Welcome!

Welcome to my humble Completion Challenge blog. This will be a chronicle (of sorts anyway) of my attempt at the Completion Challenge for The Sims 3 that was created by Robin in the Sims 3 Challenges Yahoo! group. It is a fairly freeform challenge that allows you to play however you like really, be it with a single family that you follow through the generations, with multiple families in a neighborhood, and even with different families across various neighborhoods. The main idea is that in the course of your play, you're attempting to do everything that can be done in the game, including having every trait in your game on a playable sim at some point, getting a sim to the top of every career, completing every lifetime wish (LTW) in the game, etc. Besides checking off items on the very extensive list, the other important rule is that you can only count items once the sim that's done them completes their LTW, and you must at least try to fulfill the LTW of every sim that you make playable. If a sim dies or moves out before their LTW is completed, nothing they did for the challenge will count.

I've already been playing this for awhile, and have only now decided that, yes, I do want to try to blog it, if only for my own benefit in remembering all the sims that have been a part of it and everything that they did and that happened to them in their lives. So far I've been playing legacy-style (though not by any legacy rules) in Sunset Valley with only the base game installed. While I do own all of the expansions, since I've never really played most of them (many of them not at all), I decided I would start over from the beginning with only the base game, then expansions would be added in order of release only after a certain percentage of the last one added had been completed. For now I'm thinking at around 50% completion, though I haven't made any firm decisions as yet, and I might adjust things as I go depending on what the latest expansion I'm working on is and how much it added. And I might end up getting too impatient to take it slow like this and just go ahead and install everything and figure things out from there. The main thing I'm concerned with is allowing myself ample time to really experience what each expansion has added to the game before I go adding in more so that I don't end up overwhelmed with untried content and with things that never get tried, or at least that don't get tried for a very long time even though they've been in the game since the beginning or near to it. Yes, I'm probably totally crazy for doing this, or at least one of my good friends is always telling me I'm nuts, but oh well. Normal is boring ;)

I'll be honest up front here and state that this may or may not be a story type blog, I'm really not sure yet. Some posts, especially my early ones as I play catch up with trying to get up to date with my playing, will be rather thin on pictures, because really? I'm not much of a screenshot taker. I've gotten better about taking shots of important things like births, deaths, birthdays, etc. in my game, but I don't always remember to do those, or don't always get a good shot. I'll attempt to do better now that I'm blogging it, but no promises. Stopping constantly to fiddle with getting a good shot of something interrupts the flow of playing too much for me and I want to play and have fun, not be constantly worried with watching for photo ops or whatever. Also, what pictures there are will probably be largely unedited, because I simply can't be bothered to do a lot of editing on them. I've learned from past experience that it quickly takes the fun out of it for me and makes me not want to play if I end up having to spend an entire evening editing screenshots then another entire evening writing the blog post, so...yeah. I'm going for simple here this time. Raw screens and hopefully text that's done as I play, or shortly thereafter, without necessarily much attempt at storytelling.

Ok, now that I've talked anyone who's still reading to death, if you're still around and willing to follow along with this experiment in simpler blogging, then stick around and we'll see where this goes together. Comments are always welcome, as are followers :)