Sims 2 More Crystal Ball Than Game
By Nick Wadhams
(AP) — I didn’t plan the party right: By the time it was underway, I had to get to work. That’s when the breakfast I left on the stove caught fire and the guests fled. No one bothered to call the fire department. When I got home at 6 p.m., my kitchen was a pile of ash.
Truth be told, the house didn’t really exist. It was a pixellated possession of my digitized self, also named Nick, whose existence seems much realer to me than the house. I am not nearly as good at running his life as I am at controlling my own.
Nick was the central character of my little world in The Sims 2, the inevitable follow-up to the 1999 blockbuster. For the few of you who don’t know the premise, here’s the best I can do: You’ve got these little, err …, computerized people, and, ah, well …, you guide them through daily tasks like going to work and watching TV. And you, um…, help them buy a new toaster.
For some reason, it’s really, really addictive.
Maxis, the division of Electronic Arts that made The Sims, can’t be faulted for having rejected the idea when gaming guru Will Wright presented it in the mid 1990s. Yet when Maxis finally relented, The Sims became the most popular computer game of all time. That’s because it really isn’t a computer game at all, with no definable objectives, and thus managed to attract not only the 14-year-old game geek, but also his 23-year-old sister and their 50-year-old dad.
So now comes The Sims 2, a PC-only title which is so similar to the original that it won’t turn away fans, but adds enough embellishments into the mix to make it refreshing and worth the $49.99 price tag.
The biggest change, as it often is with sequels, is the new graphics engine – and it’s a beauty. You can now zoom in and get a pimple-eye view of your sims and their extraordinarily detailed world, down to the games they play on their own computers (Electronic Arts’ own SSX 3 snowboarding game).
Then there’s something called the aspiration meter, which adds a new level of complexity by giving you control over your sims’ hopes and fears, whether they be terror about a relative’s death or the desire to make five best friends or become really good at science.
More than anything else, the aspiration meter is an existential crisis waiting to happen. The Sims 2, you quickly finds out, is less a game than a crystal ball that casts its searing gaze into the soul. It’s like holding a mirror up to a mirror, watching your face disappear after a million reproductions.
Are you the type who gratifies your sims’ every desire – from making out with five different people, to teaching your child to walk, to getting straight As? Or do you indulge their fears, perhaps by killing off a family member or setting them up to be rejected when they attempt their first kiss?
But it’s when you push your sims to do something against their will that you’ll really fall down the rabbit hole. Everything was going along fine until my sim refused to clean the kitchen because he was enthralled with a computer game. Then I realized how dirty my kitchen was and I … too … was … playing … computer … aghghgh!!!!! (Slouch over, clutch skull, commence quivering.)
And that wasn’t the worst of it. The more I played, the more I realized that in real life, I had come to think of my own needs in the convenient, easily satisfied sliding scale of my sims’. Feeling a little lonely? Call a pal and get that social meter back from red to green. Need to exercise some creativity? Go look through a telescope. Looking for a mate? Relentlessly call some neighbor you just met.
But real life doesn’t work that way, and therein lies the trouble: You will find, as you pass the untold hours neglecting your real life for the sake of a digitized one, that making your sim happy becomes relatively simple, while your own life remains in just as much turmoil as before.
After uncountable hours, Nick the Sim was on his way to becoming a sports star (one of the many career paths you can choose) with the charisma of Barry Manilow. Nick the Human, meanwhile, was growing pasty and weak, hungry, and hissing like a rabid, pregnant cat at the prospect of mingling with fellow life forms.
It was around this time, when my sim wasn’t looking, that I slowly, carefully stepped away from the computer. You will have great difficulty doing the same.
Three and a half stars out of four.
Electronic Arts says The Sims 2 requires a minimum 800 megahertz CPU and 256 megabytes of RAM.
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