The Sims 2 Extended Review

Looking for more examples of deeper gameplay from The Sims 2? GameSpy has posted an extended review for your enjoyment.

Join Bufus's Trailer Party

The Sims 2 Extended Review

By Dave Kosak

A more in-depth exploration of the latest 'Life simulation' and sequel to the biggest PC game of all time.

This Summer when I was given a preview of Sims 2 by one of the producers, he was at a loss. We'd already cruised through his canned presentation, but I could tell there was more to see. I kept asking questions and he kept showing me more and more. "I don't know what to show you next," he finally admitted. "There's just so much." So, instead, I kept barking out orders, telling him things like "Invite the maid over! Hit on the maid! Now go in the hot tub and invite her in!" He kept clicking away, and the Sims kept responding appropriately.

As I sat down to review the game, I began to understand his dilemma. Just as he had trouble boiling the game down to a little ten-minute spiel, I knew that a couple pages of a review wouldn't be able to show the full extent of the game. So, in addition to my review, I thought readers who really wanted to know more about the game would appreciate some detailed examples of gameplay that wouldn't fit into the review.

Want a more concise summary of the game? read the review! But for more details and anecdotes, read on.

Emergence In Action

From what I can tell, the underlying AI for the Sims isn't incredibly deep. Sims amble along living moment-to-moment, reacting to what's around them and occasionally to recent memories. However, the AI is deep enough, deep enough to cause the unexpected or to give the illusion that a lot more is going on than you think. Surprising things just sorta flow out of a Sim's natural behavior, which ends up making for a great game.

One of Bufus's famous trailer parties rages on.

Let's take the strange case of the Marfit Brothers. This pair of misfits live in a ramshackle home that I created for this humor column, "Spy Eye for the Sim Guy." One Sim I created as the lead character, Eugene: a slob desperate for romance. I needed another Sim for a screenshot I had in mind, and this Sim's whole purpose was to be "the guy who lives on Eugene's couch." For that role I created Bufus, who looks like a slacker incarnate.

However, when I started to play through the game, attempting to stage screenshots with Eugene, I had to deal with Bufus wandering around willy-nilly through the house on his own. My heart really warmed to Bufus when I caught him arguing with a paper airplane. He ended up being an integral part of the column.

Long after I had finished the column I kept playing with the misfit Marfit brothers, mostly to find out what would happen to them. You see, the thing with Bufus is that his only goal in life is to be popular. Instead of getting a job, he threw parties. He was a natural schmoozer. He'd throw on some grilled cheese sandwiches, crank up the tunes (salsa music seemed to suit Bufus best), slip on a pepto-bismol pink tuxedo jacket, and start the joint jumpin'. By this time I had my real-life friends watching me play over my shoulder and we got a big kick out of it -- Bufus would roll out of bed every day and it would be like: "It's 10 AM! It's time to PARTY!"

Neither of the Marfit brothers bothered to clean the toilet. Sims would walk into the bathroom and act horrified.

Parties at Bufus's place were off the hook. He'd regularly invite people in off the street. He'd always order a pizza and then his brother would hit on the pizza girl. Then they'd invite her in and she's party hard (in Sims 2, all the Sims -- even maids and delivery people -- are fully fleshed-out characters you can interact with). Eventually whenever she made a delivery she'd ask, "Hey, can I hang out now?" Of COURSE you could hang out! The door was always open at the Marfit place, and the seat was always up.

Then a crazy thing started to happen. Before long, Bufus had nine close friends and several screens full of acquaintances. He became the social center of the town. Everybody who was anybody came to Bufus's parties. If Sims wanted to make any new friends, Bufus's ugly-ass crud-encrusted trailer was the place. If you wanted to be somebody in my town, you really had to schmooze up to Bufus in order to get an invite. I didn't try to make that happen, and it certainly wasn't programmed into the game -- it just happened! That's emergence. Remember, Bufus was supposed to be a throwaway character when I created him. Who knew? Situations like that grow out of different Sims and their personalities interacting as you play.

Groping the hired help. If you like her, you can ask the Maid to move in with you...

More emergence: teenage daughters always seem to end up talking on the phone for hours on end. How does that happen? I don't think it's programmed that way. I think that effect naturally grows out of teenage wants and behaviors.

The Sims are always doing things to make you wonder if they did them intentionally. My wife created the two Roberts brothers, a neatnik (who we were delighted to discover was terrified of using a public toilet) and a total slob. One time the neat brother put a TV dinner in the oven and walked to the family room. The slob walked up and -- I swear -- he actually looked over at his brother, then removed his dinner from the oven and ate it. Was he aware that he was stealing his brother's food? Did he look over at him on purpose before slipping it out of the oven? The truth is, it doesn't matter -- it sure looked like it, and we got a good laugh out of it.

"Let the Sims Figure it Out"

In doing my review I was fortunate enough to have the perfect test audience -- my wife was as hooked on the original Sims as anybody, and made for a good case study. We played the game much as we played the original: sharing different families in the same neighborhood. Things got a little hairy, though, when the local hot redhead Sim Nina Caliente had her hooks in a Sim from my wife's family and a Sim from my family. Dilemma! Would Nina stick with my Sim or hers?

Tensions ran high in the hot tub that night.

We decided to let the Sims figure it out themselves. One thing I learned early on was that it was easy to get in the habit of meticulously queuing up your Sim's every move, but the Sims are much smarter in the second game and the game is just as much fun if you let them amble along on their own. So we had Nina throw a big party and invite both of her lovers. Then we just ... watched. At first they all seemed to get along in the hot tub. But then my Sim, the architect Feng Shui, caught Nina getting hot and heavy with the neat-freak Roberts brother and exploded with rage. He slapped her around, then retreated into the other room to cry. Poor Feng Shui. He agonized over it for days.

What Will Happen Next?

Which brings up another point. One of the things that really drives gameplay in Sims 2 is the question, "what will happen next?" It's an odd question, because supposedly you're in control of everything your Sims do, so "what happens next" shouldn't be a surprise. But nonetheless, the surprises keep coming.

Let's come back to Feng Shui, who was on the rebound: Nina may have broken his heart, but he wanted children, dammit, and needed a woman! I arranged a great little party at his house. He had the food, he had the dancing, he had the games. He dressed in his tuxedo. His guest of honor, Lucy Burb, was happy and in love. And then Feng popped her the question. You know what comes next: happy cutscene, she moves in, they make babies, right? But no -- I'm not sure what made Lucy turn him down. Maybe it was the setting. Maybe she needed to go to the bathroom at the time. She rejected him! He cried about that for days as well. You could watch him mope around his house, think of the failed proposal, and then bust into tears. Things don't always go as planned.

Feng Shui gives Mr. Roberts a piece of his mind.

"What will happen next?" You can never tell, and so you have to keep playing. Feng's old flame Nina married the neat Roberts brother and moved in with both brothers. But she was insatiable, and once she moved in it was clear that she had the hots for the slob brother. She'd walk around, think of him, and sigh wistfully. She desperately wanted to cheat on her husband and make woo-hoo with the slob. My wife didn't see that coming when the two of them got married, but now it was a part of the game and she had to figure out what she was going to do about it.

Paging Jerry Springer

In my review I mentioned that screwing up is just as much fun -- if not more -- than having a family do well. Truth is, messed up Sims have a whole set of surprising behaviors. It's possible that they end up downright neurotic! Sims with screwed up childhoods will walk around, jittering, mumbling to themselves.

Of course you want to hear some examples, so let's return to my wife's game. Here she had Nina, the wife who lusted after her husband's brother. My wife decides, what the heck, she'll let it happen. For a while it seemed to work. One brother would be off in the office while Nina was Woo-Hooing the other one. Inevitably they got caught. Screaming! Slapping! Crying! You'd think you were watching an evening soap opera.

Smooth. Very smooth.

It all seemed kinda funny until we noticed what effect it was having on their young son. At one point, he couldn't walk past his parent's bedroom without thinking of his mother and stopping to just stand there and sob. He absolutely hated her. He could never get his homework done because he wasn't sleeping right. He grades were terrible. He was afraid to go to school. He was totally messed up! It was all bad.

"This woman's a pariah!" my wife finally declared, swiping her mouse pointer over Nina's face like she was slapping her.

You'll uncover all sorts of strange Easter Eggs as your Sims hit bottom or get stuck in messed-up relationships. When a Sim is desperate for some socializing, a big fluffy "Social Bunny" might appear to talk and play with the lonely Sim. This isn't a complete surprise because you'll sometimes see the bunny on kids' television shows in the game. The hysterical part is that nobody else can see the Social Bunny. They just see your Sim talking to and laughing at thin air, and they make "he's crazy" motions with their hands. This cracked us up.

Tall Tales of Town Building

The idea that I could create my own neighborhood from scratch really got my creative juices flowing. As stated in the review, you can actually create terrain and a road layout in SimCity 4 and import it into the game. It's not self-explanatory, but the process isn't all that difficult with the help of the readme file. The only tough part is that you can't preview how it'll look in-game -- the edges of your city will be cut off when viewed in Sims 2, so it took a couple of tries before I was able to get the town "just right."

Here I am, building the bad part of town.

Even if you don't have SimCity 4, Sims 2 comes with a pile of empty cities that you can mess with, so you won't be missing out. As for me, I created a town where one side of the river was to be a lavish master-planned community and the other side of the river was an old run-down farm community filled with shacks and trailer parks. COMEDY ... IMMINENT!

Once I imported the road layout I had a blast dropping in the plethora of animated decorations. The lavish planned community had pretty hedgerows and forests and public parks along a central paseo. The other side of the river I filled with old antennas, dead shrubs, decrepit farms and trails of smoke curling into the sky. Next, I laid out the lots, both residential and community. Building community lots is a blast. On the poor side of the river I built "Dookie's Dive Bar" and "Skanky's Chow Hole."

Dookie's Dive Bar: If you can kill it, Dookie can grill it.

It's also easy to upload custom pictures and storyboards for your town. This helps you set the tone for the region. My wife and I discovered another use for the town story, since we both play on the same PC: after a play session I can update the town story with notes to her about big events: "Despite Nina's attempt to destroy our community, the town still thrives. Bufus just added a deck and a hot tub to his party pad." She sees that next time she starts to play, or she can edit it to leave a message for me.

After a couple of hours I'd built the town and one of the community lots. There were still dozens of other lots to be created. I'd have to build houses on all of them, or download ones off of the internet. Then I'd need to create families and move them in. What about the Hedonism family, who dress like Romans and throw bacchanalian celebrations every evening? How about downloading the Go-Go Yubari Sim from the website and seeing what trouble she causes? How about creating Sims who wear red face paint and call themselves the Devils? (I could create a husband and wife, "Lucius Devil" and "Jersey Devil.") The possibilities are endless!

Go-Go Yubari, downloaded from the Internet, straining hard to make a sandwich.

My town is hardly even created, and already I'm asking myself: "What's going to happen?" I've got hours and hours and hours of tinkering, building, creating, and playing in store for me before I can find out.

I can't wait.