The Sims 2

My wife Ying comes back from CA for a week and helps me pack and move. We played a very popular computer game "The Sims 2" together for a few hours before she got bored. Then I kept playing, trying to master and beat the game. Unlike other games which are so addictive when they starts and become repetitive after a few hours of playing, "The Sims 2" is the opposite: it does not look exciting at first, but you know there is a long way before you can master it.

The characters in the game are called the sims, who have six stages throughout the whole life-span: baby, toddler, child, teen, adult and elder. Their lives are driven by their "aspiration", and their performance is determined by their "mood". There are seven types of "aspiration" which the player needs to choose when creating a sims: Family, Fortune, Knowledge, Popularity, Romance, Pleasure and Grilled Cheese (Eating many grilled cheese sandwiches). Mood is determined by how well their daily need is filled. It can be interesting when a sims has to go to school when he is full of urine; or a sims needs to sleep so bad that he passes out on a couch in a night club.

You can have babies, with human or,.., err aliens. You can choose the action "try for babies" with another person of opposite sex who is in a love relationship with you, or you can use a telescope and get "abduct" by an alien so that you can have a weird-acting alien baby. Unlike other games in which fun comes automatically to you, "The Sims 2" asks you to explore fun by yourself, which you may or may not like.

Another fun part of the game is that you can open your own business, but that needs other tweaks. There are many videos on youtube about many interesting life stories about different sims. This game is the second best seller of computer games of all time, only next to the original "The Sims".

Even though this game is interesting in all aspects, it lacks one characteristic of an exciting game: addictiveness. But since I will start work soon, I can not get addicted to computer games any more, "The Sims 2" might become a casual fun for me.