Premades and Precepts

As I kind of just declared on this blog a few days ago, expansion packs suck. Let’s look back at TS2 for a moment: But which one, in retrospect, was the worst? In the spirit of negative awards, I present the AFAs – the Aspiration Failure Awards for The Sims 2.

If you agree or disagree with me, feel free to comment.

DISCLAIMER: These are just my personal opinions. As I’m a storytelling player more than a gamer or modder, that’s the perspective from which I’ll approach my choices. Also, I completely ignored the mods that fixed many of the problems I mention. EA/Maxis didn’t provide those; the community did.

On with the awards…

“Most Annoying NPC” goes to….

Rod Humble from FreeTime

Every one of TS2’s EPs added NPCs to the game. Rod Humble was the worst. Sim Rod Humble, upon installing FreeTime, would appear on every lot and bring you a shiny new computer loaded with Lies and Propaganda for…The Sims 3, of all things! Way to break immersion. Sim Humble would also give families free computers, effectively free money; and he was annoying. What more can I say.

Honorable mentions go to: strays from Pets, the professors from Uni, and the apartment townies from Apartment Life.

“Least Value For Money” goes to…

Pets

The Sims: Unleashed added a slew of great features besides pets: Old Town, gardening, the sweet sax player, all that carnival stuff… What did The Sims 2: Pets add? Pets, strays, werewolves, some superfluous build/buy stuff…and you could breed pets. Not that much new gameplay for the price. Nevertheless, Pets was EA/Maxis’ highest-selling EP. Go figure…

They definitely knew that pets were the #1 most demanded feature, and proceeded to charge full price for pets and pets alone. And they got away with it. I’ll never understand the appeal of having virtual pets to go with your virtual humans. They take too long to train anyway. Boring.

“Worst Supernatural Creature” goes to…

Bigfoot from Bon Voyage

Bigfoot is completely illogical. He is a master of every skill, gets free gifts from co-workers EVERY DAY, and is sterile (where’s the fun?) Plus his name is ‘Bigfoot Bigfoot’. And you couldn’t ‘create’ a Bigfoot or ‘become’ one; you had to go out and drag him home by sucking up to him. WTF?

“Most Detrimental to Storytelling” goes to…

University

Sure, Uni was fun the first few times… but it takes so freaking long to complete if you don’t cheat. If you play a hood ‘by the book’ you end up going through Uni for every Sim. It’s hard to avoid because the game intrinsically awards and punishes Sims based on university. So monotonous and there was only so much I could take of it.

“Worst Supporting Stuff Pack” goes to…

H&M Fashion Stuff

H&MFS signalled EAxis’ first foray into the realm of licensed, non-free product placement. Whether the content was fashionable or not is a question I’ll leave to others. No, this SP was the worst because of its blatant in-game advertising. They gave players building tools and decorations to design their very own H&M fashion store to place in their hoods. So what do impressionable players do? Write H&M stores into their stories like it’s second nature! There’s a name for that: guerrilla marketing. (I think.) Thanks, EAxis, for outright marketing expensive clothing to kids through a video game so subliminally – and making the kids pay for the privilege.

H&M only edges out IKEA Stuff by being 1) the first in time and 2) advertising a brand not even available in the countries it was released in! At least we have an IKEA here.

”Worst Expansion Pack” goes to…

Bon Voyage

Rehash of old EP? Check. Crippling, game-breaking bugs on release? Check. Boring after the first time? Check (for me). Badly integrated with other EPs? Check. No spring break from college. No pets on vacation. No running a hotel as a business.

Tags: expansion packs, failure, rant, retrospective, ts2

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 9th, 2009 at 11:46 pm and is filed under expansion packs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.