Strangetown Central

The Mummy Sarcophagus is an object that is introduced in the main story line, during Ava Cadavra's stay at the penthouse. What makes it frustrating is that you are forced by the game to place it in a room for the story to progress, but even after that part of the story is over with, the object still can't be sold, so you either lose one object slot in one of the rooms of the hotel, or in your inventory. At least I thought that until I got a peculiar call yesterday.

Giuseppi Mezzoalto, who was renting the room where I'd put the Sarcophagus, called me to report a theft, of, you guessed it, the Sarcophagus. Now, you should know that I've been playing the Sims 2 DS since it first came out, and putting the sarcophagus in guest hotel rooms, and it had never gotten stolen before until yesterday, so I'd say your odds of stolen Egyptian relics are pretty low...

This mission is one of the random missions any hotel guest can give you, they'll call or text you saying that you have a mouse problem and that you need to clean the hotel.

The most commonly found answers to how online are "call the maid" and "just suck them up with the vacuum"

In reality the answer is a little more complicated than that. If you call the maid you'll soft lock yourself out of finishing the mission, whatever you do NEVER call the maid for this mission. Instead what you need to do is pull out your trusty vacuum cleaner.

Vacuum up the dust piles as normal and you will see mice on the touch screen. It is imperative that you manually pick them out. I recorded a video of it, though the quality is laughably bad, sorry about that. I hope it's enough to show the steps.

The Grim Reaper is a character that's present in literally every Sims game I can think of, and is usually a skeletal entity dressed of a black coat, but in the Sims 2 DS, the Grim Reaper has a much more unique style. He wears a hat similar to what you'd expect a Cowboy to wear, and pretty normal looking clothes. He also looks like a ghost more than a skeleton.

As you can see in this gif, the Grim Reaper can be "summoned" after your Sanity bar empties out. This is achieved specifically by staying in the freezer too long, or not answering one of your needs in time. If you let it deplete in the desert, you will be abducted by aliens.

Another interesting fact about the Grim Reaper is that his concept art can be unlocked in game by discovering Giuseppi Mezzoalto's secret. How, you may ask? Just socialize with the guy, calm him down when he's angry, cheer him up when he's sad, give him gifts if you want, just interact with him, and eventually, he'll tell you his secret! Concept Art is found under Settings when you launch the game.

The Grim Reaper is one of those characters you can't really interact with, outside from the cutscene when your Sanity is low, there's really no way to see him.

To do that, you have to pick up the Vacuum Cleaner off of the ground, it's pretty hard to miss really, and go in your inventory.

To use an object in your inventory, click on it with your Stylus, and it will be highlighted in green like so, it should also display a description for the object you selected. What you need to do next is press the hand icon, every time you can use an object in your environment, the hand icon will be green to show it.

Using the Vacuum will bring up this screen. In the Vacuum mini-game, you have to leave the grey mush out and collect the strange objects, click them with your stylus and drag them to the hole at the bottom of the touch screen. An image of the object your collected as well as its name will show up, and depending on the object, you might even earn some Simoleons.

Important note: with the "mice in your hotel" mission, you HAVE to manually pick out mice like I just mentioned, otherwise the mission will NOT be successful! You only need to do it for a few dust piles, just be patient, the monetary reward is worth the trouble.

So you accidentally touched some dust, and now your screen is all dirty, what do you do?

Well, like the little mouth at the bottom of the screen implies, just blow in your microphone! Blow the dust away and voila! Your screen is clear again.

When you open your game after a few days, the time still passed in the game. Depending on how long you were gone for, you might start up to a very dirty hotel with no electricity. I personally haven't played for 19 days and here's the state of my hotel:

Usually, your just deal with the dust piles and the Nuclear Furnace being empty, but sometimes you'll also have bills to pay.

The price to pay varies based on how many rooms you built and the kind of furnishing you have in the guest rooms.

The Concierge calls you, it's a call that you can't ignore, it opens by itself, and tells you what happened in your hotel while you were gone. If you had clients, they'll have left and paid according to their mood.

Sometimes the Concierge also tells you a random silly thing such as "I played a card game with <character here>" or "<character here> was going crazy the past few days" or "your mother called", the usual random silliness the game has to offer really.

Your paintings are assigned a random rating by the game, it can range from Garbage (lowest) to Magnum Opus (best), and it will determine roughly how much sims will pay to buy your painting. Here's where the randomness becomes frustrating: you can get Magnum Opus from a blank canvas, and you can get Garbage from a painting you spent an ungodly amount of time making, which can feel unfair.

If your goal is to make money with your paintings, I advise against putting effort in them, most times you'll end up with a disappointing rating. You should also know that depending on the mood of the sim who buys your painting, you can get pretty harsh comments on your art such as "Your painting represents my worse nightmare" and "I bought it so nobody else would have to look at it ever again". To make as much money as possible from your paintings I suggest you leave them blank, and keep scrapping and remaking them until it's rated "Magnum Opus".

Here are a few things that impact the price of your painting:

-Its rating

-Your Business skill

-Your Creativity skill

-Your aspiration (I advise you to get the Fortune aspiration)

Completely randomly, a sim can call you telling you to go look for a treasure chest in the desert, it can be anybody, at any time. You have 6 hours from that point on to find a treasure chest, sounds easy right? Wrong. There's actually a reason why you have 6 hours to find it, it is one of the most difficult objects to find with your Metal Detector.

What makes this quest so hard is that the placement of the treasure chest in the entire desert is entirely random, and it's a rather small object, it's very easy to walk past it. (I know, I missed it 5 times)

Here are the myths I've seen that seemed funniest to me:

-if you change your date to 12/2/2059 and your time to midnight, you'll find it

Here's why it isn't true: like all the random goals, you have a limited amount of time to finish it, meaning that the notification that the people who said this "solution" saw is the failed mission notification, and honestly, failing this mission is a shame, the treasure chest is worth 6k simoleons!

-you can find the treasure chest without the metal detector in the Oasis

Uhm, nope the treasure chest requires the metal detector, there is no 3d model in the game files for the treasure chest, so it can't actually spawn.

-the treasure chest contains the key to the farm! 100% legit I swear!!

Myth number one: "You can get married in this game????" No, you can't, you never could, you never will. You can romance sims of the opposite gender if they feel romantic, but that's the only thing that approaches marriage that you can do. Sorry guys. You can write fanfictions though!

Myth number two:

"Mouse infestations totally get fixed when you call the maid~" NO. If a client asks you to fix a rodent infestation. N.E.V.E.R. call the maid, your task will never show up as finished. Instead, to actually succeed in finishing this goal, you need to vaccum dust piles yourself and pick out the mice one by one. In my personal experience, you will only have to do this for a few rooms before getting the reward, just be patient, it's worth the simoleons.

Myth number three:

"There are more than two unlockable outfits."

Nope! There aren't. For ladies, the unlockable outfits are Mamma Hogg's and Ava Cadavra's, and for gents, they're Tank Grunt's and Jebediah S. Jerky's. I'm not quite sure yet how to unlock them. I heard that you're supposed to be best friends with the characters to unlock them, but I unlocked Jeb's without being best friend with him, so I'll have to do further research on that.

Myth number four:

"The quality of your painting has to do with how much time you spend making it and how much you erase stuff!"

Nope, sorry, the rating for your paintings are entirely random, though it has been speculated but not proven that the higher your Creative skill the higher chances you have of getting Masterpieces and Magnum Opus's. In my personal experience though, all that skill does is make your paintings worth more valuable monetarily.