Bella Goth walks into the kitchen to cook for Mortimer and Cassandra. Resplendent in her bright red iconic gown, she begins to make breakfast. The food will be heated on the stove, and no matter what meal it is, will appear to be meat and vegetables. Except this morning, there’s a problem.
Bella suddenly begins to shout frantically as a fire breaks out on the stove. After a couple of seconds I realise that, despite having the largest house in the area, the Goths did not fork out for a smoke alarm, which automatically calls the fire brigade in times of crisis. Frantic clicking follows as I desperately try to get Bella to extinguish the fire. By now, the phone is also burning. So is another counter. Help is not coming. Welcome to The Sims.
The incident above resulted in three counters, a phone, and some windows being turned to ash while a wave of nostalgia large enough to have extinguished the extensive fire crashed over me. Bizarrely, the stove was completely fine. That’s the thing with this game. No matter what you think you know about it, you’re wrong. It always had an air of unpredictability and even now, 25 years later, the chaos remains strong in The Sims, which I’ve been playing alongside The Sims 2 prior to the release of the games as The Sims 25th Birthday Bundle.
Related
Nintendo Should Complete The Slice Of Life Pikachu Trilogy
Give me another game where I can just hang out with Pokemon.
The Complete Package
Both games have not been properly playable for a while now. Even those of us who have CDs and a copy of The Sims 2: Ultimate Edition from the time EA gave away codes as a promo have struggled. Hacks and patches were required, and issues still persisted, including tiny resolutions and instability. Fortunately, those days are now in the past.
Both games come with all the available DLC packed in, and the scope of each is massive. The Sims comes with all seven expansions, while The Sims 2 is bundled with eight full expansions, plus eight stuff packs and the holiday party pack, which originally came with a special edition of the base game. In short, this is almost every piece of DLC released for both games. No extra releases, no more to pay. You’ll get both early game experiences in their entirety.
The only DLC not included is the IKEA Home Stuff Pack, presumably for licensing reasons.
Nostalgia Levels High
The games themselves are a straight port in terms of content. From the ‘00s technology to the unforgiving fires, every element of the originals I remember is here. But newcomers will quickly notice that there are huge differences between the two games. The Sims is far more basic than you may be expecting.
Create a Sim for example, allows you to choose from male or female then mix and match heads and bodies. For added randomness, many of the outfits are from Command and Conquer and all the heads have hair or hats attached. It’s not until The Sims 2 that you can swap hairstyles, change body type, and mix and match tops and bottoms. Even here, the options are significantly limited compared to The Sims 4.
Building is similar across both titles. Build and buy have yet to be combined, so one menu has tools for walls, floors, fences, doors, windows, and landscaping. All furniture is under a separate tab. You’ll likely find yourself flicking between the two, as moving a door or changing the wallpaper or flooring requires you to go back to build mode. Also, good luck with the walls and flooring. There’s no nice categorisation here. Everything is just thrown into the menu in a haphazard fashion that will give you rummaging through a yard sale vibes – in an ideal world this would have all been refined for the new release, a much easier task than overhauling Create a Sim.
Servos And Genies And Zombies, Oh My!
Where both games shine is in the gameplay, which was the clear focus. Just be prepared for a challenge. If you’ve heard people say that The Sims 4 is too easy, you’ll quickly discover they weren’t lying to you. The Sims in particular is brutal at times. Needs decay fast, fires start frequently, and vacation days don’t yet exist. Your job will consume your life, until you realise that you can skip every other day and be fine. Just don’t miss two days in a row, or you’ll be fired faster than Alan Sugar can climb into his booster seat.
For the Americans, Alan Sugar hosted our version of The Apprentice, instead of… you know.
With DLC being included, there’s a lot to explore in both games. Pets, vacations, and parties are in both games, while The Sims also has magic and movie stars and The Sims 2 marks the point that the occult really entered the scene. The Sims has ghosts and monsters, but The Sims 2 has aliens, bigfoot, genies, ghosts, plant sims, servos, witches, vampires, werewolves and zombies. You can even get spectral cats.
No More Performance Issues
Running a game with all this DLC can often feel like a chore. The number of times Mansion and Garden stuff was cited as an error when The Sims 2: Ultimate Collection crashed is high enough to have made me fearful of its inclusion here. We already know the gameplay can keep us entertained for hours, but it’s useless if it crashes. Luckily, stability and modernisation appears to have been the focus of this port. I’ve played a roughly equal amount of each game over the last couple of days, around eight to ten hours of each thanks to boring things like work and sleep, and so far have encountered no issues at all. No crashes, no lag, not even a stutter. Then there’s the resolution.
I knew The Sims would still be incredibly square. Widescreen wasn’t a thing when it came out, so playing this with black bars down each side was inevitable. However, now I can play it at a high enough resolution that I can read all the menus for once. I still don’t understand the thought process behind some of the designs but that blue formica table in the Newbies house is now ready to admire in all its glory on my modern monitor.
The Sims 2 is even more noticeably upscaled. When it started up, the first thing I saw was that I could play it in ultrawide. I knew these games had been updated, yet I never dared to hope I could explore Belladonna Cove and Veronaville in a glorious 3440 x 1440 resolution.
The graphics settings you can tweak are virtually nonexistent, mostly being tick boxes to turn off shadows or clouds, but it is enough to make things smoother on older machines. Saying that, you may not even need them. My PC is almost ten years old now and runs both games with everything enabled and no problems.
If you’ve ever wanted the original Sims experience, then this is the way to do it. The ports are faithful and most importantly stable.
That busy February
? It just got a whole lot busier.
