The best Sims game turns 20 today, calling forth a wave of warm nostalgia in the face of the franchise's uncertain future

Like many children, I grew up playing whatever video games I could get my hands on, my early choices dictated largely by parental preference and what the owner of the sole computer shop in my rural hometown chose to stock. The original Sims was the first game I ever successfully lobbied to own: actively seeking it out — and my subsequent fascination upon actually getting to play it — was, with hindsight, a fairly significant early expression of my emerging personality as a 10-year-old. As you can probably imagine, therefore, four years and countless mercifully-untracked in-game hours later, I was about as hype for The Sims' first-ever sequel as a geeky 14-year-old can get. Read: extremely. And because life is nice sometimes, I was destined not to be disappointed.

All of which is to say that there's no denying the nostalgia factor at play here; but I still maintain that The Sims 2 was the high point of the franchise. And, while this isn't an uncontested view, it's not exactly a niche opinion either: it's a stronger candidate for the title than The Sims or The Sims 4, certainly; and while The Sims 3 has a lot of fans these days, the room temperature read seems to suggest it's an even split at best.

The Sims 2 wasn't criticism proof on launch, of course, even if it came in for less flack overall than its eventual sequels. For players of the original game, this was their first experience of going back to a base game without the add-ons they'd spent the previous four years (and a significant chunk of money) collecting to expand their experience. The conspicuous absence of features like pet ownership, vacations, fame, magical powers, and urban nightlife — all of which had been added through the original game's seven expansion packs — came in for a measure of criticism, especially once it became obvious that EA and Maxis fully intended to sell almost all of those features again for The Sims 2 in what amounted on a basic level to remakes of said EPs.

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