The original Sims for the PC was a classic. It let you create a family, build their house (or use a pre-built one), and control most parts of their lives, from their look to their career to their relationships. A plethora of expansion packs let you throw parties, go on vacation, get pets, or become celebrities. However, the game was flawed. There were no goals besides getting to the top of your career and being rich. Your characters stayed the same age forever and never looked different. Everything was predictable, even if it was random. With Sims 2, however, Maxis fixed everything wrong with the original while leaving the completely open-ended gameplay intact. In Sims 2, you can control every single aspect of your Sims life, from their looks to their actions, from birth to death, with a scary amount of realism. Sims 2 raises the bar for detail, depth, realism, and overall polish for games in general, no matter what the genre or platform is. It's the rare game that appeals to hardcore and mainstream gamers equally and is still an incredible, unforgettable game. Regardless of whether you hated or played the hell out of the original, you will love Sims 2. It's what every sequel wishes it could be, but it's still a masterpiece in its own right. The game revolves around being God, like all simulation games. You create your character in a mind-numbingly detailed, fun character creation system, and if you want, you make an entire family. You then choose one of three neighborhoods, and either build your own house with a detailed, extremely customizable building tool or chose one of several well-designed pre-built homes. Then the real game begins. You complete the house with hundreds of detailed, useful items, and then you start being God. You control your characters by simply left-clicking on another object, whether it's a shower, a fridge, a bed, or another sim. You then bring up layers upon layers of interactions, each one effecting the long-term or short-term feelings and/or actions of one or more sims. You have to keep your sims' moods high by fulfilling needs like going to the bathroom, eating, sleeping, and having fun. Furthermore, you can control time, either pausing it, having it go normally, having it go at 2X speed, and having it go at 3X speed. There are some great new additions to the game, like a system that ages your sims after a pre-determined amount of days, an in-game calender that tells you what day of the week it is (and thus a system that gives everyone with a job two days off per week as well as vacation/sick days), and the Aspiration system. Aspirations are four Wants and three Fears that are assigned daily to each sim, from one of five aspiration sets (fortune, knowledge, family, romance, popularity). Every time you complete a Want (without taking a long time), you get Aspiration Points and an Aspiration level (or, every time you complete a Fear, you lose aspiration points and an aspiration level). Once your Aspiration Level is Gold or Platinum, you use your Aspiration Points to obtain new items, like a Money Tree, a Thinking Cap, and a water cooler that brings your sim, upon drinking it, back to the beginning of their aging cycle. While you don't need to fulfill your Aspirations, you can if you want to, giving you the same type of freedom that makes the Sims series so great. Another addition is the frequent questions from work. You'll constantly have a little box appear, which gives you a situation and two choices from your sim's work. One choice helps you from earning skill points to getting you promoted, while the other choice hurts you from losing skill points to getting fired. Overall, the gameplay additions make the game much better due to making it more realistic, goal-oriented, and yet open-ended. The gameplay is perfect. It's easy to learn but hard to master, it has a small learning curve, and it's highly addictive. It may have some flaws- like, though improved from the original, lame AI, in which sims will do stupid things, like play videogames (all EA games, by the way) instead of feed their screaming child- but the sheer amount of fun that the game provides makes it easy to overlook the few flaws the game presents gameplay-wise. Graphically, Sims 2 is incredible. It easily has the most detailed game engine ever. From the amazing animation and emotions to the individual details like seeing individual pieces moved on a chess board or watching a shower rust away due to extended use without cleaning. There's a brilliant 3D engine at work here, letting you rotate and zoom in at any angle to capture any moment you want with an in-game video capture system and/or an in-game screenshot system. It can be hard to use the 3D engine at times, but the pause feature the game gives you lets you freeze time whenever you need to in order to get front-row seats for the game of life. There's not much to say about the game's graphics. They're incredibly polished, detailed, and realistic. From the individual pancakes that gradually disappear during a breakfast to the pimples on a teenager's face, everything is done accurately. Doom 3 and Half-Life 2 get all the credit for having advanced graphics engines, but Sims 2 easily puts their engines to shame. In the audio department, Sims 2 does well. A catchy, original soundtrack sticks in your head and makes you hum it throughout the day. "Simlish", the sims' gibberish language, is back and better than ever, now being more appropriate for the moment. Sound effects help keep things realistic. The game's audio may not be the best of any game ever, but it gets the job done and helps make the game more realistic. Let me try to explain this to you... If you like games, you'll like Sims 2. If you like Sims 2, you WILL spend at least 20 hours playing it hopelessly. Moving through generations, families, and neighborhoods lets you truly be God in the world of the Sims. Overall, Sims 2 is one of the best games I've ever played. Addictive gameplay, beautiful graphics, catchy audio... Sims 2 has it all. It lets you create a family, build their house, lead them through life, and watch generation after generation fly by in the Sims world and in the real world. It's a polished, addictive, unforgettable game that both hardcore and mainstream gamers can pick up and enjoy within minutes. Sims 2 is such a remarkable game that calling it one of the best games ever doesn't do it justice. It's going to be remembered as an instant classic that improves in every way upon its predecessor, and that's exactly what it is- an amazing sequel and an amazing game.
There are over 600 player reviews of EA's "The Sims 2" online on GameSpot. The average score is 9 out of 10, which is exceedingly good. The rating is well deserved for this worthy successor to the original Maxis master... Read Full Review
Ever wish that if your house caught fire, all you had to do was quickly exit to the neighborhood without having to save and the second your back in your house, the fire is gone and everything was back the way it used to ... Read Full Review
