Strangerville – a Sims 4 Let’s Play

Brad Zimmer and his twin daughters, Maddison and Mathilda, have just arrived in Strangerville as part of Brad’s newest military posting. Follow their adventures in this strangest of towns.

As I flagged a couple of months ago, I’ve been busy experimenting with the whole “YouTube content creator” thing, by playing and uploading Sims 4 “let’s play” videos. I’ve finished recording one of those story arcs; it’s a short one (only eight videos long), and I thought it was a good one to recommend to anyone who’s curious about that sort of content and what I do specifically — which is basically create stories and narrate them with an Australian accent. (Hawt?)

This year, the Sims 4 team released a downloadable game pack called Strangerville. If you imagine a combination of The X-Files and a zombie movie (but where the zombies don’t eat you, because of the game’s rating), that pretty much sums it up! The entire video playlist can be found here if you’re interested — the last part comes out in two days, so in theory you could binge watch the entire thing before then.

If you like. 😉

If you watch it, I’d love to hear what you think — you can leave comments here or on any of the videos! (I’m still a baby YouTuber, so please be gentle!)

Where I’ve Been: A Sneaky Side Project

I know I’ve been quiet (Instagram posts notwithstanding) for the last month. I accidentally got caught up in a new side project that isn’t related to my writing — a project that was foreshadowed by my December blog post about The Sims 4.

I started a YouTube gaming channel. (Wut?)

I’ve been pondering investigating this for a while; my son is nine and an avid watcher of “let’s play” gaming videos on YouTube, so much so that he wants to have one himself, one day. I kept telling him that I didn’t know how it worked. (If you watch my channel, it’ll become pretty clear I still don’t! 😉 )  Simultaneously, over the Christmas break I got drawn into watching some Sims 4 let’s plays … and suddenly, in January, it seemed like a good idea to investigate starting one for myself.

My boy finds Sims 4 boring, honestly, but he’s very excited that I’m a YouTuber. He wants me to tell everyone I know so that lots of people follow me and I become super famous. #goals Of course, I’ve told maybe two or three other people, because I’m a middle aged woman and I suspected people might think I’d gone a bit senile!

What made me decide to write this post in the end was the fact that I had the exact same reaction when I was writing Isla’s Inheritance, my first novel. I was embarrassed. I didn’t tell anyone I was doing it till it was done. And I get the same enjoyment from writing as I do from making these videos — The Sims 4 lets you create characters and tell all sorts of stories with them. It’s loads of fun, and I’m going to own it.

…

So, uh, I guess I should post the name of the channel.

…

It’s AussieCassPlays.

BE GENTLE WITH ME, GUYS. The first few videos I posted weren’t great — I had a few problems with the game sound. But the two children I know who watch a lot of this content assure me that my videos are better than average for a starting YouTuber — at least I’m not breathing all over my microphone, apparently! (Phew.)

If you don’t like The Sims 4, my videos won’t be for you … but if you want to have a quick look and make fun of my accent, that’s totally fine too!

I’m still writing. I don’t ever see that changing. And I don’t imagine this blog is going to turn into a Sims 4 blog — I’ll still post reviews and other writing-related news.

But I will do this too.