In this new expansion pack for The Sims 2, the weather's great. Wish you were here.
The Sims 2: Seasons is yet another expansion pack for The Sims 2, adding content and cost to Electronic Arts' wildly successful game about life. It includes weather, gardening, fishing, and a few new career paths. These features may not sound like much, but they're enough to make this one of the best expansion packs in the series.
The best of The Sims 2's expansion packs were the ones that changed life for all your sims. For instance, University added a new life phase, setting aside a stage of youth for sims to go to college. It was optional, but it was a great coming-of-age subgame. And even for sims who didn't go to college, University added a system of influence. Particularly charismatic sims were able to sway their friends and enemies.
But the weaker expansion packs only catered to specific sims. For instance, if you didn't want a sim who ran a business on the side, Open for Business didn't change much. If you didn't want your sim to invest in the considerable time sink of feeding and training a pet, the Pets expansion was superfluous. Somewhere in between was Night Life, which added an unnecessary layer to romantic interactions.
Fortunately, Seasons is one of the better expansion packs for The Sims 2, second only to University. By adding weather, the world around your sims comes alive. It's hard to appreciate until you see it in action, but the new weather is a thing of beauty. Rain, sun, and snow are such a significant part of the human condition that it's hard to imagine going back to the perpetual bland springtime of the previous Sims. What used to be a static outdoor plot is now a showcase for rain and snow.
Winters are spectacular, characterized by the lonely sound of cold wind and occasional, almost magical snowfalls. Sims churn up snow as they walk around outdoors. Snowballs and snow angels and snowmen abound. It's impossible not to be charmed by a visiting penguin having a conversation with a snowman you just made. And when spring arrives with its explosion of green and blooming flowers, Seasons really comes into its own. The Sims 2 has never looked better.
The weather is thoroughly integrated into the rest of The Sims 2. You can revisit your favorite locations -- the frat house in University, the clubs in Night Life, or just the community lots in the original game - and you'll see spring rain and winter snow. Watch your sims trudge off to class through deep snow or stop to play in the puddles during a storm. Whereas many of the expansion packs felt like side lots you might never visit, Seasons touches every part of the game.
The seasons aren't just cosmetic. Each sim has a little thermometer to show whether he's too hot or cold. During cold weather, your sims keep warm with a new outerwear costume. You can kit them out with scarves and heavy coats. They'll automatically put them on before they go outside or take them off before they come in. This does a great job of reinforcing the distinction between indoors and outdoors, something that's often minimized in The Sims 2, where you might as well keep your furniture outside if there's no room in your house.
Weather has other effects beyond temperature. Lighting might strike trees and burn them. Seasonal activities like catching fireflies in a jar let you add mood lighting to your houses. A snowman on the front lawn adds to the environmental appeal. You won't be able to fish in frozen ponds during the winter. What's more, the seasons reinforce one of the central concepts of The Sims 2: passing time. The addition of aging was one of the greatest innovations that The Sims 2 added, and now Seasons gives that process a powerful visual backdrop.
The new neighborhood of Riverblossom Hills will let you jump into several pre-made families. One family introduces you to the alternative lifestyle of PlantSims, which are Seasons' counterpart to the vampires in Nightlife and the alien hybrids in Strangetown. You can take control of Leod McGreggor if you want to immediately try an experienced gardener and fisherman.
Drawing from the talent system added in Open for Business, the Seasons expansion pack lets you earn talent badges for fishing and gardening. Think of these as special skills; unlike your sims' normal skills, such as cleaning, cooking, and logic, your talents unlock special abilities.
The fishing is a bit disappointing. Your sim just stands around at the side of a pond and eventually earns a fish that can be eaten or mounted as a trophy. But the gardening is a full-featured subgame. From the house building interface, you can plot out a garden, and even close it up in a greenhouse if you want to garden during the winter. Then, based on your sim's skill level, you can plant different crops. You can even earn feedback and cash awards by calling in a representative of the local gardening club.
With watering and weeding your plants, gardening is a real time sink. If you have the money, you can install sprinklers and hire a gardener. But it's one of the more gratifying time sinks thanks to the way the plants grow and your sims learn to produce new crops. In addition to improving your talent level, the payoff for gardening is the money you earn from selling crops and winning awards. You can also use the crops you grow and the fish you catch for cooking, which is one of the most fully developed crafting subgames in The Sims 2. By further fleshing out the cooking, gardening and fishing tie neatly into the rest of the game.
Finally, there are four new career paths with their own commuter vehicles, special events, and career rewards. There's nothing quite so tantalizing as seeing that magical idol in the career rewards screen. Maybe it's time to send a sim along the Adventurer career path to see what it does?
The main drawback to The Sims 2: Seasons is the price. Electronic Arts is hitting you up for another $30 for this new content. It's a bit ridiculous that playing The Complete Sims 2 will cost you about $200, but that's what happens when a big publisher stumbles onto a cash cow like The Sims. To get the most bang for your buck, we recommend The Sims 2 with University and Seasons. It's still not cheap, but it's the best way to see The Sims at its best.
Through rain, sleet, or snow, this latest expansion delivers.
I wonder what the record is for the most number of games of a given subject. Mega Man certainly had a lot of them, but if we count expansion packs, I think we've got a new record. The Sims 2: Seasons makes the fifth expansion to The Sims 2, and the twelfth overall including the original Sims. Throw in three core games and three stuff packs, you're up to eighteen separate titles for The Sims on the PC alone.
Last time around, we got pets added to the mix. The greatest problem with the Pets expansion pack was the lack of any core gameplay additions, instead focusing on the four-legged critters that really didn't add that much to your little Sims' lives. Electronic Arts has greatly (and we can't stress "greatly" enough) made up for that with Seasons. This is, indeed, a true expansion pack, successful in every sense of the word.
The Sims - the original - had its Sims in perpetual time, never aging. The Sims 2 introduced time, as Sims age and die of natural causes. However, this time passing went largely unnoticed, because aside from the sun setting at the appropriate time, nothing changed.
In addition to temperature, you'll see visual indications as well. Weather is finally a part of the game, and you'll see rain and snow fall in their appropriate seasons. Snow actually sticks to the ground and, in the case of a house without roofs, furniture and objects. Download the tree, kinara, and menorah from the official Sims 2 website, and you'll really be able to set up some Christmas, Kwanza, and Chanukah memories.
Speaking of objects, there are plenty of new ones, both for homes and the community. You can set up skating rinks, both of the ice and roller variety; if you have Open for Business as well, you can have a family own one of these places as well.
As always, the game is very customizable. You can set the seasons and in what order they occur. If you just hate autumn for some reason, you can trade it out for something else. You must have four, but you can have two periods of winter and two periods of spring, for example. This works well for neighborhoods that are in the desert, for example, which wouldn't see anything but summer all year round.
As if this all wasn't enough, there's a ton of little additions that would go unnoticed by anyone but longtime Sim fans. Six new careers have been added, giving your Sims the ability to dip into journalism, law, music, adventuring, education, or - our personal favorite - professional gamer. (The first time I saw that the starting level of the Gamer Career Track was "Noob," I smiled.) Other little things, like new social activities and the ability to put away leftovers in the fridge, deepen the experience further.
Everything new in Seasons is easy to grasp right out of the box. Numerically, Seasons doesn't add a tremendous number of objects; however, it will take you many hours to see and do everything, and even then, you'll want more.
The graphics and sound are largely unchanged, but that's not surprising. If you've used your MP3 collection for the Sim radio, you won't have any reason to give it up. Graphically, while the enhanced weather effects are slick, nothing has been overhauled. Par for the course, really: the gameplay additions are tremendous, but everything else? Not so much.
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