The Big Additions

There are tons of new additions that set "The Sims 2" apart from the original game. Let's take a look at the most significant upgrades.

Graphics Makeover

The original Sims world has a functional 3-D type look, but, by today's standards, is fairly limited graphically. Maxis built the sequel around a top-shelf 3-D game engine, which allowed them to make more detailed environments, more detailed sims and more detailed motion. Among other things, sims wear textured clothes, that flow around the body, they have complex skeletons with separate articulated fingers, rather than hand "paddles," they exhibit a range of facial expressions, they blink, and they have shadows and reflections.

The world is fully 3-D which means the camera can move around to show the action from many different angles, just as in most action games. The Maxis team put in tens of thousands of animator hours to give the sims a wide range of movement.

Improved Sim Builder

Taking advantage of the advanced graphics capabilities, the Maxis team built one of the best character creation systems to date. Players can create their own sims in detail -- not just by picking from available clothes and facial types, but by actually manipulating every aspect of a sim's face to sculpt an original character. By mixing and matching features from pre-loaded sims and then making your own tweaks, you could recreate your own family's faces, or even celebrity faces. Or pick two different faces and mix them together, using a slider control.

Aging

In the original game, your sims might die eventually (in a cooking catastrophe, for example), but they never got older. Create a school kid, and it will stay in school forever. In "The Sims 2," your Sims age through six stages: infants, toddlers, children, teenagers, adults and elderly adults. And just as in real life, things that happen to a sim at one age, affect who they are at another age.

This progression is built around the "Life Score" system. Basically, what your sim does and how it feels are largely determined by how it fares in "Life's Big Moments" -- a first kiss, getting married, having a child, etc. Sims with a lot of experience with important events (both good and bad), will have more "depth" than sims who haven't experienced as much.

Sims of all ages in "The Sims 2"

Photo courtesy EA Games

Memories play a much bigger role in the sequel than the original. If a Sim lives with a nurturing, happy family when it is a child, it's more likely to be a happy adult Sim, while a Sim with bad parents has a greater chance of being a relatively unhappy adult. If a sim hurts itself on the patio as a kid, it may have a strong aversion to the patio as an adult.

Aging adds significant levels to the game, but Maxis isn't forcing it on players. If don't want a bunch of dead sims on your hands, you can switch off the aging feature.

Makin' Babies

In the original game, you could give your sims children by simply creating kids that live in the same house, or your sims might even have their own child. But the new character would never grow up, and wouldn't necessarily have much in common with its parents. In "The Sims 2," adult sims have and raise kids the old fashioned way: Two sims "play" in bed or a hot tub (this isn't shown explicitly), and soon after, they may end up having a baby.

The game has a virtual DNA system that decides what the child will look like and act like, based on the parents' physical characteristics and personality traits. The system is designed to mimic the way heredity actually works. For example, features are designated dominant and recessive, just as in real genetics.

In this way, you can have many generations of sims, who are actually linked to each other, rather than a bunch of separately created Sims living in the same house. Over time, you'll see the traits of a family evolve, through many generations. According to the sims designers, you could create billions of unique sims with the game.

Smarts

One of the most important new additions is improved AI. The new sims are much more aware of what's going on around them than the original sims. They notice when other sims are fighting, they recognize and remember when one sim is mistreating (or even cheating on) another sim, and they pay attention to each other's mental and emotional states. One overriding mission for the developers was to make the AI multifaceted enough to boost the realism of the sims' behavior.

When sims fight, the other sims stop to check out the action.

Photo courtesy EA Games

Those are the biggest of the big ideas in "The Sims 2," but there are plenty more interesting additions. In the next section, we'll look at some particularly cool features.