The Sims 2

Other products by Electronic Arts

Product Features

• Lifestyle simulation where you manage your Sim's dreams and fears over a lifetime
• Mix Sim genes and see physical and personality traits through the generations
• Control the camera and capture the action into mini movies
• Generate unique Sims with the new Create-A-Sim feature
• Build dream homes and design neighborhoods with new building options

Product Details

• Our recommended age: 12 - 20 years
• Manufacturer recommended age: 0 months and up
• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B0006B63RW
• Item Weight: 8 ounces
• Media: DVD-ROM
• Release Date: June 13, 2005
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars See all reviews (131 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #931 in Video Games (See Bestsellers in Video Games)

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Product Description

Platform: Mac

Amazon.com
The Sims was one of the most popular games ever made. In it, players micromanage the lives of a family of virtual people, or Sims, and influence their paths toward success or something akin to a nervous breakdown. Its open-ended blend of cartoonish behavior and everyday living is unique in an art form otherwise obsessed with carnage and sports. With The Sims 2, longtime fans now have a deeper game with lots of ways to customize and share their experiences. The game will also attract first-timers because the goal-oriented gameplay and the luridly fun starter families make it easier to get into the action right out of the box.

Now Sims are born with the traits of their parents, families grow, and Sims grow old.

The People in Your Neighborhood
The game starts at the neighborhood level. Here you can create a housing development from scratch or start with one of three premade neighborhoods, each with its own theme. From there, you'll settle on a house and a family of Sims to control.

Create your own Sim (above) or your own house (below) from scratch with advanced tools.

Aside from the basic needs carried over from the previous game, Sims now have aspirations, wants, and fears. The wants and fears are the day-to-day things that occupy their minds, like wanting to see friends or get married and fearing death or being rejected for a kiss. Satisfy their wants, and they become more efficient at completing tasks you assign them. Realize their fears, and Sims become lethargic, cranky, and unresponsive to your commands. Aspirations are the big-picture things, like raising a family, becoming wealthy, and gaining knowledge. Succeed here and you'll be able to buy odd gifts for your Sim to improve his or her life, like a money tree that pays dividends or a "fountain of youth" water cooler.

What Else Is New?
Of course, you wouldn't be able to juggle all that if it weren't for the improved "Free Will" option, which makes it easier for Sims to fulfill their basic needs. The artificial intelligence of the game is noticeably improved; they won't turn on radios just as a family member is going to bed but, strangely, they do occasionally put their dishes on the floor.

Another big change in the series is the concept of the lifespan. Now Sims are born with the traits of their parents, families grow, and Sims grow old. Not only does this go hand in hand with aspirations (growing up is the first aspiration that a baby Sim will have), it provides a limited time with which your Sims can achieve their goals.

The Universal Control Panel helps you manage your Sim family.

A Family Affair
The Sims 2 not only lets you create just about any type of Sim in any type of family, build elaborate houses, and even create a neighborhood from scratch, but it also allows you to start the game in medias res, with premade households. These families all have backstories that are smart spoofs of soap-opera plots--lots of scheming, romance, ghosts, and family fighting. Parents of teens shouldn't worry, though, because nudity is tastefully blurred out and "woo-hoo" between Sims takes place completely under the covers. The ESRB has given this a Teen rating. If The Sims 2 were a film, it would likely land between PG and PG-13.

The makers have included some nice tools to help share the universe you've created. For example, you can capture in-game stills and video to show friends the private moments, family interactions, and house parties of your Sims. You can even package a household to share as a blog or an album on a special Web site.

The Sims 2 is for patient gamers. Like life itself, the game is filled with mundane details, like getting ready for work and doing dishes. The game also demands a level of creativity from its players that the run-and-gun game genres wouldn't know what to do with. But those who stick with it will be rewarded with an absorbing, amusing diversion and a virtual family history that they've created themselves. --Porter B. Hall

Set Up a Sims 2 Machinima Studio
Amazon.com contributor Porter Hall reveals how you can make movies using the Sims as your actors. See his guide to setting up a Sims 2 Machinima Studio.

Product Description
The Sims 2 is an incredible sequel to the best-selling PC game of all-time! You'll get to direct an entire Sims' lifetime, and try to get them to reach their goals in life. Will they have a long, successful and happy life - or will they end up poor and heartbroken?

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

165 of 172 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars absolutely perfect, September 15, 2005

By	race_of_doom (USA) - See all my reviews

Fun:5.0 out of 5 stars 

I must admit that I just bought my iMac last Friday -- therefore, I'm completely capable of playing this wonderful game. But, still -- some of the comments on this site are a bit over-the-top. If you're not completely sure about your system, research the specs (it'll take you a total of two minutes) and, to be extra sure, download the Aspyr Game Agent at Aspyr's website [...]. Run it on your Mac, and see if the Sims 2 meets and/or exceeds the minimum requirements. If it doesn't, you'll know, and therefore you won't have to waste money on a game that won't work for your Mac.

I'm particularly bothered by the "even on top of the line specs, it still doesn't work" review. My specs are not technically top of the line (I have an iMac 17" 2.0 GHz Rev. B model, 512 MB RAM), and it works PERFECTLY. The graphics are beautiful, the music amazing, the speed consistently great -- this game is like heaven on my iMac.

Considering that the requirements (more over the recommendations!) are pretty high, I can certainly understand the complaints. But on near or "top of the line" specs -- really, use that Aspyr Game Agent program -- it works beautifully.

A brief review of the game itself: this game is absolutely perfect, as I've said a couple times before. The 3D upgrade isn't as upsetting as I thought it would be, like it was in Rollercoaster Tycoon 3 (I was a Windows user before last week, bleh).

The game is exactly like the first, except with many enhancements. Your sims now have aspirations and fears, which makes for great fun! An aspiration of my sim Mike is that he wants to learn how to cook Lunch Meat Sandwiches. I had him read a cooking book one afternoon, and sure enough, he gained his goal. After which he gained enough Aspiration points to buy the family a money tree. ^_^

Another great aspect of the game, at least to me, is that any two people can fall in love. It's nice to play a game where "different" sexual orientation is automatically assumed to be normal.

Also, the way you can customize your Sims is crazy. I'm not talking about the clothing or the accessories (although you get a lot of those) -- I'm talking about the Sim's FACES. You can pretty much sculpt a face anyway you'd like. It's a bit creepy when you realize you've been staring at a person's eyebrows for twenty minutes, trying to get them to your liking.

The Sims are now smarter, too. If a carpool is waiting for them outside (say, to go to work), a Sim will automatically go outside and get in the car. I remember this being a pain sometimes in the last Sims game, where they would constantly miss the carpool because of petty problems (cleaning the toilet, etc).

Basically, anything you want to do you can. While open ended, it's simultaneously not -- your Sims actually age this time and die. You now have very little time to fulfill a Sim's aspirations (and you'll want to, believe me). However, if the thought of your beloved Sims dying scares you, read the instruction booklet -- they supply a cheat to freeze the aging process, ala Sims 1.

When two Sims have a baby, the little thing actually resembles his or her (or it's...) parents. So many improvements.

And the game is much more smoother, too. The camera configurations seemed to be much better this time around -- I was swirling around rooms and zooming in and going sideways all the time, without the slightest lag.

In fact, this game makes you forget that you yourself have needs -- to go to the bathroom, go to work, go to sleep, to eat something. I can play this game all day long and not care about the time gone. It's mind boggiling how fast six hours can go by.

All in all, The Sims 2 is a rather perfect game. I can't think of anything to really improve, and the upcoming exspansion packs will just make everything even more fun and engrossing.

Remember to check your specs throughly before buying, though.

51 of 56 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars If you've got the machine to play it... It's a blast!, June 15, 2005

By	D. Klinkowize (New York, NY) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Fun:5.0 out of 5 stars 

Just received The Sims 2 in the mail yesterday and I love all the improvements that the game has undergone. Its about 10x as detailed as the original (for example, you don't just serve dinner, you get to decide what you are making!!!) and the new 3D engine is really gorgeous to look at. Watching your sim make him/herself a bowl of cereal and dig right into it with flakes flying all around is so fun... it's breathed new life into a great game.

I'm running it on a PowerMac Dual 2.5 with a 9600XT & 1.5gb RAM. That's unfortunately the only drawback to the game - the hefty requirements - and unfortunately the state of the Mac gamming community. PC's have really gotten much more advanced as far as games are concerned, and porting these new games from the PC to the Mac is starting to show how long in the tooth some of our Macs have gotten (I have read on several Sims 2 PC sites that the game isn't coded very well and it is very processor intensive.) Hopefully the switch to Intel will help alleviate those problems in the future, but for now, if you've got the rig to run The Sims 2 and you're a fan of the franchise than I HIGHLY recommend it!

18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Whole New Experience, December 11, 2005

By	Beatrice Portinari (Chicago, Illinois United States) - See all my reviews

Fun:5.0 out of 5 stars 

Once, while visiting my neighbor, I used Create-A-Character to make a Sim version of her three (now four)-year-old daughter. (I will call this girl Fifi, though it is not her real name-thank goodness!) I invited Fifi to admire all the various hairstyles and clothing available to female toddlers, then "aged" the Sim-showing Fifi how her Sim would look as she became a child, then a teen, then an adult, then an elder. As I returned the Sim to her rightful toddlerhood, Fifi exclaimed in delight, "I growed up!"

Fans of the original Sims will be delighted to discover that the game they knew has, in Fifi's words, "growed up" into the Sims 2. You'll recognize many of the features that you loved in Sims 1 and its many expansion packs, but you'll also be happy to find how the game has been improved by various new features. One of the biggest additions is the aspiration system: just like real people, Sims now have wants and fears. By fulfilling their wants, you can drive your Sims to new heights of productivity and happiness; by fulfilling their fears, you can drive them to nervous breakdowns!

Perhaps even more fantastic than gameplay enhancements like the aspiration system are the aesthetic improvements found in the Sims 2. When I design a Sim now, she actually looks like the person she's SUPPOSED to look like, rather than the closest possible approximation that the designers have come up with. What's more, I can view my Sims in a fully three-dimensional world, and even "get close" to them. This allows me to better see my Sims' faces as they actually speak, smile, frown, cry, and cheer-a far cry from the impassive masks that were the faces of the Sims 1. In fact, the Sims 2 exhibits an overall lifelikeness that I never could have anticipated from playing Sims 1.

Still, it's not just the differences between the new and the old games that will win you over, it's also the similarities. As with the Sims 1, it's the little things that will endear you to the new game. I love the way my parents dance to the stereo in their underwear just after I've left for school (they're surprisingly limber for people in their early 50s), the way I close my eyes in an expression of musical bliss as I play on the family piano, the way my dad goes to work in a noisy helicopter (he's a business Tycoon) and my mom wears a silver robot hand as part of her work uniform (she works nights as Mad Scientist), the way the Grim Reaper takes out a cellular phone and calls up to verify his claim over a freshly-dead corpse...all in all, a winning package.

I feel obligated to address the way the game runs on my system. I run Mac OS X 10.4.3 on a G4 Powerbook. I have a CPU speed of 1 GHz (which is less than the requirement of 1.2 GHz given by Amazon) and 512 MB of memory, and I meet all the minimum video requirements. Notice that my system hardly meets the exacting standards many reviewers claim are required to play the game. In spite of this, the only real "bugs" I've noticed are somewhat slow loading times and some choppiness each time the "camera" pans across the neighborhood I've just uploaded. More recently, I've experienced some very severe bugs that have made gameplay impossible, but these are most definitely caused by the horrible scratches that have accumulated on the game disc-my fault, not the distributor's. I expect that the University expansion pack I ordered will fix these issues. Anyway, I'd take race_of_doom's advice and run the Aspyr Game Agent before you make the decision to buy this.

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