What time is
it? It’s Sims 2 expansion time. After all, it’s been about six months and
Maxis/EA keeps riding that franchise by expanding the possibilities of the
world’s (arguably) biggest single-player gaming franchise.
The last
outing, back in September 2007, addressed holiday time for the Sims with the
Bon Voyage expansion. Now it is time to address what the sims do with spare
time in the aptly named FreeTime expansion.
For those who
may not know what the Sims 2 is, it is micro-managing at the ultimate level. You
control the lives of characters in the game, from eating to sleeping to personal
hygiene, as well as their social lives and professional careers. Kids have to be
told to do homework and foster relationships with parents and others.
Expansions have
included Night Life, University, Open for Business, Pets, Seasons and the
aforementioned Bon Voyage. There are been additional content packs as well like
Family Fun Stuff, H&M Fashion Stuff, Glamour Life Stuff, Holiday Fun Stuff …
well, you get the idea.
Each expansion
comes with it’s own problems (for the full rant, see the Bon Voyage story),
which essentially means that any personalized or custom content has to be saved
to a hard drive prior to installation of the new expansion and then moved back
over into the files the game creates. Some content won’t work otherwise.
Ok, on to what
FreeTime offers …
This expansion
truly caters to spare time and expands that to include interactions with others
based off that time. There are new activities that translate out to the new
hobby meter. Sims indulge in a certain activity and the meter grows. If they
maintain their enthusiasm and keep the meter up, they are visited by a
representative from that particular hobby’s secret club and can visit secret
lots. Friends and/or a family member can be invited to visit the secret club’s
lot.
The breakdown
for the clubs is music and dance, arts and crafts, sports, fitness, scientific,
nature lovers, gaming, cuisine, tinkering, and, finally, film and literature.
Each of the general areas breaks down into entertaining categories. Music and
dance leads to ballet, violin, synthesizer and nursery rhymes; arts and crafts
gives way to pottery, sewing, frames (for paintings), and an activity table;
sports fans can practice soccer kicks, a football toss, or play basketball;
fitness fiends will be able to jog, or ride a stationary bike; for the
scientists there is an ant habitat and a telescope; nature lovers can collect
bugs, bird watch or go hiking; gamers can partake in either video or board
games; for the cuisine lovers there is a cooking competition, a nectar bar and
serving platters of food; the tinkerer can tinker, control remote-control cars
or helicopters, play with a model train or restore cars; and the film and
literature fans can read, discuss books in a group, write a novel or watch a
movie.
Now some of
these elements were available before – players just didn’t benefit from doing
them.
The expansion
comes with five new careers – entertainer, dancer, architect, intelligence
(start as a detective and work up to the head of the Sims CIA) and
oceanographer. The expansion also has a new aspirations meter with secondary
aspirations added. Sim parents can study parenting, there is a mysterious gypsy
that will grant three wishes and as a Sim ages, they can designate three NPCs to
age with them. Prior to the latter change, NPCs stayed at one age and generally
when a playable character aged, they left friends behind.
Of course, the
expansion does come with new clothes, but even better is the way that players
can associate one neighborhood with another. In previous iterations, if you went
on vacation, you had to return to your home neighborhood before you could go to
another neighborhood (read that as an expansion neighborhood). With FreeTime,
you can go from University directly to Nightlife, or a vacation spot to a
university without the stop back home.
Ok, that is all
great, but one of the best new elements is the ability to tinker with a
neighborhood after it has been created. You can open the cheat console (control+shift+C)
and type in “modifyNeighborhoodTerrain on” (no quote marks) and that allows you
to raise or lower any terrain area. This will enable you to eliminate a mountain
that is interfering with your town’s expansion.
It needs to be
noted that the disc received for this was not the retail disc, but rather an
advance burn. What that means is that there were some elements that were a tad
annoying that might be corrected on the retail code. For example, at times the
sims exhibited persistent and very stubborn free will in that they flat out
refused to do what they were being told to do – like eat when their hunger meter
was very, very, very low. Instead, they sat on the couch watching television and
the instruction would appear and then drop from the queued screen.
The game’s
controls are more or less the same, while the graphics engine is the same and
the sound has had marginal additions.
What FreeTime
offers is good stuff. The clubs are nice but the real benefit is linking
neighborhoods and terrain modification. Rather than patch in stuff like this,
Maxis packages the changes into an expansion. FreeTime is not a must-have, but
it is a solid addition to the game’s overall scope.
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Gameplay: 6.8
Free will seems to
have been a bit of a problem with the disc received. This was not a retail, so
maybe the dev team had some time to tweak it a bit, but with the disc received,
a sim would be very hungry and refuse to get up off the couch to go it when told
to.
Graphics: 6.5
A few additions in
terms of new physical content, plus the hobby graphics, but this is the same
engine and the game looks the same.
Sound: 6.5
Not much to write
home about.
Difficulty: Easy/Medium
Concept: 7.0
There is some good
stuff here, but it seems that with each expansion there is a teaser of what is
possible and the game does not quite go far enough (as in, the logical
advancement of something is done incrementally to leave content for another
expansion). The whole concept of “FreeTime” could easily have been incorporated
into Bon Voyage to create a more robust expansion that dealt with down time from
work and such. Instead, it is broken into a couple of expansions.
Overall: 7.0
The ability to rework some of the terrain in existing neighborhoods is very
nice, but it should go a little further. Still the game does offer something
more than merely adding a new zone/neighborhood and that makes it a solid
addendum to the Sims 2 franchise.
