A review by DeKDeS.
On February the 23rd DMS2C was invited to the sneak preview of The Sims 2 Seasons.
Before I start to tell you about the things we saw, I must say the simfansite’s invited and EA had made an agreement not to post any screenshots of the game until the game is released.
We drove through some strange weather towards EA, it was like the clouds not yet decided to pour down rain or just to stay teasing with some little raindrops.
We arrived much too early but dry, at EA. whilst waiting, the first other Dutch Sims fan site Mamasims arrived to join us waiting in a bit cold underground parking lot. After some while the other invited sim fan site’s arrived and we entered the EA elevators towards preview heaven.
Unfortunately lightning stroke the building so all pc’s where down…. Hehe no no, just kidding.
EA welcomed us to the preview and for the first hours we all got the change to play The Sims 2 Seasons.
The first thing that amazed me was to see a town covered in snow, it look so cool, literally.
We started to play around first with the new death effects, not because we’ve got an driving obsession with killing sims… erh well … but we were curious about the death by hailstones and lightning, well I can say I would not want to be in that poor sims’s shoes. If you want to see your sim get stroked by lightning, Hunter Howe from EA games, (with who we had a live video connection with America , amongst 2 other developers) had the perfect recipe for disaster, place a hot tub and surround it by a lot of trees, it sure will get your sim fried at one point.
So what can I tell you more about only ways to make your sim lives miserable?
Lets do a Q&A.
Q: Will it snow/rain inside your home?
A: No, this was a problem to begin with in The Sims 2, because it was difficult to know which camera positions players used, to code stuff like rain, because rain was always there in The Sims 2 with some cheats, but it then also rained inside your home. The developers had a challenge to fix this, what they did is create a sort of code that will create a sort of none visible bubble over your house, and the code tells that it should not rain in there but only outside. But if you would like to see snow in your house, then just remove 1 wall and all of the furniture inside your home will be covered in a layer of snow.
Q: Custom content will get covered in snow, but what if I download a custom made tree, will the leaves fall of it in autumn?
A: No, unless the tree is extracted from the original The Sims 2 Season, why? Well the trees that shed leaves are new objects with multiple layers, for every season the tree has a texture/status. It has the status of lumps of snow on the branches, the leaves falling off etcetera.
Q: Ponds will freeze over, can your Sims walk on it and fall through the ice?
A: No, this is the same reason why there are no such things as hurricane’s or tornado’s, EA wants the game to stay fun, some people perhaps in real life had relatives died by these disasters, and it’s perhaps not so funny when it happens within the sims, you might say that its strange that sims do can get killed by lightning, but to be honest this change is much smaller then a tornado.
Q: How about new items?
A: For the fans of little details like ovenmits, kitchen tools and so on, there will be a lot of those decorative items within the sims seasons, and yes, they also can be covered with snow. Also there are a lot other new, fun and beautiful furniture to brighten up your sims home.
Q: Are the new fears and wants?
A: Yes, for some strange reason a want is to be hit by lightning… hmm, but also the fear of it.
Weather does affect the mood of your sims, some sims just stay outside and enjoy the lightning, others are afraid and run back inside to seek safety.
Q: Is this expansion going to slow down my game?
A: EA made sure the game will run on lower end systems, one thing you might notice as the sun rises, there will be no carpools or such animation, this is to speed up the animation of the sun rising and prevent slowing down your machine.
Q: So I’ve read there will be a penguin in the game? When do we see it?
A: A funny thing to mention is that the penguin was not intended at all to appear with the Sims, one developer just loved penguins and was waiting for the right opportunity to make it happen, with seasons it was the time for this developer to make this happen, and so the penguin was for real. When you place a lot of fish on your lot and don’t have cats (who also try to steal the fish from your fishing rod ) then at some point you will see a penguin running… waggling ? about.
Q: I heard it can rain fire??
A: This was so funny! As you might know there is a new wish object, the weather station, just let a sim with a wish meter below the gold status operate the machine, and it might poor down hellfire, it was sad to see the total stranger that just walked by also caught on fire.
I can go on hours perhaps with this Q&A but I think it’s up to you all to discover the Sims 2 Seasons.
After we fired question to the developers, they had a question for us, about what we would love to see in further expansion. We told we would love to see farm animals such as cows, and starrats from Luckysims said she wanted to see rats. Also we would love to see sims sing under the shower again and brush their teeth.
And if erh.. We get The Sims Cockroaches sorry my bad.. I told it wrong lol.
Well you must know it was the first time for me to be present at a sneak preview so im sorry if this is not such a great review, but I had a great time at EA, and Mogway and me want to thank EA Netherlands for inviting our website, and thanks to EA America for their time answering our questions and giving great feedback.
Oh, afterwards all the present fan site’s got a copy of the Sims 2 Seasons!!
So if you don’t mind, I’m going to ignore the weather outside, and enjoy the rain inside The Sims 2.
My final opinion? GO GET THIS GREAT EXPANSION!!!
Keep up the good work EA!
) and i’m not allowed to do anything. LOL me and just sitting and do nothing? That’s going to be hard, well at least i’ve got a week of YEAH.
But the game just started and anything could happen. And a couple of minutes Materazzi scores the 1-1 with a great header. Then the game is equally divided with chances for both teams, and Cannavaro also shows Zizou that Cannavaro stands his ground!
