We always talk about what we love in The sims 2, but we never discuss why we got into the game in the first place?

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I think TS2 had just come out or was on the way, so TS1 was probably on sale or some such - I ended up buying TS1 and played it for a bit. The version I had only had a Deluxe version with 1-2 EPs, so I probably felt it was lacking something, but it did spike my interest.

Then a relative showed me the TS2 game. I was pretty much sold. I bought the game in 2006 along with Uni, and kept buying packs as they came out. I blame TS2 for my lack of sleep the next 3 years (and then some XD)

Mostly did legacy playing and such the first 1-2 years, along with testing out all kinds of CC/mods (my game was half serenity, half pure chaos). Then I started doing a bit of storytelling and picture/storytelling contests (there used to be a lot of those around back then), and ventured into CC-making not long after (and got a proper gaming PC, because my laptop was groaning under the load of too much CC and couldn't handle all the EPs...)

I'm not playing or creating as much these days, but I've got some projects going on (slow going, though - there's work and other things to be done).

For me, the game has been a creative outlet and helps a lot with inspiration, and it's also a very handy visual guide for storytelling/writing (characters and sets).

I've played TS3 and TS4 a bit too, but it's been a while, and I always come back to TS2 (fact is, I never leave). I haven't played TS1 since that time I had it installed on the family computer (20-ish years now?). Slightly dabbled with Urbz (PS2), but never got the hang of it. Had a lot of fun with Castaway (PC), but haven't played it in a while.

My Sims journey really started with a children's game called SimTown (also by Maxis). Played that game endlessly when I was a kid. Tried one of the SimCity games (possibly a demo) while we still had a family computer, but it was slow and a bit too advanced for little me at the time, so I kinda gave it up after a couple tries (no idea where that CD is now).

I actually got into The Sims 3 first! I think I was 11 or 12? I found out about The Sims 3 through YouTubers like LifeSimmer, iHasCupquake, TheQuxxn (RIP), jessamica92, etc. Seeing that the game was a series, I came across some of their TS2 content. I think jessamica92 made me really want to play TS2. Her All-in-One in Riverblossom Hills was my favorite. When the Ultimate Collection was released for free, I completely freaked out and downloaded immediately. I distinctly remember sitting at my grandmother's big dining table late at night with the terrible internet connection, waiting for hours, for it to finish installing. My mom saw how excited I was and let me stay up. Since I already was familiar with CC from TS3, I of course downloaded the SAME outfits and the SAME hair and the SAME furniture that jessamica had and moved my Sim into the SAME house in Riverblossom Hills and did the SAME interactions with the SAME Sim her's got with.

The funny thing is, I didn't realize it at the time, but I knew about The Sims 2 before The Sims 3. When TS2 first came out, people used to make music videos and movies. I was in love with Lady Gaga, Gwen Stefani, etc. and I came across those videos when listening to music. (https://youtu.be/it1kIHMeiEY?si=KvPTlxDTPGftDyV2, https://youtu.be/6bhtTRaGFDI?si=lQ_EN_z9JulXE8Ii) I remember seeing these 3D dolls and wanting to play with them! But little me didn't realize "Sims 2" was a game!

It sounds so weird because I feel like I still sound so young, talking about these games from 2004 and 2009 when most people on here started playing them much older. I was barely a teenager when I joined MTS and everyone here seemed to be in their 20s or older! Then I saw videos on YT of people talking about The Sims 4 being their childhood and my, my, my how the turntables... At the ripe age of almost 24 and with a husband and pretending to adult, now I feel like I'm a grandma playing a child's game.

I still play The Sims 2, but for different reasons. I used to play with a Simself and try to live the life I wanted as a kid for when I became an adult. Now, I play because I enjoy the creativity of building and controlling an entire city, which TS2 does really well. And also nostalgia.

Being able to create and control an entire city is a feeling only the sims 2 can give. Other games like Cities Skylines may let you build a city too, but not the city and buildings together. And then let you create the very people to live there too. The neighborhood creation really is why I'm into TS2.

Back then, i've never really liked The Sims 2, i thought the Sims in that game were weird and i only had TS4 at the time because it was the only free and available game i could play. But i've seen videos about how realistic the game is and started to appreciate the dev's efforts and my interest for the sims keep fluctuating until In March 31 2024, some dudes posted about the sims 2 and i got so interested in the Sims that day. I wanted to get the Sims 3 more but i also could use Sims 2. So i got the sims 2 M&G stuff. The game was awesome, but community lots were laggy. And besides, this game was very detailed. Then i became fond of the Sims 2.

Later on, the PC which had my Sims 2 M&G stuff malfunctioned and keep shutting down, so i couldn't play TS2 again, and the PC i am using right now was still being repaired. During that period, i was so desperate to play the Sims 2. I could do anything for the Sims 2. My PC returned then, and i installed Osab's starter pack and i was happy, but i could feel my interest to play it draining down... sadly. I wish there was a way to become enthusiatic about the Sims 2 more again, and the reason for this is the stupid Internet (i have a internet addiction). One time, i removed the internet and i completed a full University gameplay, in just one day.


I still love the Sims 2. I will always love the Sims 2. I have never had such feelings for just pixels. It's just a game? To me, it's a masterpiece and i will thank Will Wright and other devs for making a game

Despite all the bugs, despite the blue screens, despite the corrupted Sims in there, despite the devs making spaghetti code

I love you, Sims 2.

I started with Sims 1. Sims 2 was the natural progression.

My daughter had Sims 1, but I was more into SimCity, Myst, Baldur's Gate and Tomb Raider at that time. I remember saying to my husband, "that game doesn't interest me at all! It's just like playing dolls, which I was never interested in..."

My parents bought Sims 1 when I was in high school and my siblings and I absolutely loved it. When I was in university my much-younger cousins got Sims 2 and showed it to me and I remember thinking how annoying it would be to have to be that involved in your characters' lives. M&G came out while I was in university and after the majority of my friends graduated and moved away (I was continuing on with my schooling), I got very lonely and depressed. I decided to get Sims 2 on a whim and suddenly found that I had whole neighbourhoods of little friends that were always glad to see me! I've played off and on since then, but really got back into it during the pandemic. I work in healthcare so it was nice to turn my brain off and focus on something (SIMthing?) carefree and happy.

I borrowed a copy of Sims 3 and played it all of one time before uninstalling. I've got nothing against it, but it just wasn't for me. Sims 2 and I just "clicked" I guess.

I was playing Sims 1 when Sims 2 came out, and I was hesitant at first to buy it.

After playing it for a while, I gave my Sims 1 Collection to a friend and never looked back.

(although I should have kept that other game! Kick myself in the shins for that!)

Well, I certainly didn't play The Sims as a child -- I was eight when Will Wright was born. When The Sims 1 was released I noticed, but that's about all. By that time I was working as a freelance IT professional and regarded my computer primarily as a work tool. The Sims was reviewed in computing magazines, but I really wasn't interested. I think I regarded computer games as a waste of computing power. One game that did attract my interest a little was SimCity, The idea of simulating a city's development appealed to me a little, but I didn't have a computer that would run it, and money was always tight. It was around 2010 that I began to become aware of Sims games. By that time I had an internet connection that didn't require dial-up, and was discovering YouTube. I saw some rather naughty videos showing gay Sims dancing, kissing and cuddling in skimpy CC clothes. That's probably what initially attracted me to the game. I knew they weren't real people because of the plumbbobs and things floating above their heads! I was also aware of Sims CC clothes. because I'd stumbled upon them when looking for real clothes. Then in 2011, I got a new computer -- a Packard Bell netbook. Although it was a cheap netbook, it was the most powerful computer I'd ever had, and I wondered if it might run some version of The Sims. I did a little research on Wikipedia, and discovered that there were (at that time) three versions of The Sims -- the original Sims from 2000, The Sims 2 from 2004, and The Sims 3, which was the version EA was pushing. I began to look if I could find soe version of The Sims that might run on my netbook. Then in September/October 2012 I found my local Morrisons supermarket was selling The Sims 2 Double Deluxe for only £7. A quick check showed that my Windows version, CPU amd memory were all adequate for Double Deluxe. I wasn't sure about the graphics, but at only £7 it seemed worth taking the risk. So I went back to the shop and bought it! This trivial purchase turned out to be life changing for me!

I spent the next few weeks carefully reading the little manual that came with the game, and the more I read, the more interesting my new game seemed to be. I wanted to play the game and look after my Sims properly, so I read the manual thoroughly. Eventually after messing around in Body Shop for a few days, and playing the Tutorial, I took the plunge and started up the game on 30th November 2012. I went into CAS in Veronaville, and made a teenage boy, whom I named Andrew Jones. (30th November is St. Andrew's Day, and St. Andrew is the patron saint of Scotland, so that is probably what put the name Andrew into my head.) My intention all along was that Andrew would be gay, and that he'd meet another boy and get into a relationship with him. When I tried to save him, CAS insisted that I make an adult relative for him, so -- really as an afterthought -- I made his mum Gloria. I made Gloria Romance, as I thought I'd make a boyfriend for her, and I thought they'd quickly fall in love if they were both Romance. So I saved them to the game, and started to play my first Sims family. I spotted a little cottage at the end of Chorus Court, that they could afford with their twenty thousand Simoleons. So they bought the house and moved in. . .

. . . And then they blew me away!! This game was much much better than I had ever imagined. These Sims weren't mere ciphers. They were real characters, with deep, complex, multi-faceted personalties. They weren't mere automatons that did what I told them, they could think for themselves. It was quickly apparent that they cared for each other and wanted to please each other. It was like meeting a couple of real people and getting to know them. Within about a Sim hour of starting to play, I had fallen head over heels for both of them. I cared for their lives like I cared for my own. I, who had previously regarded all computer games as trivial and unimportant, now found myself totally engrossed in the lives of these two Sims. Starting to play The Sims 2 was truly life-changing for me.

I suppose I haven't got into other versions of The Sims, because these TS2 Sims are so important to me. Not just Andrew and Gloria, but the many other Sims in my game too. I just don't feel any need to get another version of the game. Moreover after twelve years playing, I know how to look after TS2 Sims. I know I can keep them safe and happy. I'm afraid that, if I tried to play TS3 or TS4, I might let my new friends die, through not knowing well enough what I need to do to keep them safe.

P.S. In Real Life it's now getting very late, and I need sleep. So I'll post what I've written now, and proof-read it in the morning. Until then, sorry if some of this post doesn't make sense. I've quickly read through it and made a couple of corrections. I hope it's OK now.

It was at my neighbor's house when I was about 9 years old, it seemed incredible to me that there was a game in which you could invent your own characters, have family trees, and play telling stories to myself. Since my computer couldn't handle the game at first I played Sims 1, but over time I was able to play on another computer with terrible lag, but for me it was still fun, although I couldn't play with community lots until a few years ago. xD I also did a web story with the Sims 2 and it managed to appear in a little corner of the official Sims 2 magazine in Spain. xD I also didn't have the base game until years later when I bought it for half price, the base game was very expensive!! So every time I had to reinstall, I had to ask my friend for the base game and then install my expansions.

Non-surprisingly, I am one of few who probably started with the Sims 4 as my first not-a-spin-off game. That was wayyy back in 2017, if I'm remembering correctly, and it was through my cousin's XBox account. I still remember my first sim, "Mental Illness", who was as red as I could physically make him, stick skinny, and had a roommate that wore the Sad Clown costume. Then I lost access to the account, forgot about the Sims, and then rediscovered it by somehow ending up on the CC side of Pinterest and buying a physical disk (the game wasn't free in early 2021!) and Vampire EP for the family XBox.
Then I found out about the Sims 3 through CC Pinterest (again), and it's open world.. world, and bought it's base game+Nightlife EP bundle late in the same year. Then, my laptop burned out from being pushed to run the game for literal hours with 20+ mods on High Def and I decided that maybe the Sims 3 needed new hardware to run on (wrong). In the event of buying a flashy new laptop, I realised that laptops were expensive and I did not want to start a track record of burning through them. So I looked up guides for optimizing the Sim 3 and while doing so, I found myself back on CC Pinterest looking at CC for the Sims 2 (what a pattern). And then I recognised something from my early childhood.. the WTFBBQ. I knew of it from that old movie about a "baby that hated the color yellow" and "it's mom just couldn't take it any more".
So then I found a quite extensive copy of the Sims 2 game back in early 2023 and I've been playing it ever since! I do miss the certain quirks of both 3 and 4 (3 being a world that I could Town-Bike for, and 4 for it's not-so standard fluidity in body types) but that doesn't really compare to the emotional life that exudes from 2. Sure it doesn't have the open world or body, but it has personality in your little people.

I have played all iterations of The Sims. Apart from being the one I spent the most time on, I love all the quirky and goofy things sims in TS2 can do. It was also my first introduction into custom game content. :D

I played computer games when I was a kid on the Atari, then the ZX Spectrum, Playstation, PS2 and then Skyrim on the Xbox360.
What I found is some of the game can be stressful, especially racing or fighting games. When the original Sims came out I bought it and played it a lot as it was a lot more relaxing and chilled out.

When The Sims 2 came out I loved it, a bigger open world with more things to do and interact with. I was running it on an Windows XP computer and when I upgraded my PC it wouldn't run on the new PC so I kind of forgot about it. About three years ago I found you could download the Ultimate version that runs on any PC and went for that, been playing a few times a week since then .

My sister led me down this path of sims 2 gaming and it was like quicksand to 90's kids. I will never escape. She now has kids, I have sims.

I enjoyed it for the animations and situations the little pixel dollies got themselves in, and I appreciated the customization and sandbox potential of it all. We came off of sims 1 pretty jazzed, even with just the base game and sims 2 blew our little minds (I was 17, so my mind wasn't THAT little). Add some community of sims 2 fanatics, an infinite-seeming worth of CC and mods and baby, you got a stew going that keeps on going until Computers can't run this anymore and even then I'm sure somebody will find a way.

My mom got me and my sister TS1 to play because it was one of the only games she could find for macs at the time and it became a staple game for us growing up. We got all the expansions, saw the raunchy ad and preview demo included with the Makin' Magic EP, and got super excited for TS2. I think since TS1 was more or less to me just a game my sister and I played during its run, TS2 was where I was more internet aware and enjoyed reading stories in the exchange, watching the now-dated YT videos, and checking out all the custom content (that I was too scared to bloat my dinosaur of a PC at the time with) which made it a bigger milestone for me.

Then TS3 came out and I wasn't particularly sold, didn't get it until about 5 years later. Then TS4 came out and I still haven't bothered with it to this day mostly due to just not being into modern gaming. So I just went back to the old favorite and don't really care to look elsewhere.

Strangetown has been my go-to happy place (in-game and mentally) ever since the '04 days.

We used to have a housemate. He got the original sims and played it for hours, and talked about it and showed me things on it. He built self-sims of all of us and they all died. (He really wasn't a very good player.) We were going through House Owner Things at the time and the idea of just being able to build a house and the roofs were free, and redecorate on the fly, was immensely appealing. He didn't know how to build a house without a family to build it around, so in the neighborhood he set aside for me I made a family for each lot and built the houses I wanted to build for them. Gradually I got sucked into playing families, got my own copy, got the Complete Collection, etc.

When I felt I had done everything I could possibly do in the game (I never did get that damn graveyard puzzle to work), Sims 3 was coming out, so I figured Sims 2 would be getting affordable, and I was right. I figured someday I'd use it up, too, and move on to Sims 3, but I was wrong. So far I haven't used it up; and I will never move on to any game that has an "open world."

See, I've always wanted to write a book, or a series, or a collection of short stories, or something, showing how all the individual lives in a community - an apartment building or a small town or a neighborhood or something - intersect and influence each other as each person goes around being the hero of their own story. The problem being, I could never come up with a concept for implementing the idea that was a) something I could reasonably accomplish and b) something I was actual confident of being able to sell. At this time I did not have free writing energy to spend on writing for free. If I had no realistic prospect of selling it, I couldn't invest much time in it. What the Sims did to a small extent, and the Sims 2 does in spades, is let me scratch that itch. That's why my preferred rotations are single-day; that's why I've never played a legacy; that's why I love community lots; that's why I don't want an open world. My sims get out there, pursuing their goals and impacting each other's stories, and surprising me in the ways they do it, and I get to see them do it all (which no open world will let me do - open world doesn't care about the characterization I've been doing and is likely to do stupid things with them that mess up the stories)! So they're a creative outlet that doesn't drain all my creativity from my other pursuits, that I don't have to please any market for. No one has to be happy with it but me.

Nothing else does it like Sims 2!

The seed was probably sown while my daughter was playing Sims 1 around a month or so before Sims 2 was released.

I heard her: "One cannot leave you damn sims alone for a minute, then you burn the damn house down!"

Of course, I went over and said: "Let me see...." with no intention of starting to play a game that would keep me busy for years.

She bought Sims 2 soon after and I paid more attention.

(I only started to play a lot after my husband died. Sims 2 got me through periods of mourning, insomnia and stress. But I think once that seed was sown, it was always going to grow).

I was obsessed with The Sims, which I first played at friends' houses, around the age of 11/12 - probably the year 2000 or so. I eventually got my own copy and then got very into modded objects, custom content etc. So when TS2 was announced I was even more interested in that. TS2 was a very natural progression from TS1. I followed all the development news avidly for months and pre-ordered the game and remember how excited I was on release date. It really lived up to expectations! I was very involved in the TS2 online community from the start and was a bit sceptical about TS3.

Looks like you've been playing The Sims backwards. XD Now you just have to ditch Sims 2 for Sims 1!

I'd been playing video games ever since I could pick up a controller so I don't remember exactly how or when, but eventually I bought The Sims 4 and immediately I was hooked. I racked up 1.3k hours in that game. I then switched over to The Sims 3 after researching and finding out it was available on Steam, and I fell into a similar fixation. I was a couple hundred hours into playing the game when my computer decided to go kaput, and I lost everything. I was devastated. In the time without any sims, I got my fix (lol) by engaging more with the community (I don't have any social media besides Youtube) to which I then found out about the gem that is The Sims 2. It is now the only game I play. I do feel like my experience has improved significantly as I've gone backwards through the series, which is why I still play this game and not the others.