After my alcoholic wife ran off to Vegas with the pool boy, I thought my life was over. But I eventually picked up the pieces, and my daughter Sarah and I moved into a tiny house in Pleasantville to start over from scratch.
Sure, it wasn't much to look at - Sarah's bookshelves were made from cinderblocks, and the stove caught on fire one afternoon while I was fixing lunch - but it was home.
We met our new neighbours, and they were all immediately enchanted with Sarah. I even started getting romantic vibes from the cute blond next door, and we whiled away many an hour talking about our common interests. After all Sarah and I had been through, it seemed like our lives might finally have taken a turn for the better.
But my job as a baseball team mascot had me working odd hours, and Sarah was often left home alone after school. She seemed happy enough - she'd study, play with the telescope I bought and even learned how to make a new meal by watching cooking shows on TV - until the day a social worker came while I was at work, and took Sarah away.
I still find myself bursting into tears at the drop of a hat, and my fitful sleep is interrupted by dreams of my missing daughter. Worse yet, I got promoted to a minor-league player but then got fired after I hid a fellow player's knee brace, hoping he'd be sidelined by an injury and allow me to step in.
Now I mope around my house, bitter and alone, watching daytime TV, eating junk food and wallowing in self-pity as my bank account slowly runs dry. Ain't life grand!
Welcome to an actual gameplay session from The Sims 2, the first true sequel to the 2000 phenom that became the bestselling PC game of all time and spawned 18 kajillion expansion packs. That's right, 18 kajillion. We counted.
Fans of the first game (and sweet thumping Buddha, there are a lot of them) will have nothing but profound, tender love for this grand sequel. The core gameplay mechanics are the same - you create digital alter-egos, then go about the task of making them happy, productive, fulfilled citizens - but everything you know and like about The Sims has been expanded, upgraded and retooled.
The visuals, for instance, are stunning, especially with the new fully adjustable camera. (The downside is that for a game with such huge mass-market appeal, The Sims 2 has very high system requirements.) And creating your Sims is almost a game in itself, with virtually every facet of their appearance being customizable. Cook up virtual versions of any friend, relative or celebrity you can think of, or simply go nuts and create a deformed monster. The bells! The bells!
Beyond mere appearances, though, there's a lot of new stuff lurking beneath the surface. Your Sims will now age and die, but their kids can carry on the family genes and inherit dad's fortune. Each Sim now has specific desires tied to their overall aspirations, and fulfilling these boosts their state of contentment (while realizing fears has the opposite effect.) It adds a nice bit of goal-oriented gameplay to the mix.
You could spend a year playing The Sims 2 and still not explore every aspect of the game. Create a bachelor and aspire to woo every woman in town, building up a harem of babes that would make Hef jealous. Or create a family, and watch the kids grow up, get married and have kids of their own - and then cheat on your wife with the hot brunette next door. (Or maybe she'll cheat on you with the same hot brunette.)
Or, one of my personal favourites, play as a wrathful deity and simply drop your hideously ugly Sims into doorless, windowless houses and watch them weep, soil themselves and eventually die of hunger. Kneel before me!
Thanks to more advanced artificial intelligence, your Sims will often act in hilariously unpredictable (and yet sort of logical) ways. There's less need to babysit them in this game, and while leaving your Sims unattended won't help them advance much, at least they won't be crapping their pants in the kitchen because you didn't explicitly tell them to go to the bathroom.
If you hated The Sims with every fibre of your being, don't think that The Sims 2 will change your mind about the franchise. Your Sims still speak the ever-so-cute gibberish language Simlish, they still have to tediously master specific skills to get job promotions, they still need to maintain a myriad of personal relationships and their private parts are still pixelated when they shower. Damn!
But while the game isn't revolutionary, it's evolutionary in every sense of the word. In fact, you could safely say The Sims 2 is the single biggest, coolest, most complex digital toy ever created ... at least until The Sims 3 hits sometime around 2008.
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BOTTOMLINE
Although it doesn't bring anything radically new to the formula, The Sims 2 has enough amazing twists and tweaks to make it one of those rare sequels that outdoes the original in every conceivable way.
