For some reason I find it easy to get a lot of aspiration points for my sims but I usually never buy them elixir. I usually have them go on dates with their spouses and they will get the want to whohoo in the car and make out in car and stuff like that and since their relationship is already high enough with the spouse they can just do it and get that date bonus. If you get the multi painting you can add days to one sim's life.

Have you tried using the copying tool when buying things? Does it let you make multiple copies of the Elixir of Life?

I can’t remember whether it was Nightlife or Open For business that added personal inventories, but has anyone gone for a random look through sims inventories lately?

I’ve had OFB since it first came out, but I‘ve barely scraped the surface I think! I haven’t even played with the elevators and stuff.

The first business I started was a car one, I love the platforms you use for selling the cars (side note: In buy mode you can only place Maxis cars/recolours on the platforms, I was annoyed that I couldn’t sell any of the cool custom car meshes I’d downloaded – until I discovered that you can. You have to be their in business mode, and use the wholesale tool to be able to select your custom cars).

The neat part is when a sim comes in to browse the cars, the car platform starts slowly rotating and the lights shine up like floor spotlights. It was definitely a highlight for me.

I learned pretty quickly what you should and shouldn’t have on your business lot. When I first started it, I had a staffroom out the back with a couch, TV and kitchen with microwave etc. Naturally I had a toilet too, and a shower.

I also had a watercooler that had been cloned of an espresso machine, and I couldn’t keep my sims away from it! The sim I was controlling, and my employees. So I had to remove that from the lot.
Then of course there’s locking the doors. OFB comes with a neat feature of being able to click on any door and setting it to your sim only, your sim plus family only, employees only etc etc. So to stop my customers coming out the back to watch TV and eat snacks, I had to lock that door pretty fast!

I ended up having to take the TV away too, because all the staff (including mine, the business owner) would just sit out the back and watch it, nevermind that there were angry customers out the front.

Also, I didn’t realise you had to assign tasks to your employees to do stuff, and I kept wondering why customers who had decided to buy cars were standing at the register all day screaming bloody murder and getting more and more peeved.
It was because I hadn’t assigned anyone the task of handling the cash register, so none of them would do it!
So you do learn as you go, there’s still lots of stuff I haven’t discovered or figured out yet.

Another cool aspect is staff uniforms – you click one of your employees and find the ‘assign uniform’ (something to that effect anyway) and it opens up a little mini version of Bodyshop where you can select whatever you want them to wear when they are at work – so you can download or make your own uniforms if you like, and have them wear them. You can also select their hairstyle, so you can pretty much make your employees look very similar by getting them to wear the same thing, and same hairstyle.

My first employee became pretty good at selling cars very fast, so I promoted her to manager, which meant my sim didn’t have to be there everyday, the woman I made manager would just run the business for me! As long as you ring in from home, its all ok.
Once you make someone a manager, while you are there with your sim you can also select the manager sim and control them as well, they can nearly do everything your own sim can.

So I now have 3 employees including the manager, all who were townies that wandered in from the street. One of them was some ugly guy, so I had another of my sims in the neighbourhood start up a salon business. Luckily for me, he wandered in so I had my sim give him a makeover.
He looked much better after that!
Then he started picking a fight with one of the other customers (I don’t’ know what about) and they had a huge fist fight (the other one was a woman) so in the end I threw them all out.

To my dismay though, he still had the yuck hair etc when he showed up for work at the car business, but that’s when I realised that he would stay like that at work because his work uniform had been assigned that way. So I redid his uniform, and selected the new look he’d received at the salon.

I’ve also had kids in my neighbourhood set up their little lemonade stands, which is very cute. The adults can run them too. They haven’t proven to be hugely profitable, but fun anyway.

I haven’t had a go at the craft stations yet, making toys/robots/flowers etc.
I recently downloaded a modified craft station that had fabric, and your sim can make clothing to sell, so I can’t wait to try that.

I also haven’t tried any selling of baked goods etc, but I think running a bakery would be cool.

Apparently sims love to buy hot tubs, so if you need any ideas for businesses that would do well – try opening one that sells hot tubs! There are few things like that in the game, really popular things that sims will just flock to buy, I’ve only heard about them from others playing. I know one of the sets of flowers you can make at the flower craft station is supposed to be hugely popular.

I also must try a business where you have the ticket machine – you don’t have to sell anything, customers just pay to be there, so you could have an art gallery, movie theatre, bowling alley, public swimming pool – the list goes on!

OFB has definitely turned out to be my favourite expansion pack, which I wasn’t expecting, I didn’t think I would prefer it over Nightlife, but it makes me want to play the game so much more, rather than just build houses etc.

Does anyone know where i can get a crack for the Sims 2 Nightlife (I'm sick of putting the CD in)

Do you know if you can run an art gallery, where they pay by hour, and be able to purchase the art too? I think that'd be best since they can paint and sell their paintings already. They should be able to display it, and sell it at their business.