So on to this week's trip. Wherever Wednesday edition 2 takes you to Insilico. The loading screen image is dark and kinda futuristic, so me and my travelling companion for this trip, Lysi, donned appropriate clothing before tp-ing off.
The big overview-type picture shows what sort of place we're dealing with here. It is futuristic, as I said. A stark, black, cityscape.
Upon landing the first thing I noticed was movement behind me. As I turned around for a better look I wished that I hadn't. Mechanical spiders don't make for friendly-faced doormen. We hurried off down a tunnel opposite, hoping the spider would be too busy to want to follow us and devour us. Mechanically.
The first stop on our trip was a diner in an old train carriage. There were no staff so Lysi had to step behind the counter and rustle us up some travelling food. I was tempted by the quiche down the counter from me. Until I saw it was green. And it wasn't a spinach quiche.
Our tummies filled with futuristic food and Pepsi we carried on down the tunnel until we reached a sort of factory pod-filling type room. I am not sure what the pods were for, and what the blue gloop in them was. There were no tourist-information signs.
Insilico has a transit system with wall transporters dotted around the place. In some ways I am against using this sort of thing when exploring a place as it kinda seems like cheating to me, but in other ways it does allow us to skip to the highlights without getting too lost.
One of the first places we headed, were the apartments, mainly because we figured that's where the people on the map might be and it would be good to be somewhere with people, rather than empty, shadowy tunnels and alleyways.It turns out we were right next to the apartments so we didn't tp far. We walked up floor after floor of spiral rampway finding the door to each apartment locked. Ok, so this isn't where all the people on the map are. Camming around, all of the apartments looked empty apart from one. To be honest, I wasn't surprised. I think living here instead of a nice sunny beach would lead to me doing myself some harm. It's not exactly a cheerful sim.
Take this bedroom of the one non-empty apartment as an example. Now, I am all for tying in your decor with the theme of the sim, but would some decent lighting go a miss? Maybe a plant or two, a painting of a mountain landscape, a bookcase, and more of a bed than a dirty old mattress?
The next place we found ourselves, quite accidentally, appeared to be some sort of church that appeared to be a place of worship to the colour blue. You had to join a group to make a donation. Seems a bit cultish to me...
Eventually, after some more wandering, and TP-ing we found ourselves in a skybox high above the skyscrapers. As you would expect with this sim though, it wasn't your usual skybox. Now correct me if I'm wrong, and I don't live in a skybox so I might be, but they don't usually come with cyborg justice pods as a standard fitting, right?
Just upstairs from the pod I got plugged into, on the mezzanine, if you like, was something much more homely - a couple of sofas and a tv. After wearing ourselves out we decided to rest our weary feet. I wish we hadn't. The Japanese advert for 'Fruity Oaty Cakes' will follow me to my dreams...
So overall them, it is sims like this that blow me away. The sheer scale and imagination that goes into something like this. The level of detail and the time needed are phenomenal. Take for example the fire in the pic above, or the moving shadow on the floor of the rotating ceiling fan. The pic doesn't do either of them justice.
It was a dark and brooding place, very Blade Runner. You wouldn't want to come here for a bit of light-hearted sunny frivolity. It is a beautiful place in it's own way but not exactly cheery.
Again the random gods of the loading screens seem to have picked a place for me where there is little to do, but in some ways that doesn't matter at a place like Insilico. You just need to walk around and look.
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