The Sims, with its whopping seven expansion packs, far outstripped the sales figures of virtually every other PC game in history. As a rarity among modern games, in that people who normally would never have touched computers could become chronically addicted to it, The Sims took the RPG genre and used its principles to portray what you would think would be conceivably a boring area: that of everyday life. Yet it worked, and worked incredibly well. So what could Maxis do to improve on this formula?

The short answer lies in the fact that The Sims 2 is only The Sims with a better graphics engine and some minor adjustments to gameplay. Most of the new features relate to the aforementioned upping of the engine, such as the simple yet highly addictive character creation phase (where everything can be changed from the size, shape and colour of the eyes to the prominence and shape of the chin) or the fact that now when a Sim uses the espresso machine or plays a game of chess you can see him or her actually using it.

Once your family has been created and added to the world, however, the game is back to the same theme as the original, in climbing up the career tree, forming friendships and relationships as well as amassing wealth for household improvements and general prestige.

One disappointing thing is that despite all the expansion packs released for the original game, very few of the features from them have been in any way incorporated into The Sims 2. The Sims 2 does come with a lot more basic content, including the ability to change the colour scheme of household items, and to create your own using the Body Shop, but things like pets and magic and the like are mysteriously absent.

The number of career paths is less than what you would have had before if you installed Livin' Large, a notable absence being the Hacker career, and while there is more content overall, it is themed in modern house textures and objects rather than esoteric items like wall torches. One can only assume that EA intends to capitalise on this in the future, and given there was little public outcry over the exploitation of the original game, they will in all likelihood succeed.