The Sims 2
Overview
The Sims 2 is EA's follow-up to the mega-hit The Sims, but while I appreciated many of the QoL features and updated graphics, I tried it and sort of forgot about it afterwards.
Review
I must admit I had more fun with the spin-offs of The Sims (Bustin' Out, The Urbz) than the original game. I did play the original title but never really got into it and got bored with it following the demise of several families when I played it around 2019-2020.
Besides, The Sims is, or was, a spin-off of the SimCity series, and I always enjoyed the SimCity series (the first four, anyway, in varying capacities).
Because I had a lot of problems with my families getting killed off in The Sims (1), I didn't want to get too attached to my Sims, so I made a dude that looked a bit like the dad from Inside Out, his wife with a massive nose and a clown outfit as her normal clothing, a teenage daughter who wears a ballet outfit all the time, and a little kid with eyes just wide enough part that looks like he has fetal alcohol syndrome and not some sort of alien. (You can make your Sims quite grotesque, and you can see the results below). Somehow, I felt like there was a problem in The Sims 2 with not enough options and too much options, in which the best way to explain it would be that I wanted something relatively "normal". Maybe I might be trying to find something SPECIFIC, but those cases are fairly rare in games like this. Most in-game character creators are pretty hideous anyway.
Then you get into the mod dilemma, where there's a lot of different things but never the sort of thing you want, even it should seem common. (I learned this the hard way in my "SimCity 4 with mods" phase). Then, even if you should ACHIEVE finding such a mod, the novelty wears off quickly. (I also mentioned in the review of the original title.)
As by this time, EA had figured out that women were the primary demographic for The Sims series, when you moved in, the neighborhoods aren't just for show, there's whole backstories with the neighbors, ready for you to make stories with them. Not interested! It's a good thing I didn't too attached to the original game, as there's no way to import ANYTHING from The Sims to The Sims 2. I'm guessing it was the engine difference, and despite an expansion of personalities, there isn't a way to export The Sims 2 to The Sims 3. This seems like an oversight. According to the book High Score! by Rusel DeMaria mentions that an earlier product, Little Computer People (Activision, 1985), was able to "save" unique characters by copying the 2048-bit "personality parameter" to a new diskette. The only cross-compatibility The Sims 2 has with anything is with SimCity 4, importing regions to use as neighborhood maps.
Like with the original The Sims there were lots of expansion packs released (eight of them!) as well as about a dozen "stuff packs". Notably, two of these were tie-ins with retail chains (though to my knowledge were sold in neither), "H&M Fashion Stuff" and "IKEA Home Stuff". Still smarting from a lack of SimCity 4 expansion packs at the time, I had thought that branded items would've done perfectly in SimCity 4. However, judging by what came out of SimCity 2013, the content seemed to be angled FAR toward advertising than anything resembling realism, with Exhibit A and Exhibit B. While the stuff from H&M and IKEA was functional, because of mods, there's nothing stopping you from creating and sending out fashions from, say, the spring 1996 JCPenney catalog.
Maybe I just needed to get into it, but there didn't seem to be anything compelling enough for me to keep playing.
Player Notes
I played this a bit (just a bit) in May 2024, and I wrote a small piece about it, which I've tried to patch up here as I would've written it. I might've had to more to say if I played with it more, but I didn't and I didn't have a reason to come back to it.
Port & Rerelease Notes
The Sims 2 was released for Mac by Aspyr Media in 2005, a year after the PC version (I think it was Universal Binary, it was right around the Intel switch) but didn't get the last two expansion packs. There was also the console versions but those were different than the PC version with some extra features but no expansion packs or mods.
Screenshots
