The sims 2 ign review

A text review may suffice, but why not treat your eyes to tons of direct-feed video and your ears to detailed commentary from IGNPC's Editor-in-Chief? Download It Now How can you not smile at the different ways the sims dance depending on their personalities? How can you not be pleased when outgoing characters are giving other sims in the room a thumbs up as they walk by?

How can you not throw a fit of laughter when a man in a top hat and a cute blonde teenager burp in each other's faces for fun? There are so many wonderful animations of the cute, disgusting, touching, playful, exciting, amazing, and clever things that we see in life right there on the screen for your virtual people to act out.

The combination of actions happening in the house can be downright hilarious and bizarre. The Sims 2 is a brilliant simulation but also a wonderful caricature of life in general. And that's what you have to remember when playing this game.

It isn't about completing a lofty goal of saving the world. Not reaching the top rung of the corporate ladder doesn't mean you failed. A dirty house and toilet isn't the end of the world.

This game is about experimentation and creativity, whether you're setting up relationships or building a crazy house. You can almost equate it to a very strange canvas. Maxis is selling some amazing tools to create all kinds of things from architecture to full blown stories. It's up to the gamer to take those tools and use them however they see fit. And that's the most difficult thing to understand. As I said earlier, I didn't really understand when I was playing the first game.

I was used to playing games that have specific goals. The Sims 2 declares that having goals is almost a distraction to having fun. Don't get me wrong, if you want to think of the game that way, it's possible.

You can move your sims up to the top of the corporate food chain, help your sim-kids and teenagers get into private school, or even complete abstract goals of affording the best TV on the list. But those are side shows to the main events of watching the personalities interact and sharing experiences with the community. Maxis added several different features to improve on the original and improve on it they do.

The first of these is the ability to use either one of three prepared neighborhoods with an interesting background or create your own from scratch using one of several neighborhood terrains.

Players can now create different sized lots, place houses, community centers, and environmental items like balloons, rocks, trees, clouds, birds, and so on. The neighborhood story can be added to, modified, and made creative easily with their new story creation tool. This tool works not only for the neighborhood, but also for each individual house. The game also adds a movie making feature which allows players to explore their inner director.

It isn't the easiest to make perfect movies, but with a little practice, there's sure to be some great movies online before too long. You can even use a simple movie editing tool like Windows Movie Maker which comes with Windows XP to edit the files into a coherent movie of some sort. The only thing that might be a concern is that taking high quality movies with this tool will slow down lower spec machines. Even on my Athlon 64, with a Gig of Ram and a GeForce Ultra, the game ran fairly chuggy while taking high quality movies.

The movies were certainly passable, but weren't completely smooth because all of that was happening on the same computer. Still, it's certainly a welcome feature for players that don't have the resources to buy an extra computer to capture and record video. But what would the stories or movies be without characters and drama? Maxis has added loads more of each on top of the story creation tools.

Take the character creation tool. It's about a thousand times better than The Sims original. While players won't be able to adjust height or limb length without developer cheats because of requirements to make animations look natural, they will be able to have an unprecedented amount of face customization.

There are so many deformation points and options that it'll be hard for players not to play with the tool for hours. I had several of my friends give the game a whirl over the last couple of weeks to see their reactions and how easy the tool was to use for those that hadn't seen it before and the reaction was quite good. My fiance spent a good hour and a half simply playing with this feature and experimenting, happy the entire time. I can guarantee that I've personally spent at least hours doing that myself.

The range of faces players will be able to create is extreme. Some of the faces can be downright disturbing and then watching those sims breed with other sims to create half-breed freaks is even more disturbing and fun. The addition of breeding, genetics, and aging is also a big move from the original. There's a whack-a-rat style game where you smack zombies with shovels. There's even a symbol-based dance game.

Fortunately, they're all really fun. You'll play the communication mini-game far more than the other types. Instead of just watching two Sims engage in conversation, you now need to "win" conversations by playing a symbol-matching mini-game. You need to match the symbol floating in a Sim's thought bubble with a three symbols found at the bottom of the page. It's easy at first, but the better the relationship you have with a given Sim friend, soulmate, etc the harder it gets. It gets to a point where it just feels cheap, but not for the reason you're probably thinking.

It's the constant load times. Since each phase of this mini-game is timed, you'll get screwed several times as the PSP chugs to read information.

In addition to the story and mini-games, you also get a slew of little additions with the PSP iteration of the Sims 2. Take secrets, for example. You learn secrets from other Sims by engaging in specific types of conversation. If you want to learn a personal secret, then you need to flirt. On the other hand, if you want a dark secret, you'll need to intimidate people. You can also find secret tokens scattered about the gameworld. Secrets come in different varieties such as occult, personal, dark, romance and even undead.

You use certain secrets to advance the story, but you can also sell secrets to shady Sims who always want to be in the know. Of course, selling secrets will get a Sim mad at you, and the better the secret, the better the price will be.

It's a fun, rewarding system and a great addition to the formula. Some of the bigger changes have to do with communication. You now have a sanity meter, represented by a jewel on the bottom left part of the screen. Depending on how well you're doing, this jewel goes from platinum, to gold, to green, to red.

Your sanity level affects how a Sim reacts to you during conversation. The saner you are, the easier it is to win friends or intimidate people.

You gain sanity by completing aspirations, which are ever-changing goals depending on your personality. Aspirations are listed as icons on the left of the screen and range from reading, to sleeping, to making new friends. You lose sanity by failing at the communication mini-games or by getting scared by ghosts and zombies. Like secrets, the sanity meter is very cool addition and makes the game a little easier to deal with for gamers that want quick, not-so-complicated game sessions.

Finally, the game features something called perks. You get the first perk, a cell phone, at the start of the game. But you can buy tons more and they're all fun to use. Some help you intimidate people or flirt with people, while others help you increase your skills faster. Most perks carry skill requirements, so you'll need to build up your attributes mind, body, charisma, etc to use them, but it's worth it.

Perhaps the coolest and meanest one lets you burn people to get information from them. Unfortunately, virtually every aspect of the game gets screwed due to rampant loading. Want to access game options? Tools are the key to help you through your island existence, but you won't simply find these items washing up onshore from the wreckage of your boat.

Instead, you'll need to acquire items in your surroundings, such as bamboo, vines and palm fronds to create different objects. However, you can't simply make things at will - you'll need to acquire plans for different items based upon the resources you gain and the skill that you have. These blueprints dictate what you need, where you can build these items and what skill level you'll need to successfully create them. There are fifteen separate categories that you can build items from, ranging from tools and clothing to furniture and building walls.

Unfortunately, the blueprints are one of the largest issues within the game. Not only do you randomly acquire them by getting to different island areas, gathering different objects or finishing different tasks, but you never find these items placed in the standard creation menu that you open next to a crafting bench.

Instead, these are contained in the Plans menu whenever you hit pause. Here, for some reason, you can randomly build and place these items in the traditional "free form" Sims creation mechanic, as long as you have the requisite items for their construction.

However, you are constrained by your environment - you can't clear out the plot of land you have, so you're frequently forced to place items solely around the space that the island affords you, which can be very limiting for the creativity of the person playing. There's no explanation as to why the game splits up plans in this manner or hampers your island development, but it is somewhat frustrating to realize that you need to find supposedly new items in a separate menu, then hope you have the space in an environment to use them.

Apart from the building of items, you obviously need to take care of your Sim's needs, such as remaining clean by swimming in the ocean, going to the bathroom with a never-ending roll of toilet paper, and gathering food. For some reason, every Sim that you create immediately tests out every unknown plant or floral item by grabbing a piece of fruit off of it and instantly chows down on it. Common sense would dictate that you could easily kill yourself from something poisonous, and while your Sims will sometimes vomit green, they seem to have an iron stomach which is extremely strange.

But apart from these basic necessities, you'll also need entertainment in the form of music, relaxation and even relationships. Castaway handles this in a number of ways. Single players can always look to befriend imaginary friends, creating sand creatures or other beings to talk to, interact with and even fall in love with.

It's a bit strange, but being alone for that long might cause some delusions within some people. Wilson the Volleyball, anyone? Sims can also take some time and befriend chimps that live on the island, who they can use as additional gatherers of resources on the island. The same can be said for fellow Sims that you've created, which you may need to travel to nearby islands to track down and befriend all over again.

Oddly, once you've made these connections, these friends manage to continually pop up wherever you happen to be, and after enough conversation invested in these characters, you can recruit these characters into your personal tribe, giving them jobs such as cooking, hunting and gathering. It's fine in theory, but for some reason, you may find that you constantly need to micromanage these characters in your tribe, as they won't perform a number of basic maintenance functions for themselves.

For instance, many of them won't bathe, sleep when they need to, or cook food, forcing you to always take care of them. Now, one thing that the Sims has always been known for on the PC was its ability to put a strain on system resources for its graphis thanks to its technical specs. This has really come to pass on the PSP, with a huge number of glitches that will crop up, such as having tools that will face the wrong direction when your Sim uses them, or items that appear and disappear during play.

In fact, I created an axe with the requisite materials, and found that it had disappeared from my inventory. Only by attempting to collect wood from trees did I find that the tool still existed for my character, which is just a weird choice, since every other tool was properly listed with my gear. What's more, the camera can be zoomed in so tightly on to your Sim that elements of the environment will easily disappear from view. That includes scattered materials in the environment on the ground.

It's annoying when you try to approach something on the ground and you have to run around for a few seconds until you stumble onto it.