'The Sims Spark'd' Episode 4 Highlights: Personal stories hit home for judges as show's first winners bag $100K
While the competition has been a mess of frayed nerves, crunch time and limiting competitions, the final round encourages both teams to connect with each other on a personal level. Sharing their stories through the Sims in one last video editing challenge, Team Llama and Team Cowplant share just what 'The Sims' has meant to them — all for a cash prize of $100,000.
The 'Play with Life' challenge asked the teams to spend 15 minutes discussing their connections with 'The Sims' and then spend six hours building a story and then working with a video editor to put it all together. A routine but difficult challenge nonetheless by this point, Team Llama's advantage from last episode won them an extra 15 minutes to work on their video.
Team Llama, who started as underdogs in the competition, finally learned to work together as a team. Through their stories, they realized that bullying was a common theme shared between the three of them. Following up on Xmiramira's success as a storyteller as well as a stylist, the team made her the face of the story. Their video told the tale of a young girl bullied for her love of 'The Sims', and of gaming, but through the support of her loved ones found her voice and shared it with the world. Xmiramira even incorporated a little singing in Simlish for Llama's video, which caught the eye of judge Tayla Parks, who has also recorded a Simlish song for the game.
In trying to tie together three very diverse stories into one common team, Team Cowplant told a similar story to Llama's — one of a girl overcoming negativity through 'The Sims'. Cowplant, however, chose to focus on the theme of expressiveness. The girl featured in the video had a mundane voice over her shoulder telling her to conform, while a more stylish Sim encouraged her to live her best life and follow her creative heart.
Both teams had a strong emotional connection to their stories, tearing up while telling them and the stories struck a cord with the judges and even prompted tears from them. Even the harshest judge, Dave Miotke, found it challenging to find anything truly wrong with the videos aside from minor nitpicks. The judges were stumped when it came to choosing the winner between the two teams. Ultimately, Tayla Parx felt that both stories were told so well that the only way to pick a winner was for the judges to each vote on which team moved them the most.
Though it was not an easy choice for the judges, the win went to Team Llama. The judges picked their video for how seamlessly the team blended story, style and structure, and how the story unfolded. Team Llama's video excelled both as a technical video and as a personal story, and while the competition was incredibly close, a winner had to be picked. Team Llama now goes home $100,000 richer and they become the very first winners of 'The Sims Spark'd' challenge.
All Sims 4 players now have a chance to be a part of the competition themselves by logging into the game on any platform and clicking on the new, in-game challenge tab to show the world their Simming skills.