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The Sims 2 Review - PC

The Sims is one of the biggest games ever. It's broken records in practically everything it possibly could, and is probably the most popular household family game of all time. As we eagerly await the arrival of Halo 2 in November, we've found our meantime dwelling, in the likes of The Sims 2. With its overwhelming amount of new features, animations, gameplay modes, and much more, We're wondering here at GameBiz why you're even reading this review - unless of course, you've alt-tabbed out of your Sim world. Join us as we explore all the cool new features, and the reason why this game has hit the top, even before its release.

Gameplay

For those of you that have played the first game, you may as well skip this paragraph as it's explaining the basics of the Sims world. The Sims is an idea that has become a phenomenon. We all know Sim City and how much of a success that was in the 90's. A smart little cookie at Maxis decided, 'Hey, let's make a game where you control the life of a Sim, or a family of Sims all in the one house, and they can interact with other Sims in a Sim neighborhood!' So here we are now, blessed with the second game in the series (ignoring the heap of expansions that came with the first game). If you haven't played the first game, don't worry - it won't take long to learn the extraordinarily well laid out user interface.

The Sims 2 has so many features, not to mention the enormous amount of extra features that weren't in the first Sims game, that it's likely not every one will be mentioned in this review - however we'll try to cover all the interesting ones. 13,000 animations are in The Sims 2, from simple ones like putting out the garbage and reading your newspaper, to working out in front of the TV, using the newspaper as a paper plane, and WooHooing. We'll leave it up to you to figure out what a WooHoo is. So many animations in this game, that even the Senior Producer Tim Letourneau told us that there isn't anybody working on the game that has seen all of them. This creates an incredible amount of replayability, jumping around to different houses in the neighborhood to control what they are doing, or just to see what they are up to.

Starting a family is now more complex than ever, but it's not a hard thing to do. You can get your Sim's face to practically look however you want it to - fully customisable cheek muscles, eye muscles, and basically everything else. However, you can only choose between two different body sizes, which is slightly disappointing. Once creating the Sim and choosing their clothes for different scenarios, you pick their star sign which will (continued next page)