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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.

De Sims abracadabra heeft agelopen weekend tijdens de Power Unlimited Gameplay de 'Kidsweek Award' gewonnen!

Duizenden lezers van Kidsweek, de krant voor jonge mensen, hebben in augustus en september gestemd op hun favoriete game. En dat was...De Sims abracadabra!

en daar zijn we natuurlijk supertrots op!

Greetings, Sims Fans,

Can you feel it? Do you feel a tingling sensation in your stomach that's radiating throughout your whole body? You know what that is? It's your body's way of saying, "There's less than one week left until you can rush to the store and pick up The Sims 2!"

So this week, in honor of that tingling sensation in our own bodies, we're going to take a closer look at the Create-A-Sim tool found in The Sims 2. First off, the good news is that all of the existing Sims created with The Sims 2 Body Shop will work in The Sims 2, so fear not – the products of all of your hard work (and the hard work of others which you downloaded to your hard drive) and long hours spent with The Sims 2 Body Shop will soon be playable in The Sims 2. In fact, all of your Sims will automatically copy over when you install your copy of The Sims 2. No sweat! And, with about 3500 high-quality Sims already living on the Maxis servers, you should be able to keep yourself plenty busy for the next few years

The other big news is that Create-A-Sim, as it's found in The Sims 2, contains tons of additional hairstyles, clothes, makeup and other items to help you tweak your Sim to perfection in the game or use these assets to create your own versions in The Sims 2 Body Shop.

What's more, there's a suite of sweet new features in the version of The Sims 2 Body Shop, included in the shipping product , to allow you greater control in making the Sim of your dreams. Tapping the F3 key will now toggle between "free camera" and "set camera" modes. Once you're in free camera mode, you can use these mouse controls to view your Sim from every angle:

• Click + Drag The Left Mouse Button – this combination orbits the camera around the head of your Sim.
• Click + Drag The Right Mouse Button – controls zoom
• Click + Drag Left + Right Buttons Simultaneously – Alters the center point the camera is focused on.
• < and > buttons – Rotates the Sim.

And, just in case you want even more information and tips, we've got The Sims 2 Prima Guide's section on The Sims 2 Body Shop to help you create the Sim of your dreams!

Keep tingling!

Lucy Bradshaw

The Sims 2 Executive Producer

"The Sims 2 is a brilliant simulation but also a wonderful caricature of life in general."

IGN Said What?

The Sims 2 Review

How can a company improve on the best selling PC game of all time?

The Sims was one of those games that you just didn't see coming. It smacked the gaming world upside the head with its quirky nature and long reaching appeal. Obviously, the success of the original was so high that it was a forgone conclusion that The Sims 2 would eventually hit stores after the billions of expansion packs were done selling for the first game. Finally, after four years of waiting, The Sims 2 is coming out. We've had a final for quite a while now and have been playing the crap out of it in order to write this review.

The Sims 2 is a strange game to try and review. There are a lot of different ways to look at it and play it. The only thing that's certain is that this series is one of a kind. I can honestly say that I don't think I "got it" when the original game was released. I enjoyed it for a while but became frustrated at how hard it was to juggle relationships, bathroom breaks, and sleep time in order to get to the top of the corporate food chain. But over the last few weeks, I finally discovered something, partly due to a lot of the improvements made over the first game. The Sims isn't about "winning" or reaching a certain goal. It's about setting up experiences and watching them unfold. It's about personality and creativity and The Sims 2 handles both in a way that can't help but make you stare in wonder at this brilliantly bizarre series.

The most obvious addition is the new engine. It was an easy decision for them to make the game better looking. Not only did it help them keep up with the technology but more importantly helped them create an experience with a lot more personality and flair than The Sims was ever capable of supplying. All of the items found in The Sims 2 are amazingly detailed and vibrantly colorful, but the real charmer is the hugely long list of interactive animations between sims and the environment.

How can you not smile at the different ways the sims dance depending on their personalities? How can you not be pleased when outgoing characters are giving other sims in the room a thumbs up as they walk by? How can you not throw a fit of laughter when a man in a top hat and a cute blonde teenager burp in each other's faces for fun? There are so many wonderful animations of the cute, disgusting, touching, playful, exciting, amazing, and clever things that we see in life right there on the screen for your virtual people to act out. The combination of actions happening in the house can be downright hilarious and bizarre. If you haven't read the SimIGN piece about the IGNPC guys living in a house together, you should check it out to see what I mean.

The Sims 2 is a brilliant simulation but also a wonderful caricature of life in general. And that's what you have to remember when playing this game. It isn't about completing a lofty goal of saving the world. Not reaching the top rung of the corporate ladder doesn't mean you failed. A dirty house and toilet isn't the end of the world. This game is about experimentation and creativity, whether you're setting up relationships or building a crazy house. You can almost equate it to a very strange canvas. Maxis is selling some amazing tools to create all kinds of things from architecture to full blown stories. It's up to the gamer to take those tools and use them however they see fit.

And that's the most difficult thing to understand. As I said earlier, I didn't really understand when I was playing the first game. I was used to playing games that have specific goals. The Sims 2 declares that having goals is almost a distraction to having fun. Don't get me wrong, if you want to think of the game that way, it's possible. You can move your sims up to the top of the corporate food chain, help your sim-kids and teenagers get into private school, or even complete abstract goals of affording the best TV on the list. But those are side shows to the main events of watching the personalities interact and sharing experiences with the community.

Maxis added several different features to improve on the original and improve on it they do. The first of these is the ability to use either one of three prepared neighborhoods with an interesting background or create your own from scratch using one of several neighborhood terrains. Players can now create different sized lots, place houses, community centers, and environmental items like balloons, rocks, trees, clouds, birds, and so on.

The neighborhood story can be added to, modified, and made creative easily with their new story creation tool. This tool works not only for the neighborhood, but also for each individual house. The game also adds a movie making feature which allows players to explore their inner director. It isn't the easiest to make perfect movies, but with a little practice, there's sure to be some great movies online before too long. You can even use a simple movie editing tool like Windows Movie Maker (which comes with Windows XP) to edit the files into a coherent movie of some sort. The only thing that might be a concern is that taking high quality movies with this tool will slow down lower spec machines. Even on my Athlon 64, with a Gig of Ram and a GeForce 5900 Ultra, the game ran fairly chuggy while taking high quality movies. The movies were certainly passable, but weren't completely smooth because all of that was happening on the same computer. Still, it's certainly a welcome feature for players that don't have the resources to buy an extra computer to capture and record video.

But what would the stories or movies be without characters and drama? Maxis has added loads more of each on top of the story creation tools. Take the character creation tool. It's about a thousand times better than The Sims original. While players won't be able to adjust height or limb length (without developer cheats) because of requirements to make animations look natural, they will be able to have an unprecedented amount of face customization. There are so many deformation points and options that it'll be hard for players not to play with the tool for hours.

I had several of my friends give the game a whirl over the last couple of weeks to see their reactions and how easy the tool was to use for those that hadn't seen it before and the reaction was quite good. My fiance spent a good hour and a half simply playing with this feature and experimenting, happy the entire time. I can guarantee that I've personally spent at least 8-10 hours doing that myself. The range of faces players will be able to create is extreme. Some of the faces can be downright disturbing and then watching those sims breed with other sims to create half-breed freaks is even more disturbing and fun.

The addition of breeding, genetics, and aging is also a big move from the original. The idea of having genetics in each character created for use in combining them into children born in the game is brilliant. It completely adds to the ability to be immersed in the drama and life of a neighborhood. The neighborhood will expand and grow over time as adult sims hook up and have kids. You can actually see the generations pass as they get older. The only draw back is the aging process, which means sims you like will eventually up and die if you don't cheat or use one of the aspiration rewards called the Elixir of Life that reverses aging by a few days.

The addition of several age brackets means there are a lot more types of kids. Babies, toddlers, children, and teenagers fill out the ranks with adults and old age closing out the rotation. And while there were kids in the original, they weren't implemented as thoroughly. They'll all have to go to school and do homework as you would expect, but parents will also have the option to encourage their behavior in certain ways and help them grow as people. This doesn't mean it all has to be positive either. If one of the parents is a cranky bastard, that trait could be encouraged as well, leaving some seriously funny results. One family I created called the Zoo's (originally because they were all freaks, but later because they captured and caged innocents walking past the house) were such a bad family to the toddler (I usually take a fairly hands off approach to guiding sims) that it grew up to be an incredible brat, throwing tantrums and causing problems. Of course, he wasn't happy when he found himself in a cage either, but them's the breaks.

The last very important addition to the gameplay is the idea of aspirations. When creating sims, and when children become teenagers, lifetime aspirations must be picked. These add on top of personalities to create interesting mixes. For example, a lazy and sloppy sim with a financial aspiration may find it more difficult to make money than an active, outgoing, and neat sim. Basically, these act as guideposts for players and sims. Each aspiration will govern wants. Each sim has four wants at all times and three fears. Completing these wants helps sims reach a level of mood that even needs won't effect their happiness. Points gathered from achieving wants also allows sims to purchase special aspiration rewards that could potentially help sims become better and also provide some great entertainment.

Basically, theses additions help give some direction without forcing players to pay attention to them. Those sims that have met their aspirations when progressing into the next age bracket of their life will have a better time of it than those that haven't.

Now, a lot of players complained about The Sims for AI reasons. Sims in the original would often forget to go to the bathroom or some such thing causing micromanaging issues. Most sims will now take care of all of these needs without much handholding, allowing players to sit back and enjoy the action and spend most of their time helping sims get what they want or get what they fear (if you're that kind of a person).

This is actually one of those games that I don't feel bad about cheating in. It actually allows players to set up their neighborhood the way they choose before diving into the interactions. Sure, every area has some poor people, but the mansion on the hill that you'll like to have some mean, snooty, rich people inhabiting would take a lifetime to fill. Cheats actually allow players to paint a picture before they enter and play, which I like in this case.

On top of all of this, Maxis also made sure to add enough community features to keep what is easily one of the biggest online gaming communities in the world quite happy. The game hasn't been released yet, so there isn't anything to download at the moment, but EA will be hosting servers for players to upload their content. When there are new items and skins for download available, players will be able to easily click on a snowflake icon in game to download any content that might be available. All of this custom content, including full sim designs, will be recognizable by the snowflake symbol in their iconic representation in-game. So if you're adding a looking to add new floor and you see an option with a snowflake next to it, you'll know it's a custom texture.

Closing Comments
It's really hard to shove all that's available in The Sims 2 into a neat packaged review. It is, however, easy to start rambling about all of the cool ass things that happen during the course of play. I've laughed so hard and been so disturbed that I simply have to recommend this game to anybody who was a fan of the The Sims. Even if you weren't, as I wasn't as much as some people, might find more to enjoy with this second installment.

The new features like aging, aspirations, character design, community property, and all of the great story building tools help to make The Sims 2 a more complete game in every way possible.

All of the superb personality and feeling that the game delivers with its graphics and animations only pushes my feelings higher. I've played The Sims 2 for a good 50 hours now and am sure that I haven't seen everything there is to see. When you see imaginary bunnies and doctors fall from the sky to help with mental health, you'll know you arrived.

If you're looking for a game that really and truly lets you create your own story and build your own history and world, this is the one for you. The series is unique and lovely, and while the premise may be four years old, the feeling you get when playing The Sims 2 isn't.