The Sims is the best selling game PC game ever. No really, it's sold in excess of 50 million copies worldwide. This obviously includes its eight expansion packs. The Sims franchise has really become EA's cash cow, allowing them to create new studios and unfortunately buy out other game studios (e.g. West Wood and Criterion). So, last year when a sequel came it really wasn't much surprise. Making its second appearance on consoles, can The Sims 2 still be as annoying and tedious as the first game? God I hope not.

The Sims 2 is a life simulator. In fact, the basic premise and concept of the game really isn't all that bad. You take command of a single Sim, which you customise at the start of the game. This includes hair colour, body morphing (height and weight), what t-shirt they wear and so on. You also get to pick a nice name for them too. Once you get into the game after several very long loading times you're dumped in the house and given a very quick tutorial. The game obviously thinks that you have played the first one and if not you could consult the manual. But there's no real point in that because it's thinner than a piece of tissue. So if you're a newbie you are going to be in a world of hell for the first 30 minutes; I picked it up fairly quick.

The Sims 2 works on a new aspiration gameplay; basically, wants and don't wants. You select which aspiration you want (romance, knowledge, popularity and so on) if you fulfil either of the wants or don't want consequences happen. Obviously, if you do something good you'll get some more Similonions (money in layman terms) that you can use to buy new items for your house or you can make new rooms and redecorate. You also unlock new items and customisations in Sim creation mode. And that's pretty much it. Once you've done one of these aspirations you simply get a random new one and some can be pretty hard to get. One of mine being to make 10 friends; this would take a long time. The only way you actually meet new Sims is through either calling your existing friends over hoping they invite new people or if one randomly comes over to say hi and eat biscuits... or something. This might be enjoyable for some people but being confined to a single house doing the same things over and over really isn't that much fun. In the PC game, you could go to the shops or social areas. This meant that making new friends and getting aspirations was miles easier. And for some reason this was randomly cut.

Because The Sims 2 is a life simulator you have to do everything you'd do in life. Think of it as an "interactive" version of Big Brother...only with smarter people. You have to do everything you normally would, including eating, sleeping, and going to the toilet, having showers, watching TV etc. These are all measured on bars to see if your Sim is happy or sad. You have to make your Sim do all these things. Thankfully, you can skip time by pressing the R button which is incredibly helpful when you haven't made your Sim go to the toilet in a while and they can be on there for about 2 minutes and I'm being serious about that. Another way to earn money is also through having a job and there are many fields in which you can apply. I started off as a mail boy in an office and slowly made my way up to the director of a company. This would happen in real life... but anything is possible I suppose. And when I mean slowly, I really mean it. I think it took about 3 weeks in "Sim" time. This is about 4 maybe 5 hours of gameplay or real time. Another major part of The Sims 2 is character interaction. In the game, once you make friends with someone you can choose to ehm... go "further" with a relationship you can, with either the same or opposite sex. So yes, if you want, guys, you can have a couple of lesbians if you wish. Not that I tried this out or anything. But anyway, depending on how friendly or in love your Sims are new interactions become available they go from just talking and gossiping to cuddling in bed. You can guess what that is for yourself. Once you fall in love with another Sim you can get married, then you can control the other Sim. This is a nice feature.

In terms of graphics The Sims 2 doesn't bode too well either. It looks and feels like a straight PS2 port. There are a lot of jaggies, random clipping errors and to be honest everything in the game looks fairly functional. The 3D engine is exactly the same is its predecessor and the interface is incredibly cluttered along the left hand side. I know there's a lot of information but it's displayed pretty badly. Another 'new' feature is, depending on how intimate you are with a Sim, the background colour will change from blue to yellow and then red. On the opposite side, if they hate you the background will go slowly black. The Sims 2 does have some charm; the character creation is fairly funny. Your Sim will start dancing around, flexing their muscles or scowling if you do something they don't like.

The sounds, howeve,r are much better. If you've played a Sims game before, you'll know they speak in 'Simmish', this is the national language of the Sims. Originally it was done so that they didn't have to record everything in 12 languages, but it's still quirky as ever and a lot of fun. All the other sound effects are pretty spot on; every thing is clear and well done. The best part about the sounds however, is the fantastic music. It's all sung in Simmish, but there are so many genres and songs that it's hard to find one you don't like... even if you can't understand a word of it!

The Sims 2 has two control set ups. The first one is you take a direct 3rd person camera and you move them around with the analogue stick. The problem with this is you'll constantly find yourself running randomly around the house. It's pretty fiddly and over-sensitive. I found myself walking into rooms I didn't want to. The other is weird to say the least. It feels more like a Tactics game. You press a then plot in squares where you want the Sim to move. I don't know why anyone would want to use this and to be honest I think they should have stuck with the traditional PC set up.

The controls aren't the only problems with this game. First off, loading and saving takes ages. It is obvious this is a sloppy PS2 port so no optimisations were made at all to the game. Secondly, sometimes you have to wait for another Sim to come over to you to talk to them or whatever and a little egg timer pops up the corner to tell you that you're waiting. I found myself waiting about 3 minutes once to talk to someone because for whatever reason they took a walk around the house and paid no attention to me! Finally, I think that they took a very nice feature from the PC version out. In the PC version characters could age. You could have a little baby and then you could play as that baby as he/she grew right through to old age and die, thus making a kind of family heritage. I've played this game for about 10 hours or so. 10 terrible hours, but my Sims never aged. It took 2 or 3 hours for each stage on the PC version if you were running at full speed.

It's not that I didn't try to enjoy this game. I really did try, it's just this game is incredibly boring. Really boring. I'm sure it will attract some people; for example my older sister loves to play the game. I guess it only appeals to some markets. The bottom line is the Sims 2 is going to annoy and frustrate you for hours and hours. If you want a life simulation game, buy Animal Crossing or better yet wait for Animal Crossing: Wild World coming out early next year for the DS.