erhaps one of my favorite games showcased at E3 this past May was EA’s The Sims 2. While the title wasn’t playable to the gaming public, what the company showed off was both innovative and impressive. While The Sims 2 still features the classic gameplay that helped make the series a worldwide smash hit, there’s change brewing in the waters. Change, however, is a good thing, especially when you see the game in action. Yesterday at EA’s Hot Summer Night Event I got a chance to sit in on an in-depth game demo (that’s right, it still wasn’t playable by the press) and walked away extremely impressed. If thoughts of the game fill your mind with blocky characters, frustrating micro-management, and just downright limited gameplay, prepare to get Sims-sized smack upside the head.

My demo of the game began by selecting a neighborhood in which to play. So far I’ve seen three local townships, all of which feature their own unique look and theme. Strangetown is a mysterious city in the desert, a place rumored to have ties to oddball scientific experimentation and UFO abductions. Pleasentview is more of a typical suburban neighborhood, complete with lush foliage and fairly normal inhabitants. Verononaville, perhaps the most intriguing neighborhood of all the three, takes place in a Shakespearean-like city where two warring families have done nothing but cause misery for each other. During my demo we focused on Strangetown and its weird assortment of inhabitants. The cast of characters living in Strangetown are pretty worthy of the of the title “strange,” including a couple of mad professors looking for some helpful volunteers to take part in their “experiments,” a family whose father may or may not be from another planet, and a general from the local military that has molded his own son into a veritable hooligan.

After selecting to start in Strangetown, the game zips to the actual town model that displays all of the houses and empty lots that make up the area. While you can create your own family from the ground up and move them into a house of your own making, The Sims 2 also encourages you to play through the game using many of the pre-created families, like the Martian-comprised Smith family. Much as it has been in earlier Sims titles, each family has their own unique storylines and character specific items, so there’s quite a bit of motivation to take the time and play the game as each one. As an added bonus, all the families in a particular town are also connected to each other either through storyline ties or character interaction. If you choose to play the game as the strict military general and his son, you’ll still interact with the Smith family and the mad scientists. In fact the interaction with other families is key to the well being of your Sim family, so it’s always advantageous to try and interact with everyone that you possibly can in any given neighborhood.

My demo of The Sims 2 focused on the Smith family. Needless to say, they’re not the usual type of family that you’d expect from a Sims title. The father, besides having an odd greenish hue to his skin and oversized black eyes, is also referred to as a “pollination unit.” Despite the ominous name, Mr. PU seems to be living a relatively normal life in Strangetown. He’s married with two children, one of which shares his father’s bizarre physical traits. But like any other family, they’re all about having fun, interacting with neighbors, and attending to their wants and desires. Johnny, the green skinned son, is a budding popularity –based adolescent. As such the focus of his life centers on things like getting a local girl to like him, have parties, irritating the local bully, and winning at games. But like every character in the Sims 2, Johnny also has a number of fears like being beaten up, losing at games, or being rejected by his love interest.

With the Sims 2 focusing very heavily on the idea of “dreams and wants,” it was neat to actually see this system in action during my demo time with the game. As Johnny fulfills his needs by flirting with his crush, he receives both a set number of aspiration points and a boost to his overall mood. Aspiration points are sort of like Simoleans, but differ in the fact that you spend them on special family specific reward items that really give your characters a boost in meeting their needs and desires. For example Johnny is still hot on the trail of that local girl who has caught his eye. While conversation and flirting soften her up a bit, he still manages to score a slap to the face whenever he tries to take it to the next level. With enough aspiration points, however, he can purchase a special Smith family item called “The Love Tub,” a hot tub that has magical properties and makes all romantically tied actions extremely successful. Once he’s gotten the girl into The Love Tub she’s reduced to putty in his hands. Too bad his parents also start to feel amorous and crash his party by jumping in the pool, too.

The mood system is much like you’ve seen in previous Sims games and encompasses a wide number of different factors in determining just how happy or sad your Sim is at any given moment. All manner of physical needs need to be taken care of, including watching your bladder level, eating food, getting enough rest, and keeping your mind occupied with fun activities. This mood system, however, is now also tied to aspiration, so the much you manage to fulfill your Sim’s needs and desires, the better your mood will become. The mood of your character is now depicting in a special on-screen bar display that fills up as you talk with other Sims and make your character happy. If you manage to fill your meter completely it will turn to a platinum color. While in this stat your Sim’s needs begin to have less of an effect on their mood. This doesn’t mean that you can make your Sim go days on end without a trip to the bathroom, but it does mean that you’ll be able to focus a little less of your time having to micro-manage every little thing that your character does. To make things a bit easier your Sim (and their family members) will still have an adjustable degree of autonomy, so if you neglect their needs for too long they’ll eventually take matters into their own hands and visit the bathroom before they leave a puddle on the ground.

If you asked an ardent fan of the original Sims games what they favorite feature was, a majority of them would most likely respond, “downloadable content.” Those creative gamers out there embraced the Sims in a big way, at once creating thousands of cool new items to download and import into your Sims’ home as well as a bustling online community. Realizing that the ability to create your own objects, skins, and other goodies is a major draw for many players, EA has decided to include the feature in the Sims 2. But instead of simply sticking to the familiars, they’ve gone ahead and made the entire process of actually downloading and using objects and skins quite a bit easier. First of all you’ll be able to connect to the download center straight from the game without having to stray from your game or open an Internet browser. Pressing an on-screen button opens up the download center and a click of the mouse downloads your selection into the correct directory to use it. If you got sick of having to download something and then move it manually through a bunch of sub-directories, rejoice, the whole process just got a lot smoother.

This isn’t to say that EA are being slouches on their development end, however. In all they’ve worked with about 19,000 different skins, although the final number that will ship with the game is still up in the air. Visually it’s not hard to realize this dedication once you actually see the game in action. Now that the characters are fully rendered in 3D and feature high polygon counts, Sims now look incredibly lifelike and feature extremely realistic animations. Considering that you’ll often have a score of Sims on screen all performing different actions and interacting with different objects, it was neat to see that the visual acuity of the never suffered. Whether zoomed out to the farthest possible distance from the Sims or zoomed in until one takes up nearly the entire screen, each character displays a level of detail that really is unmatched in PC gaming.

Coming away from the Sims 2, I can’t help but think that EA is only showing us the tip of the iceberg. With so many new features and gameplay mechanics, like the needs and wants system, it’s almost like having to learn to play the game all over from the beginning, regardless of whether you spent countless hours of your life on the original Sims. But, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. A big draw of that original series was the fact that it was in fact a sim; a game that was simulating virtual life. With the new features that the Sims 2 is sporting, that idea is taken to an entirely new and realistic level. True, you’ll be dealing with UFOs and Shakespearean influences (in Veronaville), but at the core of the game you’ll be taking part in guiding your Sim through life and trying to achieve very human needs and desires. They may act crazy and comical at times, but they’ll also experience sadness, depression, and human vulnerability. Kudos to EA so far on what they’ve managed to accomplish with the Sims 2, I can’t wait to see what lies in store when the game finally hits store shelves in September.