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Showtime or ITF?
BSIRegina
Posts: 5,110 Member
I feel within reasonable certainty that my game can handle another expansion pack and for months I was thinking ITF would be my choice but I looked into Showtime and I'm feeling really torn now between the two. Granted, it's entirely possible that I may ultimately be able to use both but for now I would prefer to only add one to make sure my poor old computer won't totally buckle under the strain. If you had to choose just one of these expansion packs which one would you choose and why?
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Yet on the other hand, the Plumbots are really cool to have, from Into the Future. Depending on which chips you put in them, they can do a wide rage of things. For example, you have a large garden, they can work in the garden all day. There are also special rugs that will allow you to plant anything, anywhere, including on the roof, and indoors, and this would include the fruit trees. In ITF, there is also a complete line a furniture for everything including babies and toddlers (new crib, high chair to name a couple of examples). Personally I would have a hard time picking between the two, but I did tell you what I really like about both. Oh yes about the Plumbots, again with the trait chips, they can fall in love, and get married (just can't reproduce, unless they make one). Oh yes in ITF, if you don't want to deal with pregnancies, you can send two sims to the hospital to make one, and walk out with a baby. With out mods, you have to send them into the future to do this. If you have the NRaas Mods (I forget which one) you can do this from the same town your sim lives in. I know this, because I see this option on my hospitals in my sims home town.
Well I take this back, now thinking about it I think if I had to choose, it would be Into the Future, because I could go on and on about all the things I really like about this pack.
But to be honest I have ITF but I've not had the best experience with it. I've had sims get stuck in the future world and other issues with its gameplay that have prevented me from enjoying it to its best abilities so I may well be very bias
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I've had ITF longer and like it quite a bit. I use many of the objects in building. Especially the tube elevator with its small footprint to add a floor or a basement. I put the food synthesizer in many of my community lots since it spawns a waiter for restaurant table service. I also use them in dorms, which seems to cut down on fires. Most of my sims get the wind carvers, especially when going to WA destinations. I think those are faster than running at high Advanced Technology levels. I also use plumbots frequently. They can make great controllable butlers. I garden a lot and the soil rugs make basement and greenhouse gardens easy to use.
I also really like the houses that come with Oasis Landing. I've copied several to the bin and have used them in other towns, particularly the houses in the "poor" section of OL. I thought they had some nice layouts and fit well in Moonlight Falls, for example.
If I had to give one up, at this point in time it would be Showtime.
Performance: I understand (through @igazor 's comments) that the career limos from Showtime can be a performance issue. I now use NRaas Traffic and Nona's NoLimo mod (which I think I got from the old simlogical site) to deal with those. Supposedly ITF is a demanding EP (behind Pets and Seasons). I haven't seen much of a performance impact with ITF myself. The only exception was specifically in the utopia version of OL when my sim was collecting insects. There are a lot of insect spawners in utopia; I saw some performance lag when my sims were out collecting. Once I turned off the collection helper and my sims finished collecting insects the performance issues largely stopped.
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Beyond the limo issue that is fixable with mods and some routing problems that tend to affect Starlight Shores when you first begin to play it, I don't think Showtime adds nearly as much overhead to the game as most of the other EPs. You have to have a sense of humor about homeless sims constantly being spawned to perform in parks though, NRaas StoryProgression doesn't do a very good job of preventing those and some players are annoyed by that kind of thing.
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I really like certain objects like the all in one bathrooms so I keep it in my game.
Robots come in very handy for help with garden, housework they are better than butlers or humans, especially if your sim is loner and doesn't really like being around people much.
Only thing I have done with showtime is have genie sim.
I like their cleaning and banishing abilities.:)
I have all the expansions but I don't play seasons much because my computer can't handle it.
While like the content in fast lane and other stuff back that reminds me of fast lane I just leaving it out of my game so I have memory or other things.
ITF is very interesting. I have a lot of self employed sims, and my inventors and crazy professors really enjoy the future, the advanced technology and building plumbots, traits chips and participating in the Bot Arena. Being able to change the future to either a Utopia or what looks like a post apocalyptic wasteland is awesome. And I like very much how the things your sims do in the present will affect their future. You get notifications once you have traveled to the future and returned, when something you do may have changed the future for your sim.
Also mine just won 3 million simoleons by checking lotto numbers at future town hall, and buying a lotto ticket back in the present lol
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I prefer a more realistic game so I'd choose ST. I've actually considered uninstalling ITF because I don't have my sims travel to the future and I've never even tried half the stuff in that EP. I wasn't really interested in the theme to begin with, but for some reason I thought I needed to buy everything for TS3.
Also, back when it came out I actually played a couple where the female was an acrobat and the male was a singer and they reached the top of their careers. I never simported with them and have no interest in doing that, but I actually found the ST careers a lot more fun than I expected to (although I've still not played a magician higher than level 7). I still play that family from time to time, and will sometimes place them in worlds that I want performers in, whether I play them or not. Because as others have mentioned, the negative to that pack is that SP will create sims to perform in your worlds whether you actually want them there or not. But personally I don't find it difficult to ignore that.
So, obviously we're all different in how we like to play. Good luck making your decision!
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If I was just playing my regular games I would have gotten showtime, because I really wanted to flesh out the musician and performer career since its not all that well done with .. LN.
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If you followed my update my wife is a acrobat.Little preview of her show below.GET SHOWTIME ,both videos same career look at all the stuff you can do in one career,and this is still not all the tricks.Both different stuff.
Plus look in the What Happened thread I think 2recent updates are simmers playing Showtime.It is making a comeback.
First off,I love the plumbots.
Mine help around the house a lot. They cook delicious meals, and babysit the kids. Gives my sims a break.
Descendants are great too but the novelty soon wears off.
I also love the lottery - if I want to make money without cheating I just travel back in time, check the lottery records and buy a ticket.
I often use the option to genetically engineer a baby at the hospital. Two sims of any gender can go in and BAM! you get an instant baby.
Whenever I used to decide between an expansion I'd just go with my gut. Happy Simming!
I absolutely enjoyed that first video and loved the song! Don't know who it is but it's lovely!
*goes to check out the second video*
ETA: I know that second song by a different singer. Nice.
Robot butlers/nanny/gardener cant say how awesome they are.
I just realized also, that the only showtime lot I really use in most of my towns wouldn't work without ITF among other things: http://www.thesims3.com/assetDetail.html?assetId=8084196
Without that lot theres a lot of content I wouldn't really use, but its pretty special
Hello Tad,
I have been away for quite some time and know very little about this 1.69 patch. My game auto updated because it was set up to do so? And I had not played the game in a while. Now I am back to it, seems to be running fine. I've experience no issues, but what should I be concerned with?
OP, sorry to veer your thread of track. To answer your questions, I'd go for ITF. I just love that EP. For me it provides and escape from the daily, daily of m sims lives, and we get to go and do fun things. ST was/is fun too. I'd watch for sales, look on Amazon, and buy them both! Why not, splurge a little.
I have 1.69 and no issues too.
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I forgot about the observatory :0 I need to go get it from the future for my world in the making ,seems like something that would fit well in the future district.
The buildings and houses that come with into the future are definitely amazing !
@SimKeats that is a beautiful lot! It's too bad it requires so many things I don't have.
@Pary am I to understand, then, that Showtime adds the social feature and it wasn't put in the Showtime update? I just assumed that it was in that update. Like you, I don't care about social features. When I want to talk with like-minded people about a game I go to a forum.
@momboqueen I'm a huge fan of Rflong's Bellatrix and I can imagine myself doing the same thing there. Lunar Lakes is a very pretty world but in my opinion Bellatrix takes everything Lunar Lakes has and makes it better.
@JoBass24us considering I've inadvertently done the same thing a few times in my life I'm in no position to complain.
@TadOlson I know you have worked tirelessly to get your game to perform as smoothly as you possibly can and from what I read of your posts you've done a bang-up job of things. It makes me wonder what your computer specs are. I keep thinking my computer is fairly low-end but realistically when I look at new computers many of them don't have any better specs than mine does (and for considerably more money than I spent on this one) with the upgrades I've made to it over the years. I have a 3.4 GHz quad-core processor and 8 GB of RAM. Of course we know the game can't use more than 3.6 GB of RAM and that any halfway decent video card has to be throttled to a very low FPS so all-in-all sometimes a better computer does more harm than good for this game. So, what are your specs?