Hurried out of work yesterday and straight to the local software shop for my copy of Sims 2. The game’s been getting outstanding reviews, and it deserves every one of them. Last night I went to bed around 11 p.m., but my Lisa was up until close to 1 a.m. decorating and designing her Sims’ house. Since I’ve got the only computer in the house that has the necessary power to run the game, I can see getting kicked off my computer a lot until I break down and get her a more modern machine.
Highlights:
– You need a relatively new computer to get decent performance. I’ve got a P4 2.8 with 1.5 gbs of RAM, a 7,200 RPM HD, but only a PCI Nvidia. Still, not a bad system, but I had to crank down most of the nice effects to get decent frame rates. I’m assuming a new PCI-Express card will solve most of the slowdowns I receive, and a system like mine can be had for less than $1,000 these days, but I don’t think older systems are going to cut it.
– My number one gripe with The Sims — the way it handled add-ons and custom content — has been addressed very well with an in-game content browser and an installer package system that makes it very simple to get content downloaded off the Internet into the game.
– I was really looking forward to the option to record on-screen video, especially since I’ve had quite a bit of success using FRAPS to do this in Unreal Tournament. Using the video capture option at any decent level, however, simply destroyed system performance even if I switched to 800×600 and turned everything off. One thing I strongly disliked about The Sims 2 implementation is the game currently forces you to record video to the same drive that the game is running on as far as I can tell. Stupid. Let me write the video file to my secondary HD to reduce the primary drive’s churning.
– Graphics look great, gameplay with new system of aspirations/fears is an excellent improvement over the original game.
All around, this is a game that is going to suck away considerable hours of my life over the next couple years.