While the original Sims laid down the foundations of the series, it wasn’t until The Sims 2 came out that people truly begun to realise what the franchise was and what it could be. The Sims 2 expanded on the storytelling aspects and really found itself with the quirky humour and outrageous scenarios that players have come to know and love.
For me, The Sims 2 is a hallmark in my gaming life. It allowed me to cater to my imagination and have fun crafting my own stories. While the first game felt more like a virtual dollhouse, The Sims 2 felt more like a playground.
Creating Stories
The idea of not only taking care of our Sims but actually telling stories with them was heavily expanded in The Sims 2. I remember creating my own neighbourhood and building community lots and houses that I filled with a bunch of different Sims all with their own unique background.
“Simvania” was the name of my town and in it, I had two werewolf brothers whose non-werewolf sister married a vampire while a Witch adopted a few sons who each went their one way, one even got abducted by aliens and fell pregnant with an alien baby (yes, this game was whacky like that).
Then, there was another Sim who owned a shop but he died so I managed to bring him back as a zombie using an item from The Sims 2: University and so he ended up being a Zombie salesman who converted half of his shop’s lot into the local cemetery. It was fun watching Sims busy shopping only to be scared near to death by the ghosts of their former loved ones (bonus points if they actually died).
The Sims At Its Finest
The amount of fun I had in this game is one of the highlights of my gaming life. I’ll always think fondly of my time with The Sims 2. The gameplay amongst all the Sims games is the same at its core but the new things we can do and play around with is where the fun at.
The Sims 2 was a huge hallmark in the series and a lot of players look back at it with great nostalgia. The expansion packs were rich with content and as far as I’m concerned, this was the golden age of The Sims.
In the next part, I reminisce on The Sims 3 which, for me, was a mixed bag.
