Seriously though, here we are again with yet another Sims expansion. Every six months did Will Wright say? Feels more like three, or two. If you are a fan of the series, of course this is good news, as like its predecessors this new member of the Sims 2 family brings a wealth of new features and gimmicks to enhance the lives of your micro people. In fact, one might say that the extra content is almost exponential, given that this expansion has more content depending on which of the other expansions you have installed.

What is Open for Business in a nutshell? Well, it's quite simple. It brings the ability to be a small business owner to your sims. They can open up a shop in their home or buy a lot in town, hire employees, construct merchandise and set the prices all with the aim of getting other sims to hand over their hard earned money for whatever product your Sim happens to be selling.

By itself the game has a lot of extra objects and business choices to choose from, adding heaps to the game, and with the addition of the previous expansion packs further options are unlocked. For example, if you have Nightlife installed then a Sim could be a nightclub owner, or a car dealer, and with university the student workforce can be a powerful source of cheap, skilled employees.

In this way the second Sims game out-does its predecessor, as the expansions for the original kind of gained an infamous reputation for their lack of quality (especially compared to user-created content), and their complicated installation procedures. In Sims 2, however, the three expansions so far have all been able to consistently deliver, providing unique experiences above and beyond the core gameplay.

Perhaps Will Wright and company realised that simple content packs for a game they've explicitly designed to be easy to make content for wasn't really worth the $50 odd you had to fork out, so now they build stuff a modder can't do without the engine source code. Actually… putting it that way makes it sound cheap. But we'll forgive them. Even if we're not exactly sure what for.

There are something related to this issue, though, that do set the game back somewhat. Open for Business introduces a new game dynamic, that of talents. Sounds familiar? Sounds like skills? That's because they work and function the same as skills, but dictate what you can do in a business. A high skill at cash registers gives you benefits using such, and likewise there are talents related to business, customer relations and product manufacturing.

These talents are all tied to skills as well, so certain Sims will have bonuses at learning certain talents. Where they become complicated is that they don't have the traditional progress bar visible when you are training them, like regular skills, so it becomes really hard to get a gauge of how far allowing your Sim happens to be. Add to this that the time taken to get a talent up is quite long and the whole system seems insufferably tedious. But maybe that's just us.

All in all, Open for Business is a worthy buy, especially if you're building up a collection of these little things or have a Will Wright fixation like this reviewer. There really isn't all that much more you can say about it: it's an expansion. For more details we suggest you see the articles on Sims 2, University and Nightlife (written by the same). If, by some chance, you have those three then you may as well get this fourth - not to mention that there is already a fifth.