at first as there's plenty of time to get to know the premade sims. Younger sims just sit there with "C" grades, and by fulfilling wants with aging on sims eventually have enough aspiration points for Elixir of Life, for which teens and older can drink to extend their life. How do I know the game gets boring with aging off? I've tried it.

Second: I don't get too attached to the premade sims. Dustin Broke, Kaylynn Langerak, and Darren Dreamer all met untimely demises, which also led to different gameplay experiences. (I hadn't played the Dreamer house at all when Darren died at Don Lothario's; there's Dirk Dreamer, all alone in that huge house with bills to pay and teen jobs as an only reliable source of possible income. This was also before I knew I could add bin and CAS sims to an existing house.)

Third is a three-part summary of what I'd do differently if I were to replay Pleasantview today, especially if it was my first go-around: 1) Don't delete any tombstones (my game is still playable however I seem to be very lucky); 2) Don't save the game on the screen that pops up before going back to the neighborhood or closing the game (lost the Goth mansion that way, had to move the family out), always save through the actual save function; 3) In my game, I played Don Lothario before playing the Goths and he did marry Cassandra, I didn't realize what the move-in screen was for and accidentally brought Alexander Goth over with her.

Last night I met the most famous Sim in the world!

After putting in revised versions of some of my mods (as described in my Help thread) I started to play Pleasantview again. To start off the story in my new Pleasantview I imported the cloned appearance of my CAS family the Spences. And, before I started any of the pre-made families, I sent all the Spences to 350 Main Street to buy clothes. As soon as they arrived I spotted Bella Goth there. Not only was Bella there, but Alexander was there too. He appeared to be there on his own, and he was looking at clothes. Possibly he was looking for something to wear to Cassie's wedding. At first I got Jolie (Mrs Spence) to talk to Bella, but later I spotted Bella again. This time she was inside the clothes shop and appeared to be looking at Alexander, who was still looking at clothes. I couldn't resist selecting Bella with Control this Sim, and found that she had Family Kiss with Alexander in her action queue. It dropped out of the queue, but I put it back, and he accepted the kiss! She tried talking to him, but he said something she didn't want to hear. Perhaps he told her about Cassandra and Don, or, worse still, about the Caliente sisters. Anyway she got things back on track by telling him a joke, and within minutes Bella and Alexander were friends, and were chatting happily, interspersed with hugs and kisses. :lovestruc Despite her memory loss, somehow he must have known who Alexander was. As they say, blood is thicker than water!

Well, I reckon Alexander is bound to go home and tell Mortimer, so, whatever happens, I don't think Mortimer is going to be marrying either of the Caliente sisters. It looks like Bella will be coming home!

Would any of you old hands like to tell me about what Bella and Mortimer did in TS1?

There weren't any scripts or preset stories in Sims1, so Bella and Mortimer did a bunch of different things. Their not-very-helpful bios were carried over directly from Sims1 to Sims2.

The original Goths consisted of Mortimer, Bella, and child Cassandra. They lived in a house in Neighborhood 1 that looked cool from the outside but was a bit cramped to play. Cassandra's room was the entire second floor, which consisted mostly of a "tower" and was barely big enough. I almost always started off by figuring out how to expand it - the downstairs bathroom in particular was inconvenient. As in Sims2, they had a graveyard on their property, and if they stayed up past midnight they were likely to get spooked by drifting green ghosts who, when moused over, displayed names like "Cousin Ichabod." They had an al fresco dining setup, which worked because they didn't have to deal with weather, a small porch, and a piano.

Mortimer was in the Science career, Cassandra went to school, and Bella had no job unless the player gave her one. Alexander didn't exist, as you might have figured since he's so much younger than Cassandra.

In the Unleashed expansion, which gave us pets and gardening, the map more than doubled in size with the addition of Old Town, two of whose citizens were Mortimer's parents, Gunther and Cordelia Goth Sr. They had a huge inconvenient fancy house (Sims1 build mode was limited and it was tough making a house that looked good and played decently), again with gravestones, not to mention the houseplants that had been placed with "move objects" that Cordelia couldn't reach to water so they'd die and wreck the environment score, and two Siamese cats. Gunther was high up in the education track. Their bios referenced the relationship and wanting to be near their granddaughter, but Sims1 had no way of connecting the families so it was up to the player to develop that - plus, Old Town was added to every new neighborhood, and the Goths were only in Neighborhood 1, so most iterations of them were necessarily played completely separately.

I've actually only played Strangetown and custom towns that I just made custom sims in. In Strangetown I do play the pre-mades though, love them! I also added the Travellers to Strangetown. I plan on finally playing Pleasantview. I never was interested in any other town besides Strangetown before, except Riverblossom hills which i've never played either. I like the strange and Riverblossom hills has the plantsims.

I had thought that Pleasantview sounded "normal" and "boring" but never read anything about it. I've read all about Pleasantview and those that live there now, and the oldies and burbs and it sounds anything BUT boring!

I haven't started playing just yet but I plan on rereading about them, figuring out what I want to do with the storyline, play the pre-mades according to what I choose and put in the burbs and oldies and just go from there.I do play on a rotation but first I go through them all to get out the scripted events, save them all, then start from there. Of course this is just how I play, it's up to each simmer to play their way, there is no right or wrong as has been said.

I can't wait to get started! :D

Bella dying by fire in Sims 1 is how I learned that Sims could die. In my very, very new to Sims in general days I had Sims 1 and didn't know about mods. I was playing the Sims 1 Goth family and left the game without pausing. When I came back somehow a fire had started in the kitchen and Bella was on fire. I quit when I saw the grim reaper and never played Sims 1 again. This is related because I'm very careful with Sims in general now, and the Sims 2 Goth house in particular about not wanting history to repeat itself.

It might be blasphemous, but I've never actually played any of the Maxis premade neighborhoods, only used those hoods for testing new hacks, careers, SimPE experimentation, etc. Also I had a bad habit of clearing them out of the good houses, moving the houses and businesses into the bin then into my own hoods, before I learned how to package lots. I particularly liked all the Veronaville houses. So most of the Maxis premades are homeless, have missing, dead or mutated family members, etc. Bit of a shame really.

Is there a way to restore them to their factory condition? Might be fun to poke in there and see what the fuss is about.

Reading about Bella Goth I read it's possible to get her back, the pleasantview Bella, by just using boolprop then the tombstone of L&D to get her back, is that true? How does that work...do I summon her? Resurrect her? and it won't cause corruption?