Customer Reviews

The Sims: Vacation Expansion Pack (Mac)

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

The main idea of The Sims: Vacation is to take your sims on a vacation. (Duh.) Vacation is similar to Hot Date in gameplay. You have no budget when improving (or wrecking) Vacation Island, so you can make the resort of your dreams. There are special activities for your Sims, only available on Vacation Island. These include a half-pipe for snowboarding, a fishing pier and a fortress to have a water balloon fight in. You also have downtown items available, such as cash registers and clothing racks. One of my personal favorite new features are the carnival games. Your Sims can play them and win souveneirs to take home. (These can also be bought.) Another cool thing in Vacation is the various types of lodging. Your Sims can opt for luxurious (or trashy) hotel rooms or go back to nature by sleeping in an igloo or a tent. Also, your Sims don't have to check out of a hotel until you tell them to, and even if you take them somewhere else, like a mall, they can always go back to their hotel, as long as they stay on Vacation Island.
There are three parts to the Island; the "winter wonderland" type of getaway, the forest, or the beach.

Ever since I have gotten the Sims, so many expansion packs have been released. Many of my friends had all of them and always said they pitied me because I only had the original. So for Christmas, I put the Sims: Vacation and the Sims:Unleashed on my list. I wanted all of the other expansion packs but I knew my parents would never buy me all of them. On Christmas Day I received the Sims: Vacation. Mu parents informed me they had ordered both from yours truly amazon.com, but unleashed hadn't been released for mac yet. I was a little disappointed that I didn't get unleashed, but nonetheless I was happy. I immediately put "vacation" into my iMac and was stunned. Not only did they have numerous new items such as a miseltoe, a new hottub, a hamster and a buffet table they also had amazing resort spots you can choose to take your sims at vacation island. You can choose from a carnival, beaches, camp spots, or scenic snowy spots where you can rent equitment to build a snowman, have snowball fights, go snowboarding and many other things. You can also create your own resorts or edit ones that are already there. There is also a tent you can rent where you can "play" around with anyone, girl or boy; or "play", cuddle, or kiss in the new hottub. I extremely recommend The Sims: Vacation for Mac. Happy Gaming!

The Sims Vacation must be the best game since......well, The Sims Hot Date I suppose!!
Now instead of just taking your sims downtown, you can go one step further by taking them on holiday.
Relieve them of the stress of everyday life by picking up the phone and calling Vacation Island Tours and choosing whether your sims want to to play volleyball on the beach, camp in the forest or have a snowball fight in the snowy areas.
Vacation is a must have for all sims fans, I love it so much and it's just sooo addictive!!
So choose where you want your sims to go on vacation, let them have loads of fun whilst they are there, and treasure the memories!! Who would have thought that bossing little people around could be so much fun, ENJOY!!!

I eagerly anticipated Maxis' porting of Sims Vacation for Mac. I got it for Christmas, and immediately installed it. BOY was I disappointed. The game was SO SLOW that my Sims couldn't even do anything at home, let alone on Vacation Island. However, I went to the store and bought some more RAM, and tried again. At this point I had almost 1 GB of RAM, which I figured would be more than enough. No dice. The game was still unbelievably slow. I emailed Maxis and they told me to reinstall EVERYTHING.

GRRR! Not exactly what I was hoping to hear. However, once I reinstalled (which took FOREVER, I might add), the game worked beautifully and was a lot of fun. Apparently, the game was so slow because I had installed too many downloads--extra objects, skins, and so on. While this was no problem in Hot Date, evidently the new actions and such in Vacation were too much for it all. This means that now I am playing the game at factory settings with no add-ons. Not as fun as it could be, by any means! Every die-hard Sims fan knows that 75% of the fun is customizing the game with downloads! I'm going to have to start downloading stuff again and adding gradually...ugh.

I would like to give the game 3.5 stars, but Amazon doesn't do half-stars, so I'm leaning more toward 3 stars than 4. The game is a lot of fun once you completely reinstall and start over new, and if you have a TON of RAM in your computer. If you don't want to have to drag over your old stuff to a new install, or start over completely, then you probably shouldn't bother. I don't know if it's worth it. I'll have to play a few more times before I make that decision.

By the way, Maxis says that these issues with slowness and such have been addressed in Unleashed. That's good on one hand, but at the same time, why should we have to fork over ANOTHER $30 just to get decent game play???

The reson I like this game is because it is so cool building all new resorts all the time then finnaly experiencing them for yourself. Win tockens from playing carnival games, then spend them on great soveniers for your memory chest, and you can make hotel reservations at snowy mountion lodges, swampy tents, and beach bungalows. Plus make new friends, and new memorys for your sims at the one place they will ever have this much fun, your resort on The Sims Vacation Expansion Pack.

The Sims Vacation is a fabulous game, with several new items such as the Shower-Tub, Igloo, Campfire, and Waterslide. Social interactions are no longer just one thing, but are split into different branches. For instance, the "Talk" option can be either "About Interests" or "Gossip-" you choose!
Another of the social improvements is dating. If you don't want the raciness of Hot Date, Sims can still call over their sweetheart and go on a vacation island date.

The downsides? Vacation Island is incredibly slow and skips a lot. The actual houses are more prone to crashing. Also, more negative social interactions will pop up spontaneously. Just as Sim A is going to propose to Sim B, Sim B will jump into Sim A's face and "Nag," about money, the house, or his rowdy friends. This sends the relationship for a dip and is also very frustrating.

On the whole this is a great game with exciting new features that could revolutionize Simming.

Although my G3 266MHz meets the minimum system requirements on speed, I was a little shy on memory so increased my virtual memory as recommended. However, even then the game was extremely sluggish and slow to the point of crawling. It was pretty much impossible to play with my current computer configuration. If you would like to add this one to your collection, be sure your system meets at least the RECOMMENDED specs, not the minimum and you should have loads of fun.

It's like descovering a new land. A new part of the game is now availible. And I payed very little for it. Cheap upgrade. With a lot more availible and to do. Just remember to go to the ASPYR website to register and update the product. As well as download any needed debugging or fixes for problems.

Perhaps it's just me, but Vacation installed successfully on my mac and everything looks fine and works fine until I try to actually play the game. My sims are paralyzed and time is standing still. Again, I'm not sure if it's a bug in MY program, or if it's going to happen to everyone. I look forward to others posting here- in the meantime, be aware that the game is unplayable if it happens to you too!
(I give it three stars because I know if it worked, it would be wonderful. Somewhere between 0 stars and 5 stars, is three.)

I purchased a MAC version of the Sims Vacation and cannot use it on my computer so I've never played it. Unfourtunatly it was a waste of my money.