A Week in the Life of The Sims 2

“If you haven’t heard of The Sims by now then you should probably have your Internet privileges revoked. It was a game in which you micro-managed and babied a family of petulant and unruly jerks, trying to keep them from burning or electrocuting themselves to death long enough to spend the hour it takes to pee. The Sims was fun until you had pretty much explored the limits of the game and got tired of your gibberish-screaming posse of louts and ordered them into the pool for a summary execution. The Sims 2, recently released by Maxis, brings us a much prettier version of the same, with all new and exciting ways to herd or harm your Sims. For the purposes of informing our readers, and because I love nothing more than being a sadist in computer games, I have detailed a week in the life of The Sims 2.

The extent of the changes in The Sims 2 over its predecessor will become apparent before you have even begun your first game. Before you create your family of soon-to-be-headstones you will select one of the three preloaded towns which the game offers. There is the cheerily generic Pleasantview (a familiar town to anyone who played the original game), Strangetown, a desert landscape full of oddball characters like aliens and hillbilly yokels, and there is Veronaville, ripped from the pages of The Bard for you to find out what sort of damage you can inflict on the romance of Romeo and Juliet. There is also the option to import maps from Sim City 4 to be populated manually - the game includes a handful of stock maps for this purpose as well - but Christ only knows how long doing all that would take.”