The Sims II Professional review- Game Directors

Being a sim used to be hard work. It was all hanging around being directed by a disembodied cursor waiting for permission to do things such as squat over the toilet, or get dressed. It was undignified. And then, one sunny day in Sim-land, somebody decided it was time to get away from the game's PC roots and become a proper console conversion. Out went the cursor-clicking, in came third-person direct control, and with it the whole shebang went into orbit. The Sims 2, believe it or not, is action-packed.

Yup, in this new instalment you can build a wave machine in the back garden, become a mad scientist and get abducted by aliens, or even just die, then come back and haunt everyone. All this is more than helped along by the new interaction system, which now lets you simply walk up to an item and use it. No more fiddly interfaces, no more pointing and clicking - it's all properly intuitive, making tasks that much easier to perform. You won't feel like you're spinning plates in The Sims 2.


There's also a new aspiration, exclusive to Xbox - alongside the usual Wealth, Popularity, Romance, and Knowledge, EA has introduced Creativity, which means a lot more Sim tasks based on cooking good meals, writing books, painting pictures, or acting. You can learn recipes then cook meals for friends (or poison your enemies). Of course, the size of your fridge dictates how many items of food you can store, so you'll have to work hard to obtain the goodies on offer. There are some 250 different items that can be bought and interacted with - plus a further 250 items of clothing, making for some 15 million different clothing combinations.

The idea of seeing your Sim through birth, parenthood, middle age, death (and beyond!) from the PC version of Sims 2 hasn't been included for the Xbox version, though, which is a shame. But it's still the most adaptable Sims game yet. You can customise your Sims right down to their eye colour or facial shape, and if you tire of the norm of homemaking, career-chasing and hot-tubbing, you can always starve to death then haunt the living to please SimDeath. Do his bidding, and he'll return your Sim to life.

Sims fans will have wondered where the hell a series that encompasses pretty much everything in real life already could go in the sequel. Well, The Sims 2 has gone to those strange new worlds (frying your food actually makes you unhealthy!) and beyond. Travel through time, die, do whatever you like - just make sure you go to the toilet regularly and mop up the inexplicable heaps of trash that accumulate everywhere. It's the same old Sims, and yet so utterly different. Draw the blinds and say goodbye to your friends - real life doesn't get any better than this!

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