Saturday 13 December 2014

Weekend Wrap-Up: Christmas, Night School Web Series and The Sims 4



Hello my lovelies! As you probably noticed, I haven’t been blogging as frequently the past couple weeks. One little fact has been distracting me: Christmas is less than two weeks away. Yep, I think it’s safe to say, we can all form an orderly line and PANIC! Believe me, I’m in full on Christmas panic mode, and blogging time has evaporated quite drastically!

I envy each one of you that has everything sorted – Send all your wisdom my way, pretty please. We do have the Christmas decorations up, so YAY, progress has been made! But… each year I forget just how LONG it takes to decorate the house. To make it a bit harder, my inner perfectionist comes out. Sigh, it does get a tad frustrating when I end up convincing myself I need to take all the lights off the tree and start again! But it’s worth it; the decorations look pretty good this year, I will admit :)

I’m linking up to The Sunday Post meme hosted by Kimba @ Caffeinated Book Reviewer. It's a chance to share news, recap what has happened on the blog, what is upcoming and anything everything in between.


Night School Web Series


I LOVE The Night School book series – and it’s a little obvious as I talk and blog about it every chance I get! If you haven’t read them, then you’re missing out on so much awesomeness. It’s so amazing to say that The Night School Web series is finally HERE! And I love it!



A new webisode is set to be released every Friday morning for the next two months. There really is only one thing left to say … #TeamCarter! (I really DO love Sylvain, too! But for Allie, Carter gets the thumbs up ;) Read the books, and you’ll know why :D)



The Sims 4


Speaking of Christmas-y distractions, I bought The Sims 4 recently (thank you Black Friday/Cyber Monday sales for making me even poorer!) After the buggy mess that The Sims 3 turned out to be, I was a bit hesitant to get the latest incarnation, but I ended up giving in.

What do I think of it?

It’s … small.

And VERY restrictive.

When I started playing at first, it was all shiny and new and pretty (‘cause it’s a very pretty game, I will give full credit for that, at least!) But, I ran into restrictions with the things I could do quite quickly. And also, things I expected to be there… were not.

1)Toddlers have disappeared. Babies age up straight from the cradle à la The Sims Medieval style. Now, in that game, it makes sense. But in a LIFE SIMULATOR? I don’t think so! (I can’t believe I’m going to say it, but I miss those little suckers.)

2) No family trees. This just boggles my mind that it wasn’t included. I don’t know about you, but I’d like to know if my Sim was about to fall in love with her cousin twice removed! And prevent it from happening!

3) NO BOOK SHOP. <--- Cardinal sin.

4) Actually, community lots in general are SEVERELY lacking. No grocery store, no spa, no stadium, no hospital, no city hall, no restaurants, no diners, no science lab, no military base, no beaches – and these are the ones off the top of my head.

For me, a good game can be rated on re-playability, and how many times I can come back and find something entertaining. I can find that with both The Sims 2 and 3. But I haven't with The Sims 4. Put simply, there is next to no content! I know this is a base game, but there should be some sort of 'hook' to keep me playing and make me want to fork out more money for an expansion pack.

Now, onto the serious question…

Would I recommend buying The Sims 4 for Christmas in its current guise?

I have to say… no. If you can get your hands on The Sims 2, I would highly recommend that. Or even The Sims 3.


Now onto much happier topics: BOOKS!


Books I read this past week



Red at Night by Katie McGarry
Anna Dressed in Blood by Kendare Blake
The Raven Boys by Maggie Stiefvater


Red at Night is a Kindle freebie (and still is, at the time of writing this post) and I LOVED it! I haven’t read anything by the author before, and this novella has convinced me to try some of her other works. Anna Dressed in Blood. One look at the cover and I was convinced it would be terrifying. It wasn’t. I was hoping for a good scare, so that made it even more disappointing.

I finally started The Raven Boys by Maggie Stiefvater! I said I’d read it last month, but I’m only getting around to it now. It took me a little while to settle into the book, but this has been happening to me a lot since I read Heir of Fire. Now that I’ve settled in, I’m really enjoying it! And Ronan! I really hope he’s in the rest of the series. :D

I’m trying to catch up with my Goodreads reading challenge, and it’s sort of happening... Kind of. I have 9 books to read by the end of the year to complete my goal of 120 books. Would reading 5 or 6 novellas be classed as cheating??


Thanks for reading, and have a fab week!



6 comments:

  1. You've got me interested in the Night Book series now, it seems really good. And yay so glad you are reading The Raven Boys, if you like Ronan then you'll LOVE The Dream Thieves! I have Red at Night on my kindle but haven't read it yet, I have read all Katie's other books though and I really, really enjoy them.
    Have a great week!

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    1. I LOVE the Night School series! It's been one of my fav YA series for quite a while now, plus, I love finding an awesome YA series that's set in Europe =) Makes a nice change!

      Now I'm definitely intrigued about The Dream Thieves! I'll be moving that one up my need-to-get list :D

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  2. Oh that sucks about Sims 4. ;( I mean, I haven't played sims in YEARS. But I do miss it. I was quite good (with all the cheat codes, lol) at Sims 2 and I loved building/designing. But now I read, which is probably better for my brain or something?! But I miss just mucking around on a video game. *sigh* I'm super curious about Sims 3 though...maybe oooone day.

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    1. Yeah, I was very disappointed with it :( Like you, I love the house building side, so that keeps drawing me back into the game from time to time. With the Sims 4, it's different to what I was expecting. I'd made up my mind that I wasn't going to buy it, then I saw a couple of YouTube vids on Sims 4 house building.... and yeah. Totally gave in! Hopefully things improve, but I'm not very hopeful. Even with all the bugs, The Sims 3 spoilt me in a way! I LOVED the open world aspect, and going into this game makes it feels so restrictive with constant loading screens in comparison.

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  3. YES RAVEN BOYS.

    Ok I'm going to SIMS 4 RANT. First off, I have a Mac so I CAN'T EVEN PLAY IT, which just pisses me off because I play ALL THE SIMS. And to be honest, I think that for me, Sims 2 was the best. Sims 3 was okay, but I got bored of it after a couple of days. From what I see, I think Sims 4 is great for character customization, but thats it.

    BUT YEAH. HAHA. OK.

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    1. Why the heck they don't have a Mac release closer to the Windows release mystifies me! I think the Mac release is coming soon, though? I think I read about it somewhere recently. I don't own a Mac, so I didn't pay close attention (I kinda skimmed the post!)

      Sims 2 is still the best, but I LOVE the open world in the Sims 3. A while back, (around when the University EP was released) I had to do a complete uninstall of all TS3 packs and the base game (as Origin decided to fuck up when the University patches were released), and really, I couldn't play it without quite a lot of the expansions. Late Night, Generations and Seasons are a MUST! Why they don't have all these in the base game beats the hell out of me! (Oh. Right. Spend more money. I forgot. Silly me! *rolls eyes*) I'm hoping the EP's for TS4 will help... but I'm not holding my breath. And I certainly won't be spending my money on them if they aren't on sale. Sorry but the base game hasn't impressed me enough for fork out even more cash!

      BUT, I do REALLY like the character customizations. Not sure if you can get Origin? They do have a free CAS demo available on it, but not sure if it's Mac compatible. The house building aspect takes a while to get used to, but it's pretty fun. Especially since the Move Objects cheats was released, good grief, it was a NIGHTMARE before that.

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