"The Sims Derailed"

The Sims series has always been one of my personal favorites. The idea of being in complete and total control of someone's life was always fun, no matter how mundane the task. However, that all died with this installment.

The Sims 2 is an example of game designing gone wrong; the developers took all that was right about the original Sims (e.g. the massive amount of customization available, the ability to design your Sims' house, complete and total control over your Sims' lives), chucked it all out the window, and slapped together a third-person "adventure" game and tacked on the name The Sims 2.

The gameplay for The Sims 2 is thoroughly unimpressive: sloppy controls, minimal customization, a very short game length, and little to no replayability all conspire against this game.

Moving is pretty straightforward; press the control pad and your Sim moves in that direction. 'K, not so bad. However, this is in a pseudo-3D world, where you are expected to move in more directions than just forward, backward, leftward and rightward, meaning the four-way directional pad really hampers your ability to move efficiently. You can "interact" with other sims, but it's really just you selecting a few "interactions", watching your sim do...something, and then hoping the other sim doesn't just shrug it off and cause your sim to grow embarrassed (since, after all, we all know it's perfectly logical for people to faint after failing to perform a magic trick. Not.)

As far as customization goes, you get to choose an "aspiration"; romantic, friendly or threatening. This chooses your base "interactions" which you must successfully perform a certain amount of times during each episode (more on that later). However, you don't even get to pick your sex, so if your a girl you'll be forced to play as a male character. No matter what, that male character will be thin and wear the exact same style of a shirt; you do, however, get to pick from a handful of generic colors to apply to it. That's about it. In theory you could customize your house, but any (decent) furniture costs waaaay too much for most people to even bother with, especially if you consider how hard it is to make money (you must play little inane mini-games, with such enticing points as running from an obese soda can monster, in which you repeatedly press the same button to jump over obstacles on the 2D set, and one of the more interesting ones: picking up cow dung in a tractor. Wow, sounds fun; I get to drive the oversize crap scooper. Joy!)

The game itself is extremely short. I beat it either the day I got it or the following day. Each episode can last between an hour or (if you get stuck) several hours. None should take too long, and there aren't very many to begin with. Replayability takes a real hit as well; it's hard enough to stomach it the first time, do you really want to do all of that again?

EA did, however, take the time to throw in a plot, perhaps the highest point of the game. While a plot goes completely against everything a Sims game should stand for, so does everything else in this game. You are an actor, and Daddy Bigbucks is the director of a new television show, Strangetown. He wants you to move to the town and liven up the city so as to boost his ratings, and he's compiled several different "objectives" to do just that in each episode. That's about as deep as it gets. While mediocre at best, at the very least it gives the game a direction and makes the tasks bearable. For the most part.

Graphics-wise, this game really disappoints, but it's a helluva lot better than a lot of GBA games. While the GBA may not be the strongest system in the world, it is capable of more than this game. Take a later game, for instance. The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap is for the GBA as well. Yet, it has far more engaging graphics, to the point where they are actually appealing (even more so than a lot of N64 games). This game is somewhat blocky and uses a lot of generic backgrounds; it's difficult to tell one section of the city from another, people are undetailed (though still discernible, thank God), and objects are kind of...meh.

Musically, The Sims 2 takes a real dive. There are a handful of themes for the episodes. Whichever theme the episode has, it loops incessantly, to the point where you WILL turn down the volume on your GBA. I don't recall any sound effects, but that may have to do with my muting the game after about the 100th replay of the "mysterious" theme, which, quite frankly, grows depressing.

All of these factors: mildly adequate (yet still sloppy) controls, playing inane mini-games to make money, the lack of real customization, the decent graphics, the mediocre plot, and the down-right abhorrent music all contributed to my final score of this game.

Reviewer's Score: 3/10, Originally Posted: 06/21/06