Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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84 of 84 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The essential Sims 2 upgrade, April 10, 2006
Fun:5.0 out of 5 stars
I've been playing Sims 2 on the PC since it was introduced and own all 3 upgrades. Now, I've bought everything available for the Mac to play when I travel. Frankly, I wouldn't want to play Sims 2 without Nightlife.
Dating is the most important capability Nightlife brings to the game. I find it tedious to build and maintain relationships with the base game. Dating lets you monitor both sides of a social relationship, and also tends to focus the participating sims on each other. This makes it easier to build strong relationships and to fulfill high-value wants and earn aspiration points. If you have lots of aspiration points, you don't have to resort to cheats to maintain needs or to keep sims from aging before you want them to. The first thing you'll want to do for any sim you play is to give them at least one strong dating relationship so they can top off their aspirations when they need to. Let's face it, it's easier to face going to work when you had a little hot romance the previous night.
The essential dating tool is a car. Now you can go out or drive to work in your own car. Picking up your date in a hot car immediately improves the date score. But the real reason for owning a car is that if two sims are seeking initimate reactions and a car is on the lot, chances are they'll want both WooHoo and WooHoo in Car, which nets you double rewards for a single interaction. If you have a car, a little time on a date can quickly make the sims' aspirations go platinum while building up lots of aspiration rewards that let you buy Energizers, Elixer of Love dispensers, and Thinking Caps. With those, you can make your sims accomplish almost anything you want.
Chemistry is a new Nightlife feature that can be a lot of fun. By defining Turn-Ons and Turn-Offs for sims, chemistry simulates what we all feel, greater attraction for some people, less for others. NPCs have their own Turn-On's and Turn-Offs, but can specify them for sims you play and change them when you want. When you let sims function autonomously, chemistry works with memories and other attributes to make their interactions more complex. When you control the sims, it's easier or more difficult to establish friendships and romances, depending on the chemistry they sims feel for each other.
New with Nightlife is the ReNuYuSenso Orb, which lets you change sims' Aspirations as well as their Turn-Ons and Turn-Offs. With the Orb, a sim can start out with a Family aspiration and change to a Knowledge aspiration when the kids are in school. In other words, your sims deepest desires can change as they mature. I use the Orb a lot.
Nightlife includes Downtown, which provides a many more destinations the sims can travel to, including restaurants, clubs, and bowling alleys. Sims 2, even with University, is a bit dull in terms of social destinations. You'll find dating a lot more interesting in Nightlife. You can also send sims on friendly outings. Outings are more challenging than dates since you're managing interactions between more than two sims, but they enable your sims to meet strangers and start building relationships with large numbers of people. When your sim is invited out on an outing, they'll arrive at a destination with several friends, some of which are likelyk to be strangers. If your sim is on a career path that requires lots of friends, outings can make it much easier to get the friendships started. (I still miss some of the things you could do in Sims 1 parks, such as sailing boats. In Sims 2, parks are pretty dull places by comparison.)
In summary, the emphasis of Nightlife is on sim's social lives. Relationships are richer and the range of social interactions is much more extensive. I'd hate to play The Sims 2 without Nightlife.
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61 of 63 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
An important note about expansion packs, August 23, 2006
Fun:5.0 out of 5 stars
As other people have noted here and on the other Sims 2 game pages, you MUST have the right machine specs to run this game and have a good time, and you MUST check the Aspyr website to download any available patches. I have a brand new Macbook with tons of memory which ran the Sims 2 base game like a dream... AFTER I installed the patch (before the patch it tended to hang a bit).
But here is an important word of warning. If you plan to purchase Universty, Nightlife, or any other expansion pack, you should only download the patch for the LAST expansion pack you installed. In other words, I have the base game, Uni, and Nightlife installed, and I ONLY installed the Nightlife patch. I realized this after much irritating trial and error and emails to Aspyr tech support after installing the patches for both the base game and Uni. If you install more than one patch--even in the "right order"--your game will not run and you will get an error message telling you to reinstall the game. And that means ALL the games--the base game and all expansion packs. I had to do this 3 times because the directions on the Aspyr website were not clear about this point.
Furthermore, make sure you open the unpatched game at least once before you install the patch. None of this useful information is on the Aspyr website and my suggestion that they include it was met with a "Thank you for your interest, have a nice day." I see that many other people have had negative experiences with Aspyr tech supprt as well. It's too bad that such a fun game has a Mac port with such an indifferent publicher behind it.
Save yourself the aggravation!
--Back up your game file
--Download only the patch for the latest expansion pack you install
--Make sure to open the game once before each installation of a new expansion pack and/or patch
Hope this helps other people avoid my tribulations!
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12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Fun Continues with Sims 2 Nightlife, August 1, 2006
Fun:5.0 out of 5 stars
The fun continues with Electronic Arts and Aspyr's The Sims 2 Nightlife Expansion Pack. The basic premise of Nightlife is to add pleasure to the lives of the Sims and to give them a richer social life. This is accomplished with many new additions to the game. There is a new aspiration in their lives by the added Pleasure Seeker aspiration. The Sims just want to have fun!
The Sims 2 core game is necessary to install the Nightlife Expansion Pack. Installation was easy as double-clicking the Installer on the DVD and following the onscreen instructions. Nightlife came with a 12 page paper manual which is all inclusive and very helpful. Nice touch! To start the game, double-click the Sims 2 icon in the Applications folder on your hard drive. Loading one of the three town locations, as does going downtown, takes a minute or two. The time taken was not disconcerting considering the richness of the resulting screens and actions. It is worth the short wait!
The Sims can now date, form groups to go out, have them a good time, purchase cars, build garages, go out on the town to restaurants, bowling alleys and nightclubs. They don't have to depend on the taxi or carpools. There are many new item objects, some of which include a DJ Booth, poker table, Electro Dance Sphere, photo booth and coffins. Coffins are needed to keep vampire Sims protected from the sun. Vampires roam downtown looking for victims so you should be wary.
You can now take your possessions with you if you move to another house with the new addition of personal inventories. There is also a lot of new art and furniture collections to buy to add to the Sims enjoyment.
The Sims 2 Extension Pack is all about social interaction. Dating is a mini-game within a game. Dating Sims have a certain amount of time to raise the date satisfaction level which then adds more time to the date. New actions allow Sims to ask each other what they want and like. They can now "scope out a room" to determine who might be most interested in them. Look for good chemistry and lightning bolts! There are individual turn-ons and turn-offs to be considered, a new Gypsy matchmaker if you have enough Simoleans (Sims money) and buying the new ReNu Yu Senso Orb to change your Sims life's aspirations. The gypsy can also cure the vampire Sims aversion to daylight with potions if you have even more Simoleans to cross her palm.
Group outings can be fun and keep the Sims busy. You must consider the personalities of those whom you invite to make the outing a success. If you are not careful, a fight may break out. "Woo-hoo" occurred in the core game but there are now more places and opportunities for it to happen. You can control the Sims to a certain extent but they do act independently at times. I like that the Sims can now eat out in a restaurant instead of having food delivered or buying expensive pizzas. In the Sims 2 core game, my Sims were always falling down from hunger. It seemed that by the time they took a taxi to town, they were hungry with very limited access to food.
The game can be as easy or complicated as you want. There are many screens for the novice player. The more seasoned players can keep a family of Sims going through many generations even as the elder Sims die. The family's offsprings retain many traits of the parent Sims just as in real life. We may not have vampires roaming our downtown but life has its ups and downs and is unpredictable just as the game. I love the Nightlife Expansion Pack and if you enjoy the Sims, I think you will too. I highly recommend it!
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