It’s usually quite hard to give opinions about an expansion pack of a game, you have to take into account what the package brings to the table in the larger scheme of things. If you see it this way, The Sims 2 Seasons does very little to change the way that the Sims 2 as a game works.

So far there have been many expansion packs for the Sims 2, allowing you to start your own business, tame some pets, go to university and hit the town - all on top of the things that the original version did so well. Seasons, as its name suggests, brings seasonal whether conditions and activities to your virtual families. You can finally brush up some dead leaves in autumn, catch some rays in the summer or even make a snowman in the winter. Clearly, the Sims 2 Seasons won’t make too big an effect on the overall experience of the Sims 2 but will complement it fairly well.

I must admit, before I had played Seasons I’d only dabbled in the original features of the Sims 2 so I went and created a new character to make use of the new climate system introduced to Pleasantview. The Sim creator in the Sims 2 works much like any over character creation tool in video games. You pick basic body size, skin colour, name, clothes, facial features etc. Once you are happy with your creation, you pick a star sign which will best determine how your character will act around others. Satoshi here was chosen as a Virgo and tends to be a quite clean but not very outgoing as a result of that. You then go on to pick aspirations and goals for your sim which they attend to during their life times. It’s all quite interesting from a technical point of view because the game has to keep hold of lots of information and use it to determine how relationships and actions are affected. A sign of things to come then from Will Wright’s next genre breaking title ‘Spore’.

When you are finished creating your character you leave the creation screen and proceed to find a suitably priced house on the map with which you can do whatever you want. You can build walls or knock them down, buy material goods or sell them, its just like reality (except, you can’t exactly do this on the fly in real life).

The Sims Seasons brings lots of different things to the mix. It primarily incorporates in-game seasons which change every five days of game time. Each season has its advantages and disadvantages, for example in the winter you can make your own snowmen. This system is kind of broken though, the different seasons change and flow consistently in one house but once you leave that household and enter another one, it could be a completely different season all together. This lack of consistency lets the game down a little by not being entirely universal. The same can be said for the aging system introduced in the original version which means that unless you play with each household equally and let them all grow up at the same time, you could end up with one families children becoming older than their own parents!

The game as a series has its own little problems in my opinion. The Sims 2 is hardly perfect but is in fact extremely fun, the amount of things you can do with your sim families is beyond belief. It would take you many years to discover every little thing about this game and its many expansion packs. If you have a lot of free time and you enjoyed games like Animal Crossing and Harvest Moon you could find that this game is quite to your liking. However, you may find that the Sims 2 is a fairly overwhelming experience as it has a large focus on keeping up with everything and being on top of a lot of things at one time. It is however a very enjoyable experience when you get past the largest barrier of the game - its large amount of features.

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