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The Sims 2 for PS2 Preview

The monster selling PC hit is making its way to the living room. How has The Sims 2 fared in its transition to consoles?

By Andrew Bub

The Sims 2 stormed PCs last year, becoming the hottest selling computer game of 2004. Not bad for a game where not paying attention might result in your character wetting himself. The series is a success because it's a doll house, human being simulator, dating and family sim, and much more. It's clever, refreshing, and vicarious fun for the whole family. Now the phenomenon is heading for consoles, and we got to test drive the upcoming PlayStation 2 version.

Given the dissimilarity between a gamepad and a mouse, the game plays quite a bit differently. Instead of being able to only hover over your Sim family like some kind of video game-playing god, the console version lets you zoom into a tight third-person close up. It makes the game feel a bit more personal, at the expense of being able to watch what everyone in the house is doing. It's a trade off that doesn't necessarily make the game better than the PC version, but PC users are likely to want to see it patched into their next Sims game.

Start the game and players are presented with two options: story and freeplay mode. Freeplay is a sandbox, your goals are your own, and the experience is a lot like the PC game. But that option is best suited for players who've completed the story mode, simply because of the game's quirky new gamepad-based controls. Story mode provides a tutorial to the game mechanics, and makes things much easier to grasp.

The Sims is a simple concept. You make a little computer person, customizing appearance, clothing, etc., and then you choose aspirations (like romance, money, and more). Each sim has fears, wants, and needs; these occasionally randomly change and are always based on what your sim is doing. If he's doing badly at work, his fears will reflect this.

Needs are the stuff a sim has to do, like eating, sleeping, going to the bathroom, and having fun. As these meters fall, the sim becomes less happy and will start ignoring your orders or failing at tasks. A tired sim with a high cooking skill can start a fire in the kitchen by accident just as easily as a sim with no cooking training whatsoever. The game becomes a balancing act between doing what you want to do, what the sim needs to do, and trying to deal with the always ticking clock.

Sims communicate in a gibberish known as "Simlish," and conversations are just an expanding tree of options. The friendlier a sim is to your character, the more options you have when talking to them. For example, at first you can only tell a joke but once the relationship progresses, you can tell a dirty joke. However, telling a dirty joke to a sim who's not a longtime friend might result in a slap in the face.

Pausing the game (or simply pressing "Square") brings up the wants and fears that your sim is plagued with -- fulfilling them is your job. Sims have to learn tasks so the first few times your character needs to use the bathroom, players have to point it out to them. In third-person mode this is easier, because players can simply guide the sim to the facilities. In fact, the very first task the tutorial challenges you with is fulfilling a desire to, naturally, jump on a trampoline. Bouncy, bouncy, and we can watch the sim's fun meter fill up as his energy level dips slightly.

In story mode, you have a bunch of roommates, male and female. Very soon, our character found himself talking animatedly with a lovely brunette. They told dirty jokes, showed each other their hand puppets (seemingly every sim in the game has a sock puppet), tickled each other, and became friends. Our character's wants shifted and soon he was focused on this comely roommate. She was eventually buttered up and they began making out. Meanwhile, a male sim nearby was getting more and more angry. Perhaps his girlfriend had been stolen? That's the kind of game this is.

Interestingly, EA has added a two-player splitscreen option. Two sims can occupy the same house but only one can communicate with the other at a given time. Admittedly, some marriages are actually like this. But in gameplay terms, wouldn't players prefer being able to interact at the same time, rather than, for example, making sim-husband give sim-wife a kiss and let handing over control to let sim-wife reciprocate.

To generate your character, the game creates two random parents, and then mixes their "digital DNA" to create your character. Then you can customize their look, personality, and clothing as you see fit. Bear in mind that people who enjoy this sort of customization can literally spend hours mixing and matching things like underwear or nose size. Some things, like special earrings or shoes, are locked until in-game goals are completed by the character.

The customization is very powerful; it shouldn't take anyone long to build a character who looks like them. Well, unless you're very overweight. What the game considers "obese," most people think of as "a little chubby."

The Sims 2 is nearing completion and, based on our experience, it looks like a winner to anyone new to the wild, weird world of Will Wright's Sims. We also expect it'll appeal to PC players looking for a different -- or multiplayer -- experience within a game construct they already love. Look for our full review when the game ships at the end of October.