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In 2005 a game so impactful was released, its influence on the industry can still be felt to this day: The Sims 2. No, not the PC version, barely anyone paid that any attention - I mean the Nintendo DS version. It is one of the games I loved in my childhood, and recently I decided to check if it still holds up. So I dusted off my old DS, inserted the cartridge, and played through the whole thing. Here is my review.

The most important thing to understand about The Sims 2 (Nintendo DS) is that unlike the mainline titles, this spinoff is not a general life simulator. You don't build a home or choose a career for your Sim - instead they are the main character in a wacky story, and you complete zany quests to advance in the game. That said you still customize your own player Sim. Of course your options are much more limited compared to other Sims games: There are two genders, fours skin colors, nine pre-made faces, a handful of hair styles, and a small collection of clothes you can choose from, but since the graphics are so basic you wouldn't notice any finer customization details anyway. In addition you take one of four perks which can boost the money you earn, your popularity, your love life, or the amount of sanity you regain from using objects. Yes, to my knowledge this is the only Sims game that has a sanity meter!

There is not much more to say about character creation so let's carry on. From here on out there will be spoilers, so be warned if you plan to fully experience the game for yourself.

The game starts off with a cutscene in which your Sim drives through the desert in an out-of-control car, almost running over several people, and finally stopping in a very small town. As you get out you are approached by the local farmer / engineer Siegfried Gülle who inspects the damage and tells you it will take several days to repair . (At this point I should mention I played the game in German so I don't know what the various characters names are in the original. Nowadays I play all games in English, but for nostalgia's sake I left it.)

The town is called Merkwürdighausen (or Strangeville) and to be honest, calling it a town is a stretch. There are exactly five buildings (plus a farm with a shed): A jail, a town hall where the mayor lives, a bar, a store, and a huge hotel. Why anyone would stay there for longer than one night during a road trip is perhaps the strangest thing of all. Sure enough, when you are sent to the hotel to secure a bed for the night you hear that the boss had enough of it and just left, leaving it in decay and with no guests. The receptionist isn't even sure himself why he stills works there when nobody pays him (well, he slept until you came, so it wasn't exactly work). He notices that the power has gone out and asks you to refill the nuclear power generator in the basement.

Yes, the hotel is run by nuclear power. And of course nuclear fuel rods just lie scattered around on the ground. They respawn regularly in random locations throughout the town and are an important item to collect whenever you can, since you can also sell them at the town hall when the reactor is full.

Back in the lobby Siegfried Gülle enters the hotel and complains about all the dirt on the floor. The receptionist defends his workplace by saying there is at most one visitor per month, so cleaning up isn't worth it. Siegfried argues that logically speaking, nobody will come when it is this dirty. This is the last moment in the game when someone applies logic.

Of course since the receptionist can not possibly leave his desk, the task of cleaning falls onto you. Siegfried offers to repair your car for free in exchange, so it's really not a bad deal. Picking up the vacuum, the first mini game starts. On the upper screen you move your Sim over the piles of dirt on the ground, and on the lower screen you can see what gets sucked in. Mostly it's dust, but sometimes there are small items in there. With the stylus you can drag them into a special pipe and they get instantly sold. This is perhaps the least efficient way to earn money in the game but there you go. (The most efficient way being gambling).

Once the lobby is clean another person barges in, this time it's the mayor. He is absolutely devestated that the previous owner left and fears that without tourism, basically the town's only source of income, the economy will collapse, people will starve, and wars will break out. It is again up to you to get the situation under control, and in another minigame you calm him down.

One of the basic gameplay mechanics is interacting with other Sims. Like many other aspects, this one is also vastly simplified compared to mainline Sims games. NPCs occasionally get into various moods which allow you to interact with them. All moods are handled by the same minigame: There are three buttons corresponding to different actions, and you have to perform correct one in response to the other Sims movement. For example, when a Sim is in a good mood they might raise their hand. Then you should quickly press the high-five button. Or when the stretch out both arms towards you they want a hug. This process repeats a few times.

Sadly not all of the Sims movements are so simple to read - when a Sim throws a fit they might let their shoulder hang forward or scream into the air, and in response you can calm them, yell at them, or say "Stop". Which corresponds to which you just have to memorize correctly. If you react in the wrong way or wait too long you use points, fail too often and the minigame ends.

Other moods include sadness, where you can cheer them up, anger, where you have to calm them down (be careful or they might punch you), and flirty, where you, well, flirt with them. Only Sims of the opposite gender of yours can become flirty, so if your Sim is gay they are out of luck. This was pretty surprising to learn since the The Sims 2 for the PC, which came out one year earlier, treated gay relationships on equal footing as far as I can recall. So why take a step backwards in this spinoff?

Each socializing minigame has the same effect: if you succeed it improves your relationship with the other party. Also, they sometimes give you money or items. What effect the relationship meter has I could not really figure out completely - perhaps none at all.

After calming down the mayor the people around you decide that you are now the new manager of the hotel, without asking your opinion, and that you should see to it that a casino gets built to attract customers. This teaches the valueable lesson that you should be lazy, otherwise people expect more from you in the future. Then the mayor shows you the manager suite, tells you that you stink, and leaves.

The needs in this game are relatively low key. There is no menu where you can check your current statuses, but after a while your Sim will complain by themselves that they need to improve their hygiene or eat or go to the toilet. The only status you can see directly is sanity, which is affected by every need. If your sanity is low you can raise it back to max by showering repeatedly. When it hits zero your Sim breaks down crying and gets abducted by aliens. At some point they drop you off in your room and for a minute your movement speed is extremely sluggish - so keep your sanity full!

This is especially important to keep in mind for where you need to go next, the desert. During the day your sanity gets drained by a few points every second so be quick to get back. The reason for going to the desert is because the carpenter Tristian Legend is wollowing in self-pity there and you need to cheer him up so he can build the casino for you. "Have you ever caught a meteor with bare hands? It hurts pretty bad, but it sure beats being lonely". His sadness is understandable when you consider that the woman of his dreams was abducted by giant scorpions, but a skilled socializer like you can still get him into high spirits again. Then building the casino takes him about one second, including hiring employees for it.

The second Tristian shows off his work to you you can already feel the desired effect: you get a visitor. But not the kind you hoped for, since it is the alien emporer Xizzle, threatening to invade Strangeville. Tristian tells you in a composed voice that he has been trying to seize control of the town for years and shows up like this every few weeks, but he can't fathom why. After all, there is nothing but sand here. Luckily he has never been successful since the aliens weakness is water. So you buy a water gun and drive away the fiend, but it won't be the last you see of him.

At this point I should mention that the in-game time is tied to real world time, so if you want to explore the desert safely at night you have to sneakily play on your DS after bed time without your parents noticing. At many points in the game you have to wait for the next real day to progress, and building rooms is usually one of them. That the building phase is skipped here is only for the sake of keeping the player hooked during the tutorial. If you are an impatient cheater like me though, you can just manipulate the internal clock of the Nintendo DS. But be careful! If the game ever detects that you set the clock backwards in time you are greatly punished... There is a whole cutscene just for this scenario, in which emporer Xizzle gives a speech to his army announcing the biggest invasion yet. And then you have to deal with dozen aliens that try to ruin your day (they usually succeed).

Now the main gameplay loop is open for you: managing your hotel and the guests. As for the hotel, there are three kinds of expansions you can build. The obvious one is guest rooms. You start out with only one shabby little room that you can only rent out for cheap, so to increase your income you can build three more increasingly luxurious rooms. You can buy furniture from the store and place it how you like within the guest rooms. There is not a whole lot of different options so this part is not as fun as in regular Sims games, but at least it is not fully gone. Each room should have at least the basic necessities, like a bed and a shower, or guests will be very unhappy.

Next are attractions for the guests. This includes the casino you just built where you can play minigames for money, an art gallery where you can sell paintings you make with your DS stylus, a sushi bar, fitness center, etc. Almost every one of those rooms gives you something to do inside but I found the gallery the most fun. The casino is also great because it is not hard to make a profit there.

The last category of expansions is the basement: These are rooms just for your strange hobbies, and sometimes important guests will request you build something there for their evil plans. Among the possible expansions is a secret laboratory where you can dissect alien corpses you find in the desert and sell their organs for pretty sums. (I won't spoil the other rooms, but I'll just say there IS a fursuit involved which you need to complete the story). You increase your hotel rating by building all of these.

Managing guests is simple. There are always random NPCs in the lobby, and when you have a room open you can check them in. They will tell you for how many days (in real time) they are going to stay. On the last day they will wait again in the lobby, and if you attend to them personally to check them out they give you a good tip (depending on their mood they might not pay at all however, so cheer them up first). During their stay Sims will have very annoying requests or fits of anger, and if you don't fulfill their wishes they might break or steal furniture from their rooms. I imagine this is one of the few realistic parts of the game.

It doesn't take long until the next troublesome guest arrives: Frankie Fussili. He wants to rent the penthouse indefinitely as a base for his dubious schemes. Good for business, right? It would be, if he intended to pay for it. But he tells you straight to your face that he won't. And should you disagree, he is afraid things might break, in mysterious ways... like your legs.

The story continues likes this, with evil guests that you sometimes work against, and sometimes work for (your intentions are not very clear). I won't spoil anything more since we would be here forever, but I think you can get the gist of what this game is like. So I'll be moving on to my closing thoughts.

I think the better question might be if it ever held up. Certainly it does not live up to modern standards. This is a game you could find in a discount bin for 15 cents - is it worth those 15 cents? That depends.

Are you looking for a classic Sims experience? Then definitely no, this game is at most "Sims adjacent". Are you looking for an exciting adventure? ...also no. Are you looking for a game where you can check in every day, manage your hotel a little, and fulfill strange quests in order to progress in a silly story, with often entertaining dialogue? Then yes, it is worth picking up for 15 cents! Not sure if it is worth much more than that but 15 cents definitely!

It is hard to judge from an objective point of view. I enjoyed my replaying of it, but mostly out of nostalgia. There were many points that I had forgotten and then had a good laugh about when I rediscovered it. The fuel rods are one example. The fact that you can push over cows, and then milk them to get milkshakes is another.

Overall, if you are bored and found the glimpse into this game I portrayed here interesting, then I'm sure you will have some fun with it - there is still a lot I haven't talked about that can be entertaining. But otherwise I can't in good faith recommend this game as an adequate use of your time.

Thank you for reading this far! This is my very first game review, so please let me know what you think of it and how I can improve in the future. It wasn't very high effort because I actually wrote this several months after I played it again and forgot a lot. Originally I wanted to go through the whole plot and highlight the best moments (kind of like Ross Scott's Game Dungeon series) but for that I'd have to rereplay it... next time!

Review: The Sims 2 (Nintendo DS)

Let's create a Sim

Stranded in the middle of nowhere

Social interactions

Under new management

Unwanted guests

My thoughts

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