The Sims 2

In a large kitchen filled with the latest modern appliances, Marcy Jones flips some omelettes and carefully stacks the butter drenched delights onto a plate. Once she finishes, she calls out and family members pour into the room to start their day off with a hot breakfast. It's a typical day at 38 Baker Street in Pleasantview. Marcy Jones and her family aren't your average suburbanites though. They're sims, little pixel people originally thought up by Will Wright, designer of the most popular PC game to date.

For the few who haven't heard of The Sims, it's a computer game where you control the lives of various people called sims and build and furnish their homes. Sims wake up, go to school or their jobs, make friends with their neighbors, bear children, and have romantic flings. The original series, released in February 2000, spawned seven expansion packs and sold millions of copies around the world. Eventually, though, people demanded an upgrade to their technology and, in September 2004, The Sims 2 was released.

Gameplay for Sims 2 is similar to the original game. Each sim lives on a specific lot and you can choose to have them live with other sims or alone. You must also monitor their needs which are hunger, social, bladder, comfort, energy, and environment. If these levels drop too far, something will happen. If your sim gets too hungry, he or she will die of starvation. Ignore the bladder bar and your sim will relieve itself wherever it's standing. If the social bar drops too low, your sims will get lonely and it will be visited by an imaginary bunny that only it can see. To avoid this, it'll be necessary to interact with other sims. You can hug, talk to, kiss, and even attack other sims. There's far too many actions to list here and, with each new expansion pack, that list grows. A mood bar which is a combination of all the above needs monitors how content your sim is. If that bar drops too far, your sims will refuse to perform certain actions like studying.

The sims unit of currency is the simoleon and your sims will need lots of these to develop their home so, unless you use a cheat or they're financially supported by other sims in the household, your sims will need a job. They can choose from 10 different career tracks: athletic, business, criminal, culinary, law enforcement, medical, military, politics, science, and slacker. In each of these career tracks are ten different jobs which you can access by being promoted. To get promoted, your sims must build up various skills and have a certain number of family friends. Athletes need body, charisma, and mechanical skills while aspiring politicians need creativity, logic, and charisma. Family friends can be somebody that that particular sim is friends with or just a friend of one of the household members. For this reason, it can be useful to set up a household so that one member is simply there to make friends so that the others can concentrate on their skills. For example, a businessman and his socialite housewife is a great setup for fast financial success.

The way you build your lot is one of the key factors in how successful your sim will be. More expensive items often provide better stats. A 3000 simoleon bed will provide a better energy rating than a 300 simoleon bed meaning your sims will sleep less and have more time in their day to build relationships and skills. It's not just the objects though. The way you set up your lot can also have an effect. It takes time to walk up three flights of stairs from the bedroom to the bathroom, you know.

One of the most impressive improvements that the Sims 2 added was the addition of aging. In the original game, a sim born into the world would age from baby to child to adult and then live forever unless some calamity like starvation or fire would end his or her life. Now, the life stages are baby, toddler, child, teenager, adult, and elder. At the end of the elder stage, the sim will die of old age.

Character creation is also much more customizable in The Sims 2. Before, you would choose from a set of premade faces. Now you can choose what their eyes, nose, mouth, eyebrows, and body type look like. An added feature closely related to this is genetics. Sims born into the world take on the physical features of their parents, grandparents, and other ancestors. Red hair, for example, can skip two generations and appear on the child of two brunettes.

Aspirations were also added in The Sims 2. Each sim now has a number of wants and fears based on whether they want to pursue knowledge, wealth, romance, family, or popularity. Children and toddlers have their own separate aspiration called 'grow up'. These wants can be something simple like buying a painting or something that will take you days to accomplish like reaching the top of a certain career. Each sim has an 'aspiration bar'. Fulfilling their wants raises the bar and encountering fears drops it. If the bar is high, the sim is generally pleased and, if it's low, the sim is unhappy. Should the bar drop too far, they'll go into 'aspiration failure' and they'll be visited by the friendly neighborhood sim psychologist.

Building is much more impressive as well. In the first Sims, you could only build two level homes. Sims 2 expands that to a maximum of five and, if you have the University expansion, there's a cheat that allows an unlimited number of housing levels. Creating decks or porches is also much more customizable in Sims 2 because of the addition of half-stairs. Basically, these are shorter stairs just like what's seen on many American or European porches.

A number of expansion packs have been released for the Sims 2 and a few more are certain to come.. University lets you send your sims to college. In Night Life, your sims get to go on dates, buy cars, visit restaurants, and choose the new pleasure aspiration. Open For Business allows your sims to run their own businesses. Pets added cats, dogs, birds, and other pets. Seasons added gardening, fishing, and, of course, weather and a seasonal calendar to the game. Finally, Bon Voyage, which will be released in September 2007, will allow your sims to go on vacation to new locations like campgrounds and the Far East.

One of the things that made the original Sims so popular is how easy user-created content was to make. Even though it's a little more difficult to make new content in The Sims 2, there's still millions of different downloads available and many of them are free. The Sims 2 website at www.sims2.com has a list of hundreds of websites where you can find clothing, houses, community lots, furniture, game modifications, and more.

The Sims 2 is a fantastic game that's best suited for players who like to build and design new homes and community lots. Storytellers will love it as well. One feature that I didn't mention is the photo albums where you can write short stories accompanied with screenshots that you take with the game's camera and a video feature that lets you create short movies. Members of the Sims community have created some impressive works of art with both of these mediums.