Late Night will be the next expansion for The Sims 3, and while this new addition adds tons of minor features, there are a handful of major ones that we'll focus on in this update: the ability to become a vampire, the ability to form a hip rock-and-roll combo, and the ability to become a celebrity. We did our best to achieve all three of these lofty new goals, and we have to tell you…it was really hard, you guys. It's almost like you're not meant to become a brilliantly skilled musician who has a popular music group and is also a high-profile celebrity who rubs elbows with showbiz elite and is also a powerful vampire with a close-knit network of bloodsucking buddies in just five minutes flat. Becoming America's next top bloodsucking rock band talent takes time in The Sims 3: Late Night, just like it does in real life. (Wait…what?)
In any case, we'll chronicle the rise of our ambitious young starlet/rock group leader/would-be-vampire. In order to increase our chances of success, we picked the lucky, artistic, and virtuoso traits to increase our chances of having runs of good luck in our endeavors, as well as to improve our skill as a musician (in a purely artistic sense and to gain the ability to play any instrument well). Late Night has three new instruments--the piano, the bass violin, and the drums (to go with the guitar, which has been in the game since the beginning)--and faster than you can enter the "motherlode" cheat code (which still works) to get 50,000 simoleans, we had purchased a keyboard for ourselves. Soon, we had embarked on the laborious and lonely process of grinding away at the piano to become a better musician, all by our lonesome.
Although we'd also given our sim the "excitable" trait (so that she'd find even the simple act of tickling the ivories to be enjoyable enough to fill her "motive" need for fun), it was a lonely job and we had a band to form and a name to make for ourselves--as well as a social interaction motive to fill up. So, we hit the happening new town of Bridgeport in search of some bandmates and a low-ranking celebrity or two who'd be willing to rub off a little star power on us. Fortunately, finding prospective musicians is pretty easy in Late Night. One of the first "socials" (dialogue interactions) you can choose when meeting someone is to ask them to join your band. Within moments, we had a few eager beavers in our band, and we were all set to play a gig…which doesn't happen until you get that happy phone call (and it can be a matter of in-game days before that phone rings, let us tell you).
Fortunately, while cruising for bandmates, we also ran into our fair share of low-ranking and high-ranking celebrities--indicated by the five-star meter that hovers above their heads. Here's a tip: In Late Night, celebrity performers often put on shows in the park and play for tips. While you can choose to join in on a jam session with celebrity musicians, you won't really break the ice until you formally introduce yourself, either by taking the commoner's route of asking for an autograph and just being an adoring fan, or by boldly attempting to impress them with a whole new series of dialogue options, such as name-dropping any celebrities you may have met previously. Once you get over that initial threshold, you can interact with the celebrity as you would a normal friend, and with enough brownnosing and maybe a lucky shoot with one of those pesky photographers, your sims can increase their own star levels until they, too, become headliners and can ignore bouncers at the trendiest nightclubs and go right on in.
