Why I Will Forever Love Sims 2

Hello lovelies! What have you been up to today? I'd love to hear all about it in the comments :) My day has literally been filled with sleeping and watching crime documentaries! One of the things that sucks the most about having fibromyalgia is how one day out can impact my energy levels and how much pain I'm in for the days following. Yesterday I had a busy day; I went out geocaching and I had an awesome time. However I paid for it today, waking up feeling like I'd put my body through an intense workout! Regardless, it was still really nice to get out in nature, to hear stones and twigs crunching under my shoes, to hear squirrels foraging through the leaf-litter and birds tweeting, to feel the cool breeze and warm sunshine on my face. I found two caches, spotted lots of butterflies (also took part in my first #BigButterflyCount of the year!), and picked wild raspberries, which were delicious by the way. My legs and feet may have ached afterwards, but it was a good way to spend a midsummer afternoon! 

Anyhow, on with today's post! Which has been inspired by the fact that I can't stop playing Sims lately! Usually, and I'm sure it's probably the same for 90% of us Sims players, I go through momentary phrases of really wanting to play the game, binge-gaming for a few days, and then my game doesn't get touched again for months and months! XD So different to when I first discovered Sims as an 12 year old and was obsessed with it! Especially when it came to making a Sim version of myself and my celeb crush, and investing hours after school ensuring we were married, had a dream house and lots of kids! Don't lie, you know you did this too! 

However, I have been randomly reignited with a love for playing Sims, not as much as back in my teens, but I've still been playing it a heck of a lot! So, I thought why not blog about what's kept me going back to this game for last 10+ years (gosh, I feel old now haha!) and why it is that I still play the 2004 edition of this game, when there's now a 3rd & 4th version! I hope you all enjoy reading, and that you can relate! I'm sure I'm not alone in my love of The Sims :) 

5 Reasons why I just love playing Sims 2 so much! 

(1) I just really enjoy playing RPG's (or role-playing games), they are my favourite type of game. The Sims was one of the first ever games of this kind that I played, and it's been a part of my life for longer now than it has not. I first discovered Sims 2 when a friend of mine got the game and we would play it together whenever I hung out at her house. This was around the time when I also got my first computer when my brother gave me and my sister one of his old computers (he used to love taking apart, building and modifying computers when he was a teenager!), and so I asked my mom to get me the Sims 2 game for Christmas that year. Back then, PC games were in CD Rom form and I had to use four separate disks to install the game :D At least by this point, we were no longer restricted to just using floppy disks :D Who remembers those things!? 

(2) Something that really appealed to me about Sims 2 in my early teens was how much of an escape it was, that you could just live out (as much as Sims allows) a different life for a while, if that even makes sense. You could create people to look however you wanted, to do whatever job you wanted or to live out their lives however you wanted them to. At that age especially, it was nice to be able to design a Sim to symbolise yourself 'in the future', to create yourself how you wanted to be when you were grown up. Who else used to do this? It was cool to make your sims whoever you wanted them to be! I still enjoy this now, although it's much more in a nostalgic sense, than to create a reimagined digital version of myself :D

(3) I love the creative freedom that Sims 2 offers! You can do whatever you feel like with your characters. Want an alien baby? Sure! Wanna spontaneously set fire to your kitchen? Do it! Fancy having a vampire-next-door in your neighbour? Just get your Sim bitten by one! The possibilities are pretty endless! 

Although Sims 2 is pretty outdated compared to what you can do on RPG games nowadays, I really like the simplicity of it. This point relates to my previous one about making your Sims be however you want them to be, but for different reasons. It's just fun to create people and imagine up storylines in your head for how you want their lives to play out. Playing Sims as an adult has just made this aspect more enjoyable for me, because I now literally come up with all of these intricate backstories in my mind for the characters that I am creating. It's like I'm bringing the words of an unwritten novel of mine to life! Sometimes I even have to jot down all of the Sims that I'm creating and how they are going to interact with one another so that I can remember all of the complicated ideas that I had when I first decided to make them XD I feel like such a dork telling you guys that, haha. 

(4) I am someone who has always hated any kind of conflict, I prefer to avoid confrontation as much as I can because it makes me so anxious. When I was growing up, I would never stand up for myself, or get involved in any sort of debates or drama. There were plenty of times when I wish I could have had the nerve to say something, to voice my opinion and to argue back whenever someone was walking all over me or acting like a jerk to me or one of my friends. I always had a lot to say but would just keep it in. I'm a lot better as an adult, but I still make a point to not get involved in drama, even if I really want to say something. 

This brings me to another reason why I feel I enjoy Sims. I like that you can create all sorts of drama when it comes to your characters lives, you can make them go through all of the challenges that you see on TV dramas and you get to decide what happens. It's fun to be in control of that! The Sims 2 helps to satisfy my inner bitch so to speak! :D Everyone loves a good drama, with lots of shock factor moments and The Sims lets you cause that, from affairs to forbidden love to suspicious deaths... you can express your internal sadist? , the little devil on your shoulder can be in charge for once, as though you are George RR Martin killing off all of the characters we love in Game of Thrones/ A Song of Ice and Fire T_T 

(5) Playing Sims 2 makes me feel like a builder, an architect and an interior designer all at once! I can just spend hours making a dream house for my Sims! It's really fun to keep coming up with different designs so that no two houses are the same on my game. Sometimes I honestly just go on my game, spend ages making a house and decorating/furnishing it, and then turn my game off again, without ever playing out the characters lives at all! Let me know if you do this too :D

Why am I still playing this version of The Sims after all these years!? 

♥ Something that I really like about Sims 2 is the design of the characters themselves. I love that the people that you can create look cartoon-esque, they remind me in some ways of an anime style character. As EA Games released newer models of The Sims games, the characters started to look more and more realistic, with their features resembling real human characteristics more and more, and there's just something about these characters that I don't like. I can't speak for Sims 4 because I've never played it, but I played Sims 3 once and I really didn't like how the characters looked. I don't know why I prefer the older character graphics, because I love the design quality of characters on the RPG's we have now so much, but maybe it's because I'm a 'creature of habit' and I'm so used to Sims looking this way that I can't imagine them any other way. 

♥ Another thing that I like about Sims 2 is that you can recreate a whole town, giving it whatever name you want and setting everything out however you like. I usually save all of the houses that I like from the three towns that are already on the game, and then delete them, creating a new town of my own. I'm not sure whether this is something that's only possible on Sims 2, but I like that this game gives you the ability to do it. 

♥ I've already mentioned house making in this post but I feel like it deserves a place in this section as well :) From what I've heard about the newer Sims games is that they aren't as good as the Sims 2 when it comes designing your own house from scratch, and that they focus more on the Sims characters themselves and their lives/jobs. This is honestly now my favourite aspect of playing the game and so if I wasn't able to do this, I think I'd get bored of the game easily. The novelty of being able to design your own characters and control to an extent how your characters lives pan out has mostly gone because of the advances we've seen in RPG's over the years, but something that I feel is unique to Sims 2 alone (and maybe the others Sims games but I don't know about those) is how you can create a home with all of the different design options. I just love it so much! 

♥ The final point that I want to include about why I'm still playing the Sims 2 after all this time is because it's such an easy game to play. It doesn't require you to concentrate much, you don't have to follow any on-screen instructions or complete any timed quests to move onto another level, etc. Sure, your Sims have aspiration goals that you can complete to make them successful and happy virtual people, but this is all optional, you don't need to do them, you can do whatever you want on the game. If you get bored with something, you can change it and you can delete your characters whenever you want and start again. 

A bonus reason why I love Sims 2 are the cheats that you are able to use, which makes completing your characters aspirations even easier! There's a cheat that gives you £50,000 everytime you type it in, and another that makes all of the creator's testing cheats available, so that you can do all sorts within the game with not much effort at all. Being a spoonie means that there are times when I am too tired to do or think much, I cannot concentrate or I have little motivation, but Sims 2 is something that I can do most of the time because it doesn't require me to pay much attention or use much energy. Whenever I'm bored, I will always consider playing Sims, and it's something that I don't need internet connection for, which is great when my wifi is playing up or whatever :) 

So, those are some of the reasons why I love playing Sims 2 so much and why I can't see myself stopping anytime soon. I can imagine myself still going back to this game every now and again for the next 10+ plus years! It's just one of those classics that I can't help but love to play, just like all of the PlayStation 1 games I adored as a kid. They will always hold a place in my heart, and be memorable to me for all of the times they helped me distract myself from the things I struggled with when I was a teenager (Thanks EA Games!). I am going to enjoy my current passion for playing Sims 2 whilst it lasts, before I put the game on my shelf and ignore it for another year, haha! I hope you all enjoyed today's post :) 

Thankyou for reading!

♥ 

Have you ever played Sims 2? 

If so, what did you think of it? What did you like/dislike most about it?

If you're a fan of The Sims franchise, 

which is your personal favourite version of the game and why? 


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