It can affect your Social meter into the orange zone, even the red. But I guarantee your Fun will always be green.
Okay, stop. What on earth am I talking about?
The Sims 2, taken after it's succesful successor (clever, huh), is the latest Sims made from Maxis/EA Games. That doesn't include the expansions, so be cool. There are lots of good things and a few bad things about this game, but overall it's safe to say that if you were a fan of the first Sims, you'll wanna play this one as long as your body and computer can handle it. You may think, "Ptsh! You're full of it, DarkMessiahNF, Total Access Subscriber to GameSpot! (just so you all know)." I know deep down that after you FANS play it, you will do one of two things: Be stubborn and refuse to admit I'm right, or you can just admit that I'm right and we both replenish our Energy bars happily.
First off, let's go into the graphics. It's very well done, and it kinda gives you that cartoony-yet-detailed feel. Assuming you have a high-performance machine, the object models are very well done. Gimme a few weeks (my Internet crapped out on me) and I can show some good snapshots taken from the game. I'll get into new functions in a bit. The people actually have all 10 phalanges (fingers for you under-educated folk) and the hair doesn't look half-bad either. The clothes are kinda off at times, but aside from the lack of male genitalia, they are pretty anatomically correct. Although, in this one every female has the same sized breasts (obviously teens are smaller, duh).
The houses are amazing. Even though in The Sims: Livin' Large you could add a second story to your home, The Sims 2 lets you go up to however many floors you want, depending on what you set the limit to. I forgot the code, but you can find it floating around here somewhere. Anyways, you get every kind of object you can think of, and if you can't find it in the game, there are places you can find them and download them to your Downloads folder (My Documents\EA Games\The Sims 2\Downloads).
There are new functions to the game? Well certainly, my little minions. You have better camera control (which I recently found out that if you wish, you can set it to original Sims camera) so you can actually get a first-yet-third person perspective on your Sims. There's actually a horizon line. Oh, and you have a roof too. Your Sims house actually LOOKS LIKE A HOUSE on the outside. Take a picture, it'll last longer.
There's the Camera option. Snapshot and Video. You can hit the C key and the game takes a picture for you. You can make some wacky photo albums or whatever. I caught one of my Sims making a hilarious face during Yoga so I made a forum banner with it. If you hit the V key, you can start recording video. Normally it lasts about 30-60 seconds, tops. If you go into your Camera options, you can set it to whatever you want. Mine is now at 2400 seconds. 40 minutes. Lemme tell ya, when I make videos, I make videos. If there's a scene that you want to catch in your video but don't want to stop it and start a new file, you can hit the B key and it pauses it, then you can pause the game and set the camera up how you want it (see next paragraph) then unpause, wait a second then hit the B key again and it'll continue recording. You will enjoy your results.
There's also the Camera Man option you can use for moviemaking that allows you to get close-ups of your Sims and lets your camera go places you can't go in normal mode, like in a small room with all the walls currently standing up. Hey, if you want to make a movie, at least make the set look real. To access this option, hit the TAB key.
Q - Moves the camera down
E - Moves the camera up
W - Moves forward
S - Moves backward
A - Moves left
D - Moves Right
Z - Zooms in
X - Zooms out
Mouse - Moves the camera field of vision to look anywhere, though it's as if the cameraman isn't moving, just the the direction the camera is looking in
There's this new system called Aging. I think you've heard of it. It's when you grow older as time goes by. Though the Sims 2 is based on real-time, they're not THAT real-time. Their aging process is a gratefully quicker, so you don't have to spend 80 years to develop your toddler into a senior citizen. That's for real-life, which is hard enough. Newborn babies grow into toddlers 3 Sim days after birth. From the first day as a teen, it takes 15 Sim days to turn into an adult. Adults take 29 Sim days to turn elderly, then old folk just die eventually, unless you drink the Elixir of Life, which adds on 3 whole days of life. Wow... 3 days.
The Expansions are definitely a good plus. University adds on 4 new jobs, which you can only get if your Sim has a college degree (starts after you send your teen to college, which if you don't they go straight into adulthood and miss out on the new spiffy jobs, one being a Superstar. Movie actor or voice actor or whatever. Another one is an Artist. Come on, you know you want that job.
Nightlife allows you to drive a car to work and basically everywhere you go instead of carpooling with someone or taking that smelly taxi. They have added vampires to your neighborhood townies, so if you befriend one of them, you become one of them......I'm still working on that one. They have Turn-Ons and Turn-Offs, which makes finding love either easier or harder, but nonetheless it's awesome. Nightlife also adds the system option of viewing your entire neighborhood from your lot, so you can see your neighbor's houses. Just not your neighbors. That's that the telescope is used for during the daytime. Dirty perverts.
Open For Business, which I have yet to buy, is bound to be my favorite one. You can basically run your own business either on a community lot or from your own home. I have used a special program called The Sims 2 Homecrafter Plus to design my own wallpaper that has my company name on it, so I can make my own office building when I get that expansion. My company is actually going to be game design (in real life, not Sims) so I can find something close to that, I suppose. A few hacks and a couple days on SimPE (a program you can use to make custom content for The Sims 2) and I can have my own game design company.
You can also have ghosts in this game, which they only come out at night. They appear by how you kill them. Fire, drowning, flies, falling satellite, electrocution, hunger, disease, fright, and just plain getting old. Your female Sims pregnancy is now new age, so it seems more realistic. If your adult male Sim gets abducted by aliens, he comes back pregnant. I find that awfully hilarious, and definitely worth making a movie about.
There's another new addition called Aspiration. Basically, your Sims get wants depending on what they wanna do with their life. If you have the Knowledge aspiration, they'll wanna see a ghost or get abducted by aliens or gain lots of skill points. The other Aspirations are Fortune, Romance, Family, and Popularity. Nightlife adds the Pleasure aspiration, which we can all guess what that one is. To have fun, duh! What'd you think I meant?
There's a bunch more, but all-in-all, you get the basic idea of this game. It's worth playing, that's for sure. The main thing I love about it is that you can add your own custom content. Especially music for the radio, or videos for your TV or video games. I have Half-Life footage in place of SSX, that snowboarding game they put on there. It's an EA thing, I guess.
Now if only I could create my own radio station, or TV station..
Anyway, thanks for taking the time out of your not-so-busy schedule to read this... what, you actually had stuff to do, yet you come on here to read reviews? Ha... you wished.
My name is Dark Messiah. This has been the highlight of your day, good bye.