Zel-kun’s Words

Saturday I installed The Sims 2.  I did so because I had a marginal enjoyment of the first one, and a friend let me borrow it, so the price was right.  I love Sim games, from the beginning when it was just SimCity, the odd SimAnt, the horribly programed yet somehow intriguing SimEarth, and of course the needlessly complex SimCity 4.

The Sims is one of the strangest games I’ve ever played.  Its a game where you build a house, have a person, then you live his life.  That’s right, you eat, sleep, talk to friends, watch TV, and even let your “sim” know when he needs to use the toilet.  That’s right, instead of ACTUALLY taking a crap, you can tell a little virtual man to.

Ain’t life grand?

Nothing interesting happens in The Sims, yet it is remarkably addictive.  You want your sim to be happy, to do well, and you become engrossed in this quest.  If left to himself, your sim would be an unemployed, filthy, out of shape bastard who routinely pees on the floor and cries in piles of his own filth.  You are the only thing keeping this neanderthal civilized and intelligent.

What’s the goal?  Why are you virtually living the mundane life of a mentally-challenged invalid?  To buy more stuff, get more friends, and maybe get some action.  Sounds….. exciting.

For all of my trash-talk of the game, it actually IS fun.  I can’t explain it, but finding time for friends, work, and actually bettering yourself through activities, is pretty addicting.

The Sims 2 is very much like its predessessor.  In fact, its ALMOST a clone.  But, there’s a few key differences that make it worth it.

1. There actually IS enough time in the day to do everything.  In the first one, you either worked, or were reasonably happy.  Never both.  Just wasn’t enough time for both work and a social life.

2.  The creation system was vastly overhauled.  Its comperable to Oblivion in the sheer complexity involved in changed your character’s face.

3. You get old.  And you DIE.  That’s right, you get old and die.  That’s not depressing.  But this is a plus from the first game because if you had a kid, he was a kid FOREVER.  Talk about a parent’s worse nightmare.

4. It doesn’t work for some people.  I popped it in my computer and it worked fine.  I stopped, then I decided to play a little later, and my computer crashed during the startup.  I cursed, restarted, and perused my error logs.  It claimed my video card crashed.  This surprises me being as I play more system intensive games than The Sims.  And I play them often, and this is the first time this video card has given me any trouble.  I start The Sims 2 again, it works.  The next time, a crash.

What the heck?

I start looking online, and sure enough.  Its a known issue.  Apparently, it doesn’t like some types of CD drives.  The obvious fix, a no-CD crack.  I installed this and it starts up perfectly, and much more quickly.  Problem being, the crack has a known issue, you can’t use the Build Mode in the game.

Well that’s just great.  So I can either roll the dice and HOPE my game starts, or use the crack and not have access to one of the game’s main functions.  My luck with computers remains the same after all these years: If there IS a possible problem, then I WILL experience it.

Legend has it there’s another CD crack out there that’s fixed this issue.

I can only hope.

Zel-kun out.