The Sims 2: Nightlife [PC]

One of the challenges the team at Maxis is being asked to make good on is EA's schedule of delivering a new expansion pack for The Sims 2 every six months or so. There's obviously a lot of ideas coming from the team as they consistently delivered with mostly decent to good new content in The Sims. It's pretty obvious they hope to continue the streak with this sequel. The first expansion pack, University, brought a huge addition to the experience by adding an extra "young adult" life segment for the sims you choose to send to college. Not only did it open up some new gameplay ideas, but also gave players more time with their sims. Their latest expansion, Nightlife, adds more items, gameplay, and animations to the core game. It's a nice addition, especially for those that want to be able to get out on the town and experience more of the sim social life instead of the sim home life. It doesn't seem as huge as University did, but those Sims addicts out there will have some new additions to look forward to that could warrant a purchase.

Every Sims expansion that's ever been released has had a theme. In the case of Nightlife, it's all about Sims getting out of the house and experiencing the fun of city social activities. In this way, Nightlife definitely succeeds. Along with the new dating mini-game (which I'll get into more in a second) Maxis has included a large number of new destinations in the new downtown area including dance clubs, shops, restaurants, lounges, bowling alleys, and parks. While a lot of the areas overlap in purpose, they all make use of different themes and sometimes clever architecture and design to keep the similarities to a minimum.

Getting sims into the swing of the social scene has become easy thanks to new features like the ability to ask other sims questions about themselves, the ability to "scope" out a room, go out on outings in groups, and date. All of these things provide a much more active feel to the game than the core product, which focused more on building and interacting within a house. Dates and outings in particular are more active for the player and are very comparable to the Greek Rush mini-game from the University expansion. Each date or group outing starts out by inviting someone or a group of people into the experience. From there, it's a matter of keeping those people entertained and excited to be out.

Dating is probably the most important addition to many players. It allows sims to really spend time with each other in a more private setting while opening up new actions like asking "What do you want?" which will allow the other sim to let you know what will make them happier. The answer could be anything from wanting to eat out with your sim or woohoo it up back at your place. This isn't just an normal date though, it's under the baleful gaze of the clock. When the date starts, you'll have a certain amount of time to raise the date rating to the next level which will add on more time. The goal, of course, is to end up with the highest rating possible. If that happens, there's a pretty good chance your sim will be a happy camper by the end of the night. Like I said, it makes the experience much more pro-active on the player's part, which for some will be awesome. For others, it'll be less awesome.

Making things even easier for potential relations is the idea of "chemistry" which has been added to help your sims find that special someone quickly. It's a nice touch that allows you to focus energy on the sims that will be easier to get to know, especially romantically, even going so far as to point out which actions will have a greater effect on the relationship with a lightning bolt. It had been frustrating in the past wasting time talking to sims where there was simply nothing going on. Along those same lines, sims will have a better time finding someone interesting with the "scope the room" action which will pop up a little dialogue box showing who your sim thinks is the bees knees. Finally, sims will have to contend with turn-ons and turn-offs, which in sound great on paper, but in practice just tend to confuse the issue more. It's hard to remember what your own sims like and some of the time potential dates will refuse to tell you theirs.