Creating your fantasy home is a lot easier now. There's a handy autobuild function for making square rooms, and placing roofs is a lot less tricky task than before. There are a decent number of objects to build with, and the amount of wall decorations like paint and wallpaper is frankly ridiculous. You can now add decks to the Sim's abodes and with the improved graphics it's very easy to while away the hours creating some hideous/beautiful mansion. If you are into writing stories about your there's a lot more scope to fill in the tiniest details about your Sim's life and its surroundings. The story mode will allow you to create an entire virtual Mills & Boon novel if you are so inclined. On top of the expanded picture taking feature you can now take little home videos, both of which can be posted onto the Sims 2 website for the more narcissistic amongst us.

The improvements over the original Sims are legion, but they do come at a cost, and the asking price for these changes could well be too much for the core group of users that made the first game into such a phenomenon. You see, the system requirements for 2 are rather high. Whereas the original game could run on anything one step above a calculator the sequel requires a good graphics card along with a meaty processor and plenty of RAM. This won't bother anyone who has bought themselves a Dell or some other consumer friendly machine in the last year. However, all those Sims fans that have up until now been happy with their four year old as it could run Word and surf the net on top of transporting them into their alternative lives will find themselves in something of a quandary. Will they want to spend a grand on an all new PC, or will they have to phone up their son/grandson/nephew/paperboy and ask them how they can upgrade their PII 350 running Win 98 with 128 meg of RAM into a machine able to handle the demands of the Sims 2.

Either have a much better understanding of their user base and believe this won't be a problem, or maybe they just don't give a stuff as they are still counting the revenues from the game. Or maybe they are doing their bit for the with the specs of The Sims 2, which will certainly spur a good number of people onto a full upgrade. Either way, if you are tempted to enter the realm of the new and improved Sims bear all this in mind. The game tends to suffer from a nasty dose of the stuckies when there are more than a couple of Sims onscreen at one time, and trips to highly populated areas are best down with the Sims decked out in Victorian finery, to give the resulting slideshow a period feel. Bizarrely, there are lots of people out there on message forums with lower specced machines than mine who have reported no such problems. So there's a good chance there's a problem with the code which will be addressed in a patch.

Still, even with the unpleasant jerkiness The Sims 2 remains a very compelling game. It addresses the longevity that many players had with the original, with the introduction of the aspirations along with wants and fears injecting a previously missing sense of purpose into the proceedings. The whole concept of progeny and DNA also works very well to provide both an extra element to the gameplay as well as a reason to continue playing the game once you have maxed out on all the rewards. The Sims 2 is an enjoyable way to pass an hour or two, with that period of time invariably ballooning into marathon sessions which find you half comatose in front of your monitor at four in the morning, convinced that you will finally go to bed once your Sim reaches level nine in creativity. Paint you wee bugger, paint for your life! The Sims 2 is the latest in a long and distinguished line of games which just suck your life away every time you sit down to play, and no matter how much you try to put a limit on each session the enjoyably compelling nature of the gameplay will fight hard to keep you in its grip.

Maxis are to be congratulated for dragging the previously archaic Sims into the modern world of graphics. The vastly improved graphics are well complemented by the addition of new gameplay elements and the successful tweaking of the old paradigms which made the original Sims both so compelling and frustrating at the same time. So if you are under the impression that The Sims 2 is for girls and housewives and that you wouldn't touch it with my rocket launcher you could be doing the gaming node in your brain a great disservice to pass over this title with such wilful abandon. The Sims 2 feels like the game that The Sims should have been, and as such it does very well in the Ferrago marking system, as revealed here:

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By Sam Gibson