Cat celebrates The Sims' 25th birthday with a chaotic playthrough of the first two games as someone who was too young to enjoy it the first time.
Happy 25th Birthday to The Sims, everyone’s favourite game for drowning roommates, love affairs in dumpsters and doing push ups in the middle of the street.
The Sims 4 is easily my most played game ever (last I checked I’ve logged over a thousand hours…), so it’s no surprise that I leapt straight into the rerelease of THE SIMS LEGACY COLLECTION and THE SIMS 2 LEGACY COLLECTION with extreme enthusiasm.
First of all, a slight disclaimer; I never really played The Sims 1 and 2 as a kid. Other than sharing The Sims 2 Castaway with my older sister, The Sims 4 was my first introduction to the franchise, so, for me, there wasn’t a significant nostalgia factor with this rerelease, other than the nostalgia of crunchy UI styles. However, getting to throw myself into the beginnings of one of my favourite games has certainly been an experience.
So, without further ado: a retrospective on The Sims 1 and 2, written by a twenty-something who just loves building cottages.
TS1 gave us very few choices to work with, as can be expected from the first game of the series. As someone so used to the expansive customisation offered by TS4, it made such a limiting experience feel less enjoyable for me, kind of like playing with my hands tied behind my back. Clothes came in full outfits, hair changed faces, and there were only two skin options - it was, perhaps, the quickest Create-A-Sim (CAS) experience of my life.
Building wasn’t much different. There were no swatch choices for furniture, and finding matching woods felt nearly impossible. Colours didn’t match, and I would often need to repeatedly hover over the icons to try and figure out what the items were. However, there was a piece that nonetheless made it an overwhelmingly positive experience - the Forgotten Guinea Pig Painting. This painting paid off my student loans, cleaned my skin and fixed my anxiety. It is impossible to have a negative experience when this bad boy is on your wall. I put one in every room and two in the bathroom.
Moving on to gameplay, I loved that there was a model train set as a hobby, and I definitely jumped in the Hole in the Ground to Magic Town way more times than I’m willing to admit. As far as I’m concerned, these are the two things that make the best games. Aside from this, relationships were hard to build and felt generally unfulfilling. I found myself abandoning the game quite soon after this point, simply because it didn’t give me the same feeling as The Sims 4, and that was ultimately what I was searching for. All in all, it wasn’t a bad game - I would say, especially for the 2000s, it was a fantastic one - but it simply didn’t compare to how I felt playing TS4.
The Sims 2 was a completely different ballgame. Straight off the bat, loading into the neighbourhoods, I got an immediate cosy vibe that I felt had been missing from TS1. The actual room backdrop in the CAS was a refreshing change to the UI-centric menu of TS1, or the light blue void of TS4.
Options were far more expansive, and the outfit pieces were honestly adorable. There were also outfits for different events, which we didn’t have in TS1. On top of outfits, there was also an expansion on personality traits, and even turn ons and turn offs (which, if you’re up to date with TS4, we only received last year!).
In some ways, I had more fun creating my sim in this CAS system than I do in TS4. I am, however, more interested in building than sim creation, so the build/buy system was the real test. And oh boy, did it pass with flying colours.
Carrying over elements from TS1 that still have not made it TS4, or have only been introduced recently (spiral stairs, working driveways and garages, round pools), TS2 included swatch customisation to a level that still cannot be seen in the modern game - separate colour choices.
Yes, dear reader, you must imagine the tears I cried when I learned I could separately choose a colour for the wood of my bed head, and the design on my sheets. As opposed to TS1, where I found myself doing the bare minimum in order to get on to the next thing, I proudly sat transfixed for 4 hours, playing with different build ideas and colours, to the extent that I had to leave my house half furnished just so I would actually test the gameplay and stop getting carried away. This is where the chaos began.
I gave my sim, Taylor Sift, over to my sister, another avid Sims player, to see her approach to the gameplay. With Taylor, her cat Concrete, a half-furnished house and explicit instructions to have a romantic partner, an enemy, and a friend, my sister was off.
Within five minutes, she was friends with her mail carrier, had various members of a neighbourhood welcome party refusing to leave her house, Concrete the cat had destroyed not one but three couches and she was talking to a fortune teller about setting up a blind date for her.
Within ten, her date had arrived, and her garden was on fire. For some reason, the fire fighters (who she called two separate times) refused to acknowledge the fire on her property, so had continuously fined her for ‘prank-calling’, and had negative social moodlets about her. This, I counted as her enemy. Her date went successfully, despite losing another couch to Concrete the cat in the middle of it. Romance, check.
The mail carrier returned moments later, not to bring mail, but just to hang out. This was her friend. By minute fifteen of gameplay, she had achieved all the goals I set for her, and none of them in the ways she had expected.
The chaos of The Sims, the spontaneity, the whimsy - it was all here. Over the days as I wrote this review, I have found myself steadily drawn back, wanting another hit of TS2, another hit of angry fire fighters, blind dates set up by a mystic and that one, couch-hating kitten.
This felt more like The Sims than sometimes even TS4 feels, and it was such a strong punch in the gut of fun that I found myself thanking every Landgraab, Goth or Pancakes I could think of that it was returned to us.
With all my heart, WooHoo.
A copy of THE SIMS 25TH BIRTHDAY BUNDLE on PC was provided to SIFTER for the purposes of this preview.
