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Review: Sims 2 Nightlife
- Title: The Sims 2: Nightlife
- Developer: Maxis
- Publisher: EA Games
- System: PC
- Reviewer: Zonk
- Score: 7/10
The microcosm world of The Sims 2 allows players to vicariously live out the lives of the rich, popular, or phenomenally stupid. The ability for the game player to project their own hopes and neurosis onto their virtual marionettes involves a lot of set dressing. Furniture, art, electronics, wallpaper, and swimming pools are just some of the tools Sims 2 players use to tell their stories. The set pieces that players seem to enjoy manipulating the most, though, are the Sims themselves. "Nightlife" is a generous package of objects, interactions, and locations designed to make lubricating Simlish society more convenient.
Like all Sims expansions, at its core "Nightlife" is a system add-on for the basic game. The first Sims 2 expansion, "University", added on a college campus to the neighborhood as well as a young adult development stage to the life cycle of the Simlish species. "Nightlife" incorporates the highly successful dating system used in the "Hot Date" expansion for the original Sims title. Dating allows Sims to improve their relationship by attempting a 'dream date' at romantic locations like parks, restaurants, and bowling alleys. The date mechanic is extremely useful, allowing two Sims that you'd like to get together the opportunity to improve their social connection in a hurry.
Besides actual dates, you can arrange group gatherings that pull together more than two Sims into an outing. These group gatherings are even more useful for raising social standings between Sims, but can be a mixed bag. Dates and gatherings are evaluated based on how good a time the participants have. While dates, with only two participants, are fairly easy to run group gatherings can be very challenging because of the number of Sims involved. Unattended Sims have a tendency to lose track of what they're doing, and if your gathering depends on everyone being on the same page even one wayward Sim can ruin the event for everyone. While the date mechanic is lots of fun, gatherings could have used a little more polishing.
Social gatherings need interesting backdrops to be fully appreciated, and the new downtown area very much fulfills that need. Downtown is chock full of different places, each themed to a different type of get-together. Rocking out with a group of musicians can be accomplished in the park, while a date might find the candle-lit restaurant more agreeable. Each of the default areas packaged with the expansion is a well thought-out venue for socializing, and they're usually handsome looking as well.
Some more subtle system additions also allow for easier socializing. Sims now have romantic preferences, which result from turn-ons (dark hair, formal ware), turn-offs (stench, workout uniforms), astrological signs and life goals. Sims that have chemistry with each other have little lightning bolts near their names. Likewise, Sims can now have antipathy towards each other just based on their personal makeup. Sims with x'd out lightning bolts will have a harder time than normal having a successful relationship. In practice, the chemistry is just another addition that makes it easier to max out relationships between two Sims.
These like/dislike values play a large role in the life of the Pleasure Seeker Sim, a new life aspiration you can create Sims with. Pleasure Seekers want parties, fast cars, steamy dates, and expensive toys. The Pleasure Seeker Sim I made ("Hef") was a pain in the butt to keep happy. Most of the things that give him happiness are either expensive or require a lot of work to accomplish. As a counterpoint, the Pleasure Seeker isn't very good at living in the normal world. They have a hard time with jobs and chores, making them terrible room-mates. Pleasure Seeker Sims might be an interesting addition to a well developed neighborhood, full of rich families, but for a starter Sim they're just not practical.
A mainstay of Sims expansions are the objects. Adding new objects to your purchasing repertoire is always a goal for a Sims player, and "Nightlife" fulfills that goal admirably. The downtown areas come with a plethora of new objects specifically for dates and group gatherings, like the bowling alley or the restaurant host stand. There are many handsome new objects that are used in the new venues that can be purchased for home use as well. My personal favorite is the karaoke machine, which is a great group activity and painful to watch to boot. "Nightlife" even introduces a new type of object for Simlish consumption: the car. Sims can now have garages and vehicles, adding yet another layer of realism to the game and making traveling to out-of-the-house locations quicker. All aspects of car culture are there in car ownership: listening to music, tooling around for fun, and more amorous activities as well. While every Sim, it seems, ends up wanting to own a car as a life goal at some point they're not absolutely critical. For the most part they're simply convenient for the player who wants to wring every minute out of the SimCity day.
Practical additions, like vehicles, aren't the only features "Nightlife" offers. One completely useless feature the expansion adds is a vampire Sim-type. Vampires can now be found prowling around SimCity, and if you go looking for them you can get your own Sims turned into the restless undead. Unfortunately, it sounds cooler than it really is. Aside from turning other Sims into vampires and transforming into a bat, the amusement factor is sort of limited. Vampire Sims become quite nocturnal, making it difficult to participate in normal jobs and raising family members. The new "type" of Sim idea is interesting, but as far as this expansion goes doesn't see a lot of real use.
There isn't anything here that will shock a current owner, and likely doesn't have any features that might convince a non-player to purchase the game. That said, "Nightlife" is another solid expansion for the now venerable series. It adds on extremely useful systems to the game, opens up new possibilities for gameplay, and incorporates the ever-important new object sets into the title. "Nightlife" gameplay adds a lot of potential to the already entertaining Sims 2. Folks who don't already own the game would probably be best advised just to buy the basic game to make sure they enjoy the gameplay before dropping another $30 for this expansion. For a veteran Sims 2 player who has already tired of college life, though, a night on the town may be just what you need.
I will say one thing for Nightlife. I found the original Sims "Hot Date" expansion frustrating and just downright not fun to play. You had no real idea what you were doing right and wrong, and this seems to have been fixed in the latest version. You're able to see your dates wants and fears, and these are changed to stuff that's fairly easy to do on a date (eat out, tickle etc) so keeping your date happy is fairly easy. (Remember you can influence people to do stuff to you, which sometimes they want)
Now if only on real dates we could have a list of four different things that would make our dates happy, updated as the dates progressed...
People play the game in different ways. For instance, I like fucking up people's lives and watching the entertainment that ensues afterward. Every neighborhood I create has several lesbian grandmas who sleep around, seducing the wives and girlfriends of all the unsuspecting working males. Naturally, I throw in a few tense moments where the male just happens to walk into the bedroom at the wrong time. My old, prominent politician has a lesbian grandma wife, HA-HA!
I also always have the trailer in the corner of the map where the hideous rednecks neglect their kids, leave spoiled diapers lying around for years at a time, don't own a shower, and leave the babies sleeping around on the carpet, just so I can have babbling feral psychos when the kids grow up. And of course, I have the household of five lesbians all sleeping around with each other and swapping beds, slapping each other around, and generally being bitchy to everyone.
I usually have one normal family somewhere in the mix to play with when I get bored with the rampant chaos...
"Sufferin' succotash."
Let's just not go there with the oot-and-aboot stuff. The last thing I need is to imagine a bunch of flappy-headed Canadian Sims, and the notions of "hot date", or worse, "hot coffee", all conflated in something that sounds like Greater Toronto Area: Sim City.
But as long as it's too late for my mind to escape the pain, I may as well share it with you.
According to the UN and various research studies, Canadians have twice as much sex per person as Americans do.
Maybe you're just envious of how cute Canadian girls are, how much longer Canucks live (10 years) than Yanks, and that they actually have a health care system and a budget surplus?
That or you wish you could have hot dates like that.
Mmmm, donuts. Coffee. Yup, that makes me randy, baby!
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
But staring a simulation to see how the character you created will play for you, in the house you designed for him, within the limited options of the game, and with no obvious objectives/victory conditions, does not sound productive or fun at all.
Say you play a RTS game, waste a good 1 hour developing your bases and armies in an online play, you win/lose get an allied victory/ or whatever. The objectives are obvious, and fun.
However with this "game", rather simulation, its like looking at a bunch of rats you PROGRAMMED to behave a certain way, and basically see how far the dev team's creativity goes...
Instead REAL games allow the player to make up his own strategy, and thus creativity.
I've watched someone play this "game", tried it myself for the hell of it.
The result was to simply get bored after a while, since I don't have any fake consumeristic tensions (that is seeing my character earn more and get more STUFF)
Instead I went off to continue on with reading a book that inspires me in creating my own world.
Unlike this "game" and most games, Etheria, my dream world, is about the players and not so much the designers.
Thats what "I" always wanted to do in a game, that is my own thing, not blantantly, but within the laws and concept of the game, but without any fake limitations.
I know what you'll say, it can't be perfect, a game run by the players, where the only thing staff does is run a plot to mark them their own towns/cities/empires.
But at least, if nothing else, instead of wasting my time looking at a sim, I play MYSELF, muhahaha, -creating another world for people to lose themselves in.
True, it can't be perfect, because game mechanics will never be perfect, however why should that stop us or our creativity? Whatever mechanics can't make up or, RP can!
Within the contexts of the world though, since in the "real" world sadly you can't fly around on a dragon, thus wouldn't want to see anyone thinking that'd be possible in my world either! :P
You can have fun with real variables, true! Hence, the sims, but-- only if you could actually really take over that character, and break the limitations.