The Sims 2 [PS2]

The Sims 2 stormed PCs last year, becoming the hottest selling computer game of 2004. Not bad for a game where not paying attention might result in your character wetting himself. The series is a success because it's a doll house, human being simulator, dating and family sim, and much more. It's clever, refreshing, and vicarious fun for the whole family. Now the phenomenon is heading for consoles, and we got to test drive the upcoming PlayStation 2 version.

Given the dissimilarity between a gamepad and a mouse, the game plays quite a bit differently. Instead of being able to only hover over your Sim family like some kind of video game-playing god, the console version lets you zoom into a tight third-person close up. It makes the game feel a bit more personal, at the expense of being able to watch what everyone in the house is doing. It's a trade off that doesn't necessarily make the game better than the PC version, but PC users are likely to want to see it patched into their next Sims game.

Start the game and players are presented with two options: story and freeplay mode. Freeplay is a sandbox, your goals are your own, and the experience is a lot like the PC game. But that option is best suited for players who've completed the story mode, simply because of the game's quirky new gamepad-based controls. Story mode provides a tutorial to the game mechanics, and makes things much easier to grasp.

The Sims is a simple concept. You make a little computer person, customizing appearance, clothing, etc., and then you choose aspirations (like romance, money, and more). Each sim has fears, wants, and needs; these occasionally randomly change and are always based on what your sim is doing. If he's doing badly at work, his fears will reflect this.

Needs are the stuff a sim has to do, like eating, sleeping, going to the bathroom, and having fun. As these meters fall, the sim becomes less happy and will start ignoring your orders or failing at tasks. A tired sim with a high cooking skill can start a fire in the kitchen by accident just as easily as a sim with no cooking training whatsoever. The game becomes a balancing act between doing what you want to do, what the sim needs to do, and trying to deal with the always ticking clock.

Sims communicate in a gibberish known as "Simlish," and conversations are just an expanding tree of options. The friendlier a sim is to your character, the more options you have when talking to them. For example, at first you can only tell a joke but once the relationship progresses, you can tell a dirty joke. However, telling a dirty joke to a sim who's not a longtime friend might result in a slap in the face.