Simtury 21

Vima - If you are shopping for houses, there are few of a larger variety here using Maxis wallpaper, so you don't have to go out and hunt for new ones. The site is simple, but slow loading thanks Geocities.

The houses are divided into catagories by the number of rooms. Some of the catagories only have one house, so I found it a little annoying to click and just see one sample...well, not exactly see. It would be nice if there were some thumbnails of the exterior of the house or something. I'd like to see more images and not ones with such poor quality. This is actually really simple to do, because the game will generate pictures if you just check the button to save your webpages in the game. Then you can grab several pictures of the houses from:

C:\Program Files\Maxis\The Sims\UserData2\Web Pages\FamilyName_Address\FamilyGFX\

just look for house-exterior.jpg, house-floor1.jpg, house-floor2.jpg, house-thumb.jpg (which would be great for your thumbnail. Now granted, they are green, but maybe with a little border around them...

The site is rather small, and I don't feel the need to expand much more on this review. If you don't like building houses, but like to decorate, this place might come in handy.

Two martinis...

Dane and I aren't ready to start shopping for a house together. Skyler keeps trying to put her claws on him and well, I haven't seen him exactly fighting it.

Sister Cecilia C. Robertsim
Pastor of the Church of Simmintology - Simtury 21, cute name. I like the setup very simple, nice wood planking and burned in title. Nice small site for my first night back to the lounge. I have been gone, as my dear Pat has been ill, and all you women out there will agree that there is nothing worse to have about the house than a sick man.... Oh Laws!! Lord Help Me!!! At last he is well and back to terrorizing the evil doers in this fine community. Praise be!!!

Well to work for me. Simtury 21. Ok there is some text that says "read this so you don't get lost." How hard can it be everything seems very self-explanatory!

"1 room" now what is in that section? Oh a house but it only has one room, kind of like a studio apartment setup.

"2 rooms" is next, so I wonder what I will see here? Oh a house with 2 rooms in it.

OH! I get it! Everything is set up split into how many rooms there are in each house. I am so sorry, I have been caring for a sick man all week, I am not thinking as clearly as I should. Plus that will teach me to not read things when it says so. I have been humbled...Thanks be to the Lord! So it is a small site and the houses are unremarkable, but they do have small and medium size houses of simple design which I find refreshing. If I were the type that downloaded houses I might find things I like here.

So I am giving a medium rating, three communion cups. Here is to this group of young people, keep up the good work and have fun...remember no bubble machines children, there is one study that says that use of those minions of Satan can actually can stunt your growth.

Well I wonder if Skyler has missed me? I think she probably has, I imagine. Poor thing.. It is on nights just such as this that I wish that my dear Sister soldier the Church Lady could be here to give me some of her sage advice...Oh but she is an inspiration!

Storel - The first thing I saw at Simtury 21 was this notice: "Hey, I added a guestbook. Listen I'm to (sic) busy to make houses but I can manage the site so I need people to send houses. Thanks." The irony in this didn't become apparent until I realized that this site doesn't do anything but houses...

Rather than confront the thorny ethical issues of including third-party furniture or walls for download with the houses, Simtury 21 (wisely, in my opinion) supplies their houses unfurnished and uses only Maxis walls. This gives you maximum flexibility in furnishing and decorating the houses, while avoiding all the possible "missing objects" and "missing textures" errors when you import the houses into your game.

Interestingly, the houses are divided by how many rooms they have: one room, two rooms, on up to eight rooms, and then everything larger than that is in the "Mansions" section. I think this is more useful than the usual method of dividing them up by which lot they go on, but your preferences may differ from mine. I couldn't understand why the houses all seemed to have more rooms than their category implied until I realized that bathrooms were apparently not being counted as rooms, which seems a bit arbitrary to me. An explanation of that somewhere on the site would help. Even without counting the bathroom, though, the "two-room" house looks like four rooms to me, so I don't know how to explain that one.

The house creators here seem to prefer larger houses; there is only one house per section until you get up to the six-room houses, and then there are 4 six-rooms, 5 seven-rooms, 1 eight-room, and 5 mansions. I especially like the design of house 4 of the six-room houses. House 5 of the seven-rooms is nice, too. Too many of the houses have no exterior views, though; I really can't decide if I like a house if I can't see a full exterior view with the roof on. In particular, house 1 of the Mansions section looks as if it'll have an inner courtyard with no roof, which is a tricky bit of design, but since there is no view with the roof on I can't tell for sure. You'd think they'd want to show off their virtuosity.

Several of the pages don't have working links to the other pages. On the two-room page, the links for "1 Room" and "4 Rooms" don't work; on the three-room page, the "2 Rooms" and "4 Rooms" links don't work; on the four-room page, the link for "2 Rooms" doesn't work, and so on. Since most of the pages only have one house on them, this probably reflects a failure to update all the pages when a house was added to a particular page. Whatever the reason, though, it's pretty careless work by the webmaster.

At first glance, it seems the four-room house doesn't have an interior view of the first floor. On reloading the page, I realized there were actually three pictures on the page, not two, but one of them (the first-floor interior view) is completely covered up by another (the exterior view). This happens in both Internet Explorer and Netscape, so it's not a browser-specific problem. Again, this reflects carelessness on the webmaster's part. Oh, and speaking of carelessness, Mansion 2 appears to be the same exact house as Mansion 3, right down to the file sizes. What's up with that?

Besides the houses, there is a Walls page. Unfortunately, the whole page consists of two links, one to "Download Pack 1" and one to "Download Pack 2". Um, gee, could we see what the walls in these packs look like before we download them? I'm sorry, but I won't download anything sight unseen.

The youthful crew of Simtury 21 (aged 13 to 15) have produced a decent site with some attractive houses. (It plays well with Netscape, too.) If they clean up the technical problems and add exterior views for all the houses and pictures of the available walls, this could be quite a nice little site. At the moment, though, I can't give it more than two martinis with an extra lime.

Skyler - Before I start my review, I'd like to say I read about the "crew" running this site, and as it turns out they're all between the ages of 13 to 15, hey at least they know how to run a site ;)

This site is rather small, the background is wood... I still haven't figured out if I like it or not :/ They have a cute section "READ THIS SO YOU DON'T GET LOST!" I think it's cute, however I do suppose it;s helpful to people that have never installed a house before.

I'm not happy at all with the walls section. There are two packs of walls to download with 15 wall per pack. However there are NO pictures of these walls, nothing, not even a description, I don't touch downloads like that. You might consider getting some pics up on that page. It's a shame to work hard(?) on walls then possibly no one wants to download them, cause they can't see them.

On to the houses... I personally like smaller, single story homes. It makes it easier to play the game if you don't cheat and are working your little Sims butts off :)

They have their houses divided by number of rooms, not lot number. I finally noticed if you scroll to the bottom of each page you will see which lot each house was intended for. Houses with 1, 2, 3, and 5 rooms only have one home available for each. There wasn't anything for 4. It seem this crew likes larger homes, but not atrocious. Even the "mansions" don't look HUGE, however house 2 and 3 appear to be identical.

So with all this said, I'll give the crew three Shirley Temples, since they're all under age. I wouldn't want to be accused of contributing to the delinquency of a minor ya know... However a grown man is a different story Grrr ;)

Squeegee - It's constantly a satisfaction to sit back on a sizzling afternoon and not only worry about when the rolling blackouts will appear. But also to get in some quality time reviewing a new Sim site. This is one of the first reviews of a site that features only Sim properties and I am honestly not interested in sites like these. I don't know what my phobia is. But I will just not download any house from any 3rd party website or even from the Sims Exchange. It all started with the "White House" and that Maxis download crashing countless computers. :(

But I will give "Simtury 21" an sincere review. And I have to say that the wood background is just a little too "thick". There is just too much images with the wood look that take away from the text of the site. The webmaster might want to contemplate a more light textured color with maybe a wood frame around the buttons and such. The way the site looks now, it reminds of a cigar shop.

Oh, I stand corrected. There also appears to be a selective amount of walls featured here as well. I just wasn't aware of that button on the left side. Ouch, there are two ZIP files with 15 walls. But the bad part is that there are no screen shots of those walls. So I think I will pass on them.

The navigation was not as hard as I had thought. I pretty much just made sure that the link my mouse went to ended with a ".html" and then I knew I was fine. I can understand if others might become confused because of the fact that once you click on a certain link to a set amount of rooms, then you come to another page that looks exactly the same as the first. EXCEPT, you a small blue link towards the left. There the sure can click again and browse images of the house plans.

If the user is able to not be turned off by the extreme wood feel and the way the navigation is. I would think that they would find some damned impressive houses that are offered. The person just has to use some patience and they will be rewarded. I have also considered the age of the players who offer the house downloads and I am awed. People will get a kick at the "8 Rooms" and "Mansions" areas. Very nice offerings indeed.

I submit a review of two martini glasses.