The Sims

[Prophetic Spirit]

imagine actually paying for sims lmao xdd consoomet brain.

That's true. And a lot of people bought these games.
Sims 1 & 2 are just re-releases to "modern computers" but much worse.

 

[Lurkerish Kandor]

EA should've just paid a team of experienced modders to iron any compatibility issues and glitches Sims 1 and Sims 2 have with modern systems but evidently that was too expensive for a company worth billions upon billions of dollars.

Meanwhile, Croteam have enough of a brain to do exactly this. Serious Sam 2 got a "modernization" update like 3 years ago, and basically all they did was get a modder to add the features of his mod to the game and help with some optimization and wide-screen support. Probably didn't even have to pay the guy, although I'd like to think they did.

 

[fartsnstuf]

Local Sims 4 hater LGR reviews the TS1+2 Legacy Collection:

 

[Thiletonomics]

Patches for TS1 and TS2 are out, but people have reported that the new patch made the glitches and crashing issues in TS2 even WORSE.

EA also made this dumb spin comment about the TestingCheatsEnabled command in TS2:

Remember that the “boolProp testingCheatsEnabled” cheat will cause the game to periodically show various dialogue boxes with debugging information in them. The cheat is working as expected.

So basically they're admitting that their game doesn't work correctly.

 

[Book Thief]

As someone who played Sims 2 since its release, Testing Cheats wouldn't spawn dialogue boxes "periodically." It was extremely rare unless you were deliberately fucking with things or used mods that change game behavior. So that's just proof that they've completely fucked this rerelease.

 

[LifeAlert]

The Virgin EA Consoomer:
-pays for shittified, glitchier and DRM-locked rereleases of 20+ year old games
-begs daddy corpo for endless amounts of patches to unfuck their butchered rerelease
-rewards evil megacorp for shitty practices
-doesn't own the game, only has a temporary license to rent which must be validated through retinal, nasal, and anal scan upon launching the game
-"download it for f-free? abandonware?? that's illegal!!!"

The Chad "Backup" Enjoyer:
-plays the game as it was originally intended without any modern fuckery, and without game-breaking glitches
-only gets fan patches to remove CD check, increase the resolution, fix minor annoyances/bugs, or doesn't patch at all
-fucks over evil megacorp by not paying for abandonware
-owns the game forever and never needs to connect to the internet or use a shitty launcher/Orwellian spyware
-"I don't need to pay, I got it for free"

 

[Kane Lives]

So after hearing the news that EA is re-releasing the first two games on Steam, I went and checked to see if the Ultimate Collection could still be accessed and played. (For those of you unaware, in the early 2010s, EA had been giving out TS2 ultimate collection for free on their shitty proprietary Steam-alike, called Origins then. It has been renamed to EAApp nowadays, and apparently about to be discontinued on non-32bit systems lol).

I'm happy to report that it does, indeed, work out of the gate, with only a minimal configuration required (4GB patch, and a config line change). Of course it also requires that you actually claimed this game during that period and to install EA spyware on your PC.

Which honestly makes their bumbling in this """Legacy"""" version all the more puzzling, because the fucking game works like a charm without needing changes. In other words, pirate this shit if you're nostalgic. You get a superior product without needing to give EA any shekels.

 

[⋖ cørdion ⋗]

Local Sims 4 hater LGR reviews the TS1+2 Legacy Collection:

It's always funny when content creators absolutely LEAP onto the chance to clown on a game, then if the game is fixed and redeemed, nobody cares and they don't even bother making another review. The engoodening of no man's sky never undid the initial reviews all these "enlightened non-sheeple" that totally weren't pushed onto them by their favorite youtubers.

 

[Brain Power]

Local Sims 4 hater LGR reviews the TS1+2 Legacy Collection:

TL;DW he's happy the games are legally available again (Lack of IKEA pack aside), but with the bugginess (mainly in 2) it's not really worth it right now. Pretty much what everyone thinks.

It's always funny when content creators absolutely LEAP onto the chance to clown on a game

Nigger, did you even WATCH the video?

 

[Thiletonomics]

Here's another person's rant about the The Sims 2 Legacy Edition, which also mentions about the game-breaking Sims disappearing bug:

The comments in the video were on point too:



The sheer amount of people still defending this half-assed and broken as shit release is absolutely frustrating. But then again, The Sims community has always been more lenient on EA in regards to game bugs, whereas if this were a Battlefield game re-release, people would be screaming at EA, and hundreds of hate articles about the game would come out on gaming news sites.

 

[Thiletonomics]

A second patch was rolled out for TS1 and TS2 Legacy, but people have reported that bugs with TS2 Legacy STILL were not fixed, in typical EA fashion.

The Sims Creator Will Wright did an interview with NYT, talking about the game turning 25 years old. He also talks about how some of the aspects of TS1 were lost in the later games:

Will Wright kindly requests that admirers stop describing him as a god.

“I don’t think God would concern himself with taking out the trash and cleaning the toilet,” he quipped while chain-smoking cigarettes. Besides, he’s an atheist.

But what is better shorthand to describe the man who created The Sims? The influential video game allowed players to act like gods themselves, building virtual neighborhoods populated by virtual families who pay virtual bills and complete virtual chores.

Players could improve the lives of their Sims by constructing McMansions filled with plush couches and flat-screen televisions. Or they could become vengeful, directing Sims to light fireworks indoors and paddle to exhaustion in a swimming pool with no exit.

Twenty-five years later, players are continuing to push the boundaries. Sure, there are glitzy houses and happy families in The Sims 4. But by modifying the game’s code, players have created a health care system as byzantine as the real American one and taught Sims how to wield pistols and knives. The game’s official expansion packs offer their own weirdness. Sims can become vampires and witches. They can even play The Sims.

“I never really thought of The Sims as inherently optimistic,” Wright, 65, said. “I always thought of The Sims as slightly sarcastically nostalgic for a past that never really existed.”

The Sims was a sandbox for the American dream when it was released on Feb. 4, 2000, with Wright pulling inspiration from biology, architecture, comics and psychology to dictate the rules of his virtual dollhouse. It was an unusual proposal at a time when most games were goal-oriented and linear, and a predecessor to create-your-own-adventure games like Minecraft that give players a pick axe and carte blanche.

Although more than 500 million people have played games in the Sims franchise, which is particularly popular with women, it was originally seen as a risk. Executives at the game studio Maxis had urged Wright to focus instead on the SimCity franchise, his urban-planning simulator from 1989 that had put the company at the forefront of American game design. “Everyone in the room hated the idea of The Sims,” Wright recalled.

The outlook initially worsened after Electronic Arts acquired Maxis in 1997. Some managers wanted the game to be less realistic; others wanted to prevent it from being released at all.

But other leaders saw promise in Wright’s vision. “We wanted to make SimCity bigger,” said Luc Barthelet, who was then an Electronic Arts executive and brought in key resources for The Sims’s development team. “But we also needed to invest in designers like Will who were extremely talented and doing things that were different.”

Claire Curtin, who helped invent Simlish, a gibberish language spoken by the game’s characters, said developers refined its social system by imbuing the Sims with needs like hunger, comfort and hygiene. Neglecting those needs could lead to starvation, anxiety attacks and bladder problems.

“When I joined there wasn’t really any social game between the Sims,” she said. “There was no love; there certainly was no woohoo,” she said, using an in-game euphemism for sex.
The final product included the hierarchy of needs — and a lot of shopping.

The Sims was a satirical take on American consumerism. Wright echoed the grandiose claims of postwar advertising in the game’s furniture catalog, which offered Sims toasters and chairs that promised to change their lives. There was often a correlation between the price paid for an item and how much it would improve a Sim’s mood.

“You buy all these things,” he explained. “Fridges and TVs. And all these things promise to make you happy. But at some point they all start breaking down. They become hidden time bombs.”

The Sims were poorly equipped to handle those catastrophes. When a stove caught fire, the entire family would run into the kitchen to scream in terror. They would often allow themselves to be engulfed in flames instead of reaching for an extinguisher. And once the Grim Reaper arrived to replace their bodies with urns, the game had essentially ended.

Each disaster was carefully engineered. “In early versions of the game, the autonomy was too good,” Wright said. “Almost anything the player did was worse than the Sims running on autopilot.” So he infused his simulation with a little chaos to make players feel like anything could happen. Even guinea pigs, introduced as low-maintenance pets, might accidentally bite a character and leave them with a deadly disease.

Wright wanted players to feel like they were gods controlling stupid ants when, in reality, they were actually ants pretending to be gods. Even the cheat codes that could change the moods of Sims or instantly increase funds were intentionally included by developers to make players feel like they were breaking the game.

Ants are a poignant metaphor for Wright, who pulled The Sims through a grueling seven-year development process after the Oakland-Berkeley firestorm in 1991 destroyed most of his belongings.

“When I returned to the ashes of my house, I noticed that the only things still alive were ants,” said Wright, whose insect simulator SimAnt was published that year. “They had burrowed deep into the ground to survive the fire and were living off the dead carcasses of what they could forage.”

Ants use pheromones to communicate with one another, leaving their intelligence across the environment to mark areas filled with food or predators. Wright wondered: Could human intelligence be distributed in a similar way? Instead of pheromones, The Sims uses objects as behavioral markers (a hungry Sim might be automatically drawn to the fridge). It was a modular approach that allowed designers to expand the game — and its revenue.

“A long time ago, I decided that game design is applied psychology,” Wright said.

Even before The Sims was released, developers invited people to create custom content, providing basic programming tools for the invention of in-game furniture. As more players adopted the software, content creators opened websites and offered subscription platforms that provided a steady income.

“The people who were really invested in the game weren’t even playing The Sims,” Wright said. “They were maintaining websites for the community.”

It was the beginning of a community-driven phenomenon that continued with The Sims Online in 2002. “A noble failure,” Wright said of the Wild West iteration where players could interact with one another. Users developed new personas, fueling a national debate about the limits of free expression online. Some players operated digital bordellos; others formed mafias.

“We figured out who the godfather was,” Wright attested as he grabbed his red lighter to fire up another cigarette. “It was the lead homemaker of the Bellagio in Las Vegas.”

A die-hard community of players have learned to create new rules within the game’s code that go far beyond what Wright imagined. They are largely broken into two factions: the realists and the extremists.

The realists started with the creation of a financial system that enabled players to apply for debit cards and take bank loans; later modifications included lawn mowing and funeral services. Extremists introduced madcap violence, allowing innocent Sims to be drop-kicked into lightning bolts. Others had their bloody corpses secured behind police tape as journalist Sims described the scene.

“As much as we have set out to carve spaces particularly for custom content, players will always find some way around,” said Lyndsay Pearson, who was a quality assurance tester on the pets expansion of the original game and now oversees the franchise’s creative design.

Electronic Arts has indicated that there is no plan for The Sims 5 and that The Sims 4, which was released in 2014 and became free to play in 2022, will continue to be supported with the sale of expansion packs. Recent expansions have allowed Sims to become landlords, horseback riders and cottagecore enthusiasts.

“We are committed to reinvent what it means to play with life,” Pearson said. “The world keeps changing but there is always something for the Sims to do.”

Wright left The Sims shortly after its sequel started development, envisioning that the game would evolve into a version of “The Truman Show,” where “the boundaries are as far out as we can make them.”

One joke among current players is to create a secret basement of “painting goblins” who are locked into small rooms. Their basic needs are met while they create piles of paintings to sell for the Sims who live above them.

Wright had since built other universes like Spore, an evolution game where players helped a civilization grow from microbes into galactic emperors, and “Bar Karma,” a television series where viewers pitched the story ideas. His current game project, Proxi, is about transforming personal memories into lifelike characters using artificial intelligence.

“I never really liked the idea of working on sequels,” Wright said of The Sims. “But I’m happy to see the franchise survive and grow in different directions.”

The Sims 2, released in 2004, leaned further into narrative. Players could engineer detailed stories for their Sims, who were equipped with aspirations, desires and fears. Neighborhoods were customizable and spun with a spider web of social entanglements that echoed the desperate housewives and cheating husbands seen on reality television.

One Sim named Don Lothario had a romantic entanglement with multiple women, including Nina and Dina Caliente, two sisters who lived together. Lothario was also planning to marry the daughter of a wealthy family whose matriarch, Bella Goth, had mysteriously disappeared. Players might later discover that Bella was abducted by aliens and deposited in a desert village called Strangetown.

Zooming into this desert pit stop, gamers might discover an odd Stonehenge on the neighborhood’s outskirts. There among the rocks is a Mount Rushmore-size dedication to Wright, sculpted with glasses so he can watch over players’ creations.

 

[Quijibo69]

I got a copy of the new Sims 2 rerelease and it's so bad I've been having problems trying to install it on my computer. I'll see if I can get it to work with the other computers I have.

 

[Xarpho's Return]

The Sims Creator Will Wright did an interview with NYT, talking about the game turning 25 years old. He also talks about how some of the aspects of TS1 were lost in the later games:

Will Wright has always come across to me (as an adult) as a big enough douchebag where the more he talks, the less I like him, but at the same time humble enough to realize the Sim games were good because of the team building it, not himself (something many game devs never realize).

 

[Kane Lives]

I got a copy of the new Sims 2 rerelease and it's so bad I've been having problems trying to install it on my computer. I'll see if I can get it to work with the other computers I have.

Honestly just refund and pirate it like any sane man. You owe EA nothing for this slop.

 

[Bankingway]

I got a copy of the new Sims 2 rerelease and it's so bad I've been having problems trying to install it on my computer. I'll see if I can get it to work with the other computers I have.

Easier solution here if you've not seen it yet, might wanna be quick in case EA's personal army of retarded Creator Network shills do something about it or the Steam reviews get too loud. Gonna echo Kane and suggest you refund it if you haven't already, complete waste of money that adds more bugs officially than the fans have fixed for free.
Shit, have a similar solution for The Sims 1 here, no good game deserves to be churned into rotten meat like these two have by EA.

 

[Demon Mist]

It is pretty incredible that EA cannot release functional versions of these games decades after their original release.

Are we getting stupider?

 

[Thiletonomics]

Will Wright has always come across to me (as an adult) as a big enough douchebag where the more he talks, the less I like him, but at the same time humble enough to realize the Sim games were good because of the team building it, not himself (something many game devs never realize).

Some things Will Wright says does come off as having an ego, and it bares some similarities with Gran Turismo creator Kazunori Yamauchi, who also created a video game series that became a huge hit and is beloved to this day, even though the later games suck. (Gran Turismo 7 and The Sims 4) Wright does come off as a bit more humble though, although I'm not sure if it's because of the cultural difference with the US versus Japan, and GT's success did seem to get more into Kaz's head and made his ego even bigger.

It is pretty incredible that EA cannot release functional versions of these games decades after their original release.

Are we getting stupider?

I don't know if anyone that worked on the earlier Sims games is still at EA to this day, since they were probably fired/laid off/or they quit on their own by now.

 

[Xarpho's Return]

Some things Will Wright says does come off as having an ego, and it bares some similarities with Gran Turismo creator Kazunori Yamauchi, who also created a video game series that became a huge hit and is beloved to this day, even though the later games suck. (Gran Turismo 7 and The Sims 4) Wright does come off as a bit more humble though, although I'm not sure if it's because of the cultural difference with the US versus Japan, and GT's success did seem to get more into Kaz's head and made his ego even bigger.

It's not just culture, so many Western devs turned out to be massive douchebags who treat big games by their respective companies as "their" projects (meanwhile, their more recent pet projects, often Kickstarter funded, are terrible) or cry about how it was too violent/sexualized, or just outright hate their fans. Ron Gilbert, Tim Schafer, Warren Spector, John Romero, and several others.

The other question of why Wright acts the way he does was a lot of his later works were failures. The Sims, in its original 1990s prototype state, was based on SimCity 2000, with the stated goal of having a full range of products that provide interactivity and imports into each other, something that was never fully adapted by any game since. (There has been some intercompatibility with Sim games, even up until The Sims 2 but that has fallen well short of expectations and plans).

Spore, too, was planned to a much bigger thing than it ended up being, and it was Will Wright who fell on his sword on compromising on the "cute and fun" side and then later saying it was a "good compromise" of both (it wasn't). Whether this was bullshitting on EA's behalf (entirely plausible considering the mess with SimCity 2013) or because he didn't have his heart in it after all, is unknown.

 

[Pidiort]

Easier solution here if you've not seen it yet, might wanna be quick in case EA's personal army of retarded Creator Network shills do something about it or the Steam reviews get too loud. Gonna echo Kane and suggest you refund it if you haven't already, complete waste of money that adds more bugs officially than the fans have fixed for free.
Shit, have a similar solution for The Sims 1 here, no good game deserves to be churned into rotten meat like these two have by EA.

The Starter Pack and other related repos got DMCA'd by EA in Github. I wonder if someone backed up those repos? Sadly I didn't managed to because I used the web installer which downloaded all of the needed files from Github.

 

[Prophetic Spirit]

The Starter Pack and other related repos got DMCA'd by EA in Github. I wonder if someone backed up those repos? Sadly I didn't managed to because I used the web installer which downloaded all of the needed files from Github.

Huh.
Typical EA. I think the same happened when Mass Effect LE dropped.