23 June 2005

Sims have good taste in music!

One of the many things I love about The Sims 2 is the INCREDIBLE attention to detail in the game.

After playing the game SEVERAL nights a week ever since it came out (I know, I know), I only just noticed something this evening: if you zoom in on the CD rack under the little stereos some of the Sims own, you can identify the CD covers- and they're all CD's I have right here in my house! :D




This is the best resolution I could get out of the game, blown up to double size, so you'll have to squint a bit. Click the image above for the larger size image. (inside the game, I have the advantage of being able to zoom in and out, and rotate around in all three dimensions, so I was able to check them out thoroughly.) What we have here are four CDs repeated in nine slots in the CD rack. Starting in the top left slot, they are (mockups of):

Belle and Sebastian, Tigermilk


Aphex Twin, Come To Daddy EP


Beck, Midnite Vultures


...and finally, Radiohead, The Bends


The CDs repeat once as you go left-to-right thru the rows, and then the last one (bottom right) is Beck again, I suspect to keep from having a tic-tac-toe style diagonal row of Tigermilks.

I realize this may be the geekiest post I've ever done. ;) But I have to admit, it made my night. Heh heh!!!

5 Comments:

Blogger Rev. Syung Myung Me said...

That is pretty awesome, although I'm not 100% certain the "Come to Daddy" one is actually "Come to Daddy" -- the colors don't seem to quite match up. But, then again, I don't have another suggestion of what it might be (my only other guess would be "3...6...9...Seconds of Light", but a) looks way, way too dark for that and b) _Two_ B&S records?). But still, that is really really awesome. I've been sort of excited for Sims 2. I think it's _finally_ coming out for Mac, too, so, hooray!

It's too bad they didn't put in a full 9 different CDs, but then perhaps people wouldn't find it nearly so easily, and think they were just Generic Covers, instead of covers to awesome records. (Tigermilk is my favorite B&S after Dear Catastrophe Waitress; Midnite Vultures is easily my favorite Beck.)

3:32 AM, June 23, 2005  
Blogger Lee H. said...

The Come To Daddy one kind of got blocked by pieces of the rack in this pic, but in the game when you rotate it around and get a good look at it, I think it's most definitely meant to be that CD. :)

Midnite Vultures is really the only Beck CD I like at all!

8:49 AM, June 23, 2005  
Blogger Rev. Syung Myung Me said...

Ah, OK, I could see that, then.

Hm, for me, I wouldn't say at all. Although I'm sorta "eh" on him. Guero was OK, but, like Odelay, had a little bit of "OK, I get this point, you can do something with a different sound now", though Odelay is way worse in that respect. Odelay is like "Hey, you like this song? Great, because it's going on for an hour!" But I think both Guero and Odelay have the same producer (Dust Bros.), so that might have something to do with it. (Though I've only heard a bit of their other stuff, and it seems OK; I really dig, say, their remix of "Snail Shell" by TMBG.)

Mutations is about the only other Beck album I listen to frequently. That one is really, really good. I've got Mellow Gold too, which is sorta... OK. It's basically a collection of songs that tends to wear out its welcome about 3/4 of the way through, but it's Oh-Kaaay.

And, um, I thought Sea Change was ass. Although that might be that prior to getting it, I'd been listening to eels' Electroshock Blues a whole bunch, so Sea Change didn't really set too well, since it was basically:

BECK: Broke up with a girl; wrote an album of all Sad/Mopey/This World Sucks And I Want To Die type tracks.

E: Had his entire family die, along with a few friends, and some other stuff happen to; wrote an album that's got a lot of depressing stuff, but is a song cycle that basically is about working through the grief and ends with a song that's all "You know, this sucked, but, you know, dammit, I'm going to live; I don't necessarily have to forget these people, but I can move on and live my own life. It's healthy, and it's what they'd want me to do."

Considering that both Beck and E have similar voices (though I like E's better), it seems a little easier to compare the two records. But... yeah. I might have been a little kinder to the Beck record had I not just been listening to that one so much, giving me a "Man, it totally sucks to break up with someone, but, um, pfft, baby." type reaction when comparing.

12:30 PM, June 23, 2005  
Blogger CatsFive said...

I like ALL Beck. His latest really kicks my ass. Sea Change is considered his weakest, but I think only because it's the least "tricky" or "clever" of his LP's.

I don't really see the comparison between B & E... one's sort of a white funk-soul beat poet and the other's a really talented one-man band with really different lyric structure (although both are clever)...

4:10 PM, June 23, 2005  
Blogger Rev. Syung Myung Me said...

I think the main Beck/E comparison comes in just the tone of their voices, they're both low and sorta gravelly. But yeah, musically, they're both completely different. (And I think one of the things that sort of jumpstarted me to thinking of Sea Change Versus Electroshock Blues was that I'd also been reading a bunch of reviews of Eels stuff that'd kept talking about his voice in terms of Beck's. So, I think that sort of planted the seed, or something.)

But yeah -- I still don't like Sea Change as an album, but it's got some neat songs, like "Lost Cause" really is a good one. (Though I'm kind of the same way with Odelay; I don't mind hearing "New Pollution" or "Where It's At" occasionally, but I pretty much never care to listen to the full record again.)

7:39 PM, June 23, 2005  

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